Sound and Detention: Towards Critical Listening, Sonic Citizenship and Social Justice

(Hardback)

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This book tunes in to some of the many ways in which soundand its absencecan function as a source of connection, isolation, harm, restoration, power, control and resistance.

Sound and Detention uses close attention to soundscapes in places and processes of confinement as a source of sensemaking. Privileging the aurality of incarceration, the authors foreground critical listening as a mode through which to explore sonic citizenship and social justice. In doing so the volume evokes the auditory imagination to reconsider the shifting position of detention at a crucial point of intersection between social, political, economic and cultural life. Through its breadth of contributions, the book tunes in to some of the complex ways in which the presence and absence of sound and music can mediate isolation, harm, connection, restoration, power, control, and resistance.

Sound and Detention presents research, projects and reflections on carceral soundscapes in a variety of times and settings. Drawing from a range of practitioners, those with lived experience, artists, activists and academics the contributors ask important questions about the role of sound and music in transformative justice and how attention to the sonic can form part of the work to imagine alternatives to the prison and immigration industrial complexes.

Through deep engagement with sound, music and listening, the contributors seek to collectively unsettle western, androcentric epistemologies and knowledge hierarchies, specifically with respect to places of detention. Tuning in to the particularities of sound holds the capacity to listen nearby making space to hold distinct perspectives and positionalities in respectful simultaneity - while also cementing connections to broader questions of social justice and solidarity.

Author Bio

Lucy Cathcart Frdn is a researcher, linguist and community artist, working primarily in music and sound. She is interested in creative collaboration across boundaries, and how the act of making things together can foster solidarity and care. She has published textual and audio work in fields including criminology, artistic research, sound studies and political science. She completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow, UK and is currently Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway.

Kate Herrity is Research Fellow in Punishment at Kings College, University of Cambridge, UK. A criminologist, her work seeks to unsettle boundaries between fields and ideas with a focus on music, sound and critical listening. Her monograph Sound, Order and Survival in Prison drew on aural ethnography in a local mens prison. She is currently completing an International Handbook of Sensory Criminology with colleagues Kanupriya Sharma, Janani Umamaheswar and Jason Warr, scheduled for release in 2025.

ine Mangaoang is Associate Professor at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, Norway, and Principal Investigator for the international, interdisciplinary project Prisons of Note, funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Her books include Dangerous Mediations: Pop Music in a Philippine Prison Video, winner of the IASPM-US Woody Guthrie Book Prize, and Made in Ireland: Studies in Popular Music. Recent writing appears in the Journal for the Society for Musicology in Ireland, and Music Scienti.