(Un)Disciplining Sound Studies Colloquium
Sound studies has established itself rapidly as a new discipline—or perhaps better, an interdisciplinary field—with canonic texts, handbooks, and readers acting as guides to the identity of the field, new graduate programs, and a burgeoning crop of annual conferences. In this one-day colloquium we will reflect on the emergence of sound studies; we invite not only enthusiasts and those persuaded of the significance of the new field but also sceptics and even cynics to join us in considering: How and why has this new disciplinary formation come into being? Does it merit the status of an (inter)discipline? What is gained and what lost, what is made audible and what inaudible, with the coining of the new field? Has sound acted primarily as a means of working around, or shedding, some of the lacunae associated with the inherited formations of music studies? Is the category ‘sound’ a robust basis for probing and critical conceptual, historical and/or ethnographic research? And had we wanted to design from scratch a transversal space encompassing new directions in, broadly, music/sound and media/technology studies, on what other grounds might we have wanted to build?
Humanities Gateway 1010, 9:30–5:00, followed by reception
Speakers: Amy Bauer (UCI), Georgina Born (Oxford/UCI), Don Brenneis (UCSC), Amy Cimini (UCSD), Nina Eidsheim (UCLA), Peter Krapp (UCI), Jan Pasler (UCSD), James Steintrager (UCI)