This five year project is a sonic ethnography led by Sue Frohlick in collaboration with Joy Chadya from the History Department at the University of Manitoba, funded through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research (SSHRC) Insight Grant program, and in kind support of the Collaborative + Experimental Ethnography Lab.  

This project is inspired by sounded anthropology, an approach that, by exploring the  “complexities of sound’s temporality” and the “socially and culturally positioned listener” (Samuels et al 2010, 338), probes the subjective and sensate dimensions of “refugeeness” (Nguyen 2019). By learning more about how sound matters in the strivings for belonging for refugees who are subjected to structural uncertainty and “bare life” (Agamben 1998; Sanyel 2012), this project will address refugee subjectivity (Nguyen 2019) at a time when intensified surveillance and “logics of otherness” permeates how refugees are seen—and heard—in the world (Ramsay 2020). 

Bibliography:

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press. 

Nguyen, Vinh. 2019. When Does a Refugee Stop Being a Refugee? Social Text 37(2): 109-131. 

Samuels, David, Louise Meintjes, Ana Maria Ochoa, and Thomas Porcello. 2010. Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 39:329-345. 

Sanyel, Romola. 2012. Refugees and the City: An Urban Discussion. Geography Compass 6(11):633-644. 

Ramsay, Georgina. 2020. Time and the Other in Crisis: How Anthropology Makes Its Displaced Object. Anthropological Theory 20(4): 385-413