SOUNDS, RIGHTS AND THE POLITICS OF LISTENING

Moderator: Prof Maruška Svašek

Speakers:

Daniel Fisher is Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. Across a range of ethnographic and other projects his work has tended to focus on questions of indeterminacy and those aspects of social and material worlds that lend insight into their unfinished, plastic character. In part this has meant an ethnographic and analytical focus on the political, epistemic and worldly work of undecidability. These conceptual interests animate writing that concerns sound, image, fire, and the emergent material, ecological, and social coordinates of the urban. Fisher is currently pursuing several ethnographic and archival projects, grounded in long term ethnographic work in Australia and more recent work in North America. Supported by the National Science Foundation’s Cultural Anthropology Program, the first concerns Indigenous urbanism and environmental infrastructure, focusing in part on urban fire, its transformation by climatic instability, and its mediatization via image, story, and the logics of carbon capture and exchange. His book manuscript, Long Grass Variations, and a series of photography and sound-based projects under the shared title of Fire’s Image, address these phenomena from the bush spaces and laneways of Darwin, capital of Australia’s Northern Territory. Earlier ethnographic work addressed the efflorescence of Indigenous music and film production, and the still unfolding entailments of that success for communities across northern Australia. This provided the focus for his first book, The Voice and Its Doubles (2016), and continues to underpin ongoing research and writing.

Professor Fiona Magowan is Professor of Anthropology at Queen’s University Belfast and has published extensively on the analysis of conflict and the arts as well as on sex and gender in anthropology and ethnomusicology. Most recently, she has co-authored Sounding Conflict: From Resistance to Reconciliation (Bloomsbury Academic 2023) and co-authored/edited two books on sex and gender, the Anthropology of Sex (Berg 2010 with Hastings Donnan) and Transgressive Sex: Subversion and Control in Erotic Encounters (Berghahn 2009 with Hastings Donnan). Other work on performance includes the co-edited volume, Performing Gender, Place and Emotion: Global Perspectives (Rochester 2013), which was nominated for the Seminar for Ethnomusicology’s Marcia Herndon prize. Her research further addresses religion, performance and conflict in the co-edited volume Christianity, Conflict and Renewal in Australia and the Pacific (Brill 2016 with Carolyn Schwarz). She has conducted long-term fieldwork in Australia and her authored book, Melodies of Mourning, shortlisted for the 2008 Australian Stanner Award, examines sense and emotion in performance. She has held a series of grants relating to conflict transformation and the arts. She was PI of Sounding Conflict: From Resistance to Reconciliation (AHRC 2017- 2022) which explored sound, music, storytelling and digital media in Brazil, the Middle East and Northern Ireland.

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