Unwanted Sound?
Contested Lake and Highway Noise in Okanagan Summer Tourism
Funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grant, this pilot project uses sonic ethnographic methodologies to explore how, why, and what sounds matter for people living in and/or vacationing in Kelowna and the surrounding Okanagan Lake region during the height of tourism in the summer months. Drawing from the anthropology in/with sound, critical sound studies, multisensory anthropology, as well as settler studies, critical tourism studies, the anthropology of roads, water studies, feminist and decolonial anti-black and Indigenous racism approaches to tourism, this project represents a new area of research for me and will eventually make connections between tourism, listening, sonic atmospheres, infrastructure, and climate change. For further information about the study, please go to this website:
Panelists
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier is a visual and multimodal anthropologist and director of the visual lab at the University of Victoria. She works on various projects within the anthropology of/with sound and is the author of many articles and books including Aerial Imagination in Cuba: Stories From Above the Rooftops (2019, Routledge).
Denielle Elliott is a socio-cultural anthropologist and Deputy-Director of the Institute for Technoscience and Society, and the Director of the Science and Technology Studies graduate program at York University. Her research focuses on the anthropology of medicine, science and social suffering and experimental ethnographic methodologies.
Lorenzo Ferrarini is a documentary filmmaker, photographer and sound recordist, and a lecturer at the Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester. He works in Burkina Faso and southern Italy on themes relating to ecology and perception. In 2020 he published the book Sonic Ethnography (with Nicola Scaldaferri) for Manchester University Press.
Marina Peterson is professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work attends to elemental forces and shifting modalities of matter, exploring diverse and innovative ways of encountering and presenting the ethnographic. Her most recent book, Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles (2021, Duke UP), engages mobilizations around airport noise to address ways in which noise amplifies modes of sensing and making sense of the atmospheric.
On June 22, 2021, I hosted a public virtual webinar called Sound Dialogue: A Conversation about Sonic Ethnography that brought together four anthropologists with diverse backgrounds to share insights on sonic ethnography from fieldwork in Cuba, the U.S., Canada, and Italy: Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria), denielle Elliott (York University), Lorenzo Ferrarini (Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester), and Marina Peterson (University of Texas, Austin). These four panelists discussed different approaches to sonic ethnography as well as methodological practices, critical praxis, and possibilities. If you are interested in hearing excerpts from the public webinar, two 45-minute podcasts are available on [+]
Research Collaborators
This project is a collaboration with the Collaborative and Experimental Ethnography Lab at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, where Fiona McDonald is the Lab Director.
The Sound Dialogue webinar was a collaboration with Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, director of the University of Victoria Visual Media Lab, who generously hosted the webinar.