SΟΝΟPOLIS. SOUND, CITIZENSHIP AND MIGRANTS ACTIVISMS IN ATHENS
SΟΝΟPOLIS. SOUND, CITIZENSHIP AND MIGRANTS ACTIVISMS IN ATHENS | Tom Western |Friday, March 13th 2020 | 18:00-20:00, EAE Rm 318 (2nd floor, Glass Building)
Abstract
What does citizenship sound like? How do people use music and sound to protest border regimes and assert belonging at street level? This workshop listens to migrant activisms in Athens, hearing the city as a sonopolis: a sounding board of solidarity and a resonance chamber of resistance. I will attempt three things. First, I posit sound as a means of understanding citizenship – of hearing inclusion and exclusion. I ask how listening can open creative engagements with representing displacement, finding spaces of narrativity that have not yet been claimed and foreclosed, and distorting the dominant tropes of ‘refugee crisis’.
Second, I will present the results of a collaborative sound recording project, in which I work with an activist collective who resist the idea of refugeeness. We are recording the city at street level, using sound as a catalyst for narration, unmaking borders and amplifying creative citizenship practices. Third, I consider sound as a research method. Here, we explore ideas of sonic and sensory ethnography, thinking how listening can foster collaborative knowledge production by commoning the ethnographic process. Sound is an access point to the agency of people who have crossed borders. In the sonopolis, voices and vocabularies of inclusion and integration are reclaimed. In the sonopolis, migrant activisms open ways of rethinking citizenship altogether.
Biography
Tom Western is a Marie Curie Fellow in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oslo, and Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. He is an ethnographer and sound recordist, working mainly in Athens, where his research connects music, sound, borders, migrations and citizenships. His first book – National Phonography: Field Recording, Sound Archiving, and Producing the Nation in Music – is forthcoming with Bloomsbury Academic Press. He has published articles in the journals Sound Studies and Ethnomusicology Forum, has chapters in several edited books, and has work that will soon be published in Migration and Society, and Forced Migration Review. Tom has also published sound recordings in numerous online publications, and is currently preparing a radio series and collaborative sound installations at museums in Athens and Oxford. He edits the blog ‘Mediterranean Music Studies’ for the International Council of Traditional Music. In Athens, he is a member of an activist collective (The Syrian and Greek Youth Forum), with whom he has built the Active Citizens Sound Archive. He also plays the baglama very badly.
