A brief proposition toward a sonic geo-politics: Rajarhat New Town

The sounds of a place can reveal what it is made up of: the infrastructures, lines of power and governance, bodies, and ideologies of a place, and how they move in relation to one another, all make audible conditions of social, political, economic and cultural production. By listening to these relations, it is possible to get a sense of the multiple terrains that comprise such places and the atmospheres they engender (Thibaud 2011); sounds can help in understanding how place is made, unmade and remade. Through careful listening it is possible to encounter sounding as a way of knowing, as an acoustemology or acoustic epistemology, an idea developed by Steve Feld during his work in Papua New Guinea. For Feld, acoustemology is the potential of acoustic knowing, of sounding as a condition of and for knowing, of sonic presence and awareness as potent shaping forces in how people make sense of experiences (1996: 97). Put simply, acoustemology asks: what kinds of meanings, knowledges, values, communications, identities are afforded through sonic practices and forms of representation (Rice 2003)? In this paper I will focus on the site of Rajarhat New Town, a newly developing satellite town in West Bengal, constructed upon histories of land grabs and mass dispossession, in order to demonstrate how soundings, and acoustemology, can hold relevance for a relational materialist politics. By this I mean a politics that is explicitly committed to engaging with the differential and unequal access to resources (such as work, housing, mobility, education, healthcare) and social relations that tend to be experienced and reproduced through processes of contemporary capital. Politics, as I am using it, is less orientated toward rigid systems that see capital as a \u27thing\u27 in the world, than toward the complex ways that such processes and conditions assemble and decompose; it is an understanding of capital as a way of relating and being affected. Soundings are useful to this orientation precisely for their ability to move along with such complexity, bringing together possibilities for affective and semiotic approaches. It is this specific combination - a capacity for attending to those highly contingent and contagious atmospheres of a place, and to infrastructural, discursive, and material systems - that make soundings interesting for geo-politics

Gravity and height variations during the present rifting episode in Northern Iceland

In 1975, a rifting episode started in the neovolcanic zone of northern Iceland, consisting of a succession of slow inflation periods and rapid subsidence events, which is still going on. The center of activity is situated below the Krafla caldera, and the rifting process is affecting the 80-km-long fissure swarm associated with this central volcano. Gravity and height variations associated with this process have been investigated by re-observing profiles earlier established in the Namafjall and in the Gjastikki area, situated nearly 10 km south and north of Krafla respectively, as well as by the re-observation of a number of gravity stations in the northern part of the fissure zone, in 1976, 1977, and 1978. By repeated observations with 2 or 3 LaCoste-Romberg gravity meters, the accuracy obtained in each gravity survey is of the order of ± 10 x 10-8 ms-2. In the profiles crossing the fissure zones, a rate of gravity increase of more than 100 x 10-8 ms-2/a has been found in the central part, while gravity at the flanks decreases at the same order. These variations are correlated with subsidence and elevation rates of the order of 0.5 m/a.           ARK: https://n2t.net/ark:/88439/y060150 Permalink: https://geophysicsjournal.com/article/268 &nbsp

Voicing climate change? Television, public engagement and the politics of voice

This paper examines a body of TV commissions made for BBC Television that formed components of the BBC Climate Chaos season (2006–2007). These commissions represent the first and, to date, only concerted attempt to address the issue of climate change with a range of approaches across a number of broadcast and online platforms within a public service broadcasting context across an extended season. The paper contributes to the task of balancing the relatively extensive body of research into news media coverage of climate change with that of longer form broadcast content. It examines these programmes as a particular moment in the history of broadcasting, lying on the threshold of a proliferating number of TV channels and the burgeoning growth of interactive digital and social media based forms of leisure and public engagement. It takes as its starting point Couldry's plea to make voice a key focus for the promotion of more democratic media spaces. Specifically, it examines this assertion in relation to calls for polyvocality and the need for new and expanded political spaces in relation to human‐induced climate change. The paper contributes to the developing geography of voice in relation to public understanding and debate of complex global issues. At the most practical level, it also assesses a body of innovations and experiments in content, tone and media mix in broadcast television commissions on climate change, and points to areas for future investment

Sound as affect: Difference, power and spatiality

This article considers what happens when sound is understood as affect. It begins by recounting a minor event in which sound moved my body. I use this as a starting point for defining sonic affect as the vibrational movement of bodies of all kinds, moving away from anthropocentric notions of sound based on human perception. The vibration of bodies can be understood as a ‘base layer’ of sound, which may activate or accrue layers of feeling, significance and meaning, but which is not reducible to them. Developing this conceptualisation of sonic affect, I argue that: (i) there are repeating affective tendencies of sound, but these unfold differently in context; (ii) sonic affect exercises power over bodies, sometimes by combining with meaning; and (iii) sound propagates affect through space in distinctive ways, some of which I discuss. These arguments are grounded in numerous examples, reflecting the variety of both sound and affect

Lasting impressions: ethnic food tour guides, body work, race and gender in southwestern Sydney, Australia

In this paper we examine the racialized and gendered body work required of guides leading ethnic food tours in southwestern Sydney, Australia. We draw on theorists who examine the materialization of race and bodies to extend concepts of intimacy, vulnerability and proximity: dominant themes in studies of occupations involving ‘body work’. To date, very few studies of tour guides have examined the embodied interactions required by the work of guides. Using Ahmed's concepts of inter–embodiment and impressions, we stress that racialized bodies need to be understood as materializing in body work. In particular, we show how body work on the tours includes smiling, vocalization and shepherding and can be understood as contact with the Other. Our paper contributes to the literature on bodily interactions at work in three core ways: first, adding original empirical work on ethnic tour guiding, second, by showing how ‘body work’ is racialized and gendered, and finally, by exploring the relations between food and multicultural intimacies and the vulnerabilities of racialized bodies

Gathering around stories: Interdisciplinary experiments in support of energy system transitions

This paper explores the creative uses of stories and storytelling to engage groups and individuals with consideration of changes in energy systems across time and place. It summarises three story-based experiments that responded to the theme of ‘energy utopias’. These are drawn from the three core strands of a much wider body of work undertaken within the Stories of Change project. This took stories as a central motif and organising device to refresh public and political conversations about energy and decarbonisation. Our hypothesis was that stories could offer a popular and engaging route into thinking about the past and present of humanity’s lives with energy and a lively way of imagining possible futures. We also wanted to test the degree to which stories could offer a shared intellectual space that might support both interdisciplinary and co-productive working for a core team that includes social science, humanities, media, computing and design researchers as well as creative and community partners. The paper considers some of the practical, methodological and theoretical considerations and reflects on the strengths and limitations of stories as both motif and technique in supporting action on climate change

Listening

In this paper we reflect on the kind of listening that happens in research whilst taking part in a keep fit group and getting sweaty, that pushes us to ask an interviewee 'Are you alright?' and haunts us when the project is over. This is the kind of listening that weaves through, around and beyond what is immediately heard, including the unspoken, the articulateness of objects and the listening that comes through participating. The paper stems from a project concerned with how people live, experience and manage cultural diversity and ethnic difference in their everyday lives in urban England. Divided into two sections, the first part introduces our methods that included participant observation, interviews and repeat in-depth discussion group meetings. The second reflects on our experiences of listening whilst doing, explores feelings that mediate listening and considers the time involved in listening