“A Long, Strange Trip”: An Engineer’s Journey Through FM College Radio

Today is World College Radio Day, and it’s more important than ever to honor and preserve free airwaves for our communities, now and for the generations to come. Sounding Out! is marking the day with a special post devoted to the intergenerational relationships that power college radio and keep it lit, whether over the terrestrial airwaves or via online streaming. College radio binds campus and community in tangible ways and builds deep and long lasting connections, as Sean Broder’s (WHRW 90.5 Class of 2025) conversation with Freddie Montalvo (WHRW 90.5 Class of 1987) certainly shows. Tune in to the people and keep it locked on college radio. –SO! Eds

In 2026, Binghamton University’s WHRW 90.5FM will celebrate its 60th birthday. Ferdinand “Freddie” Montalvo has been an prominent member of the station for 45 of those years, which means he has experienced many changes in radio’s culture and technology. Supplemented by his experience as a professional electrician, Freddie’s enthusiasm for a traditional approach to broadcasting has remained unchanged through the station’s many alterations, bringing undeniable authenticity to the forefront of the station, and showing newcomers how they can do the same.

An expressive medium, college radio has enabled students of all backgrounds to project their voice and music taste as far as the radio waves take them. Whereas some former college radio DJs apply their newfound power of expression to other professional fields, others like Freddie have only continued to develop their broadcasting style, which is why I wanted to get his perspective on college radio’s evolutions. Freddie has never lost sight of the art and the value of individualized broadcasting in the age of streaming music, and he generously shares it with incoming members who seek their own voices.

An image of a Puerto Rican man in his 30s in the 1980s wearing a Black leather jacket and white shirt.

I met Freddie for this interview in the station’s current location in the basement of the university union. WHRW has three studios, one of the largest record libraries in the northeastern United States, and a common space that’s layered in stickers, posters, and graffiti spanning several generations of broadcasters. I found him in WHRW’s primary studio, CR-1, serving as the required broadcaster for a student talk show. As this was the end of the Spring ‘25 semester at BU, I was able to briefly catch the thank yous and goodbyes of the hosts at the conclusion of their final show. Freddie continues to host his own weekly radio show–Dimenciones on Saturdays from 7-10 PM on terrestrial radio 90.5 in the Greater Binghamton area and via WHRW’s livestream–but his additional involvement as an engineer for others at the station continues to enable newcomers to develop and project their own voices, even if they’re not certified broadcasters themselves. This post offers some excerpts of our in-depth conversation concerning Freddie’s life and rich history with WHRW, as well as his perspective on the continued importance of college radio, and of course some of the many valuable music recommendations he shared over our two hours together.

Freddie’s journey into the world of FM radio began in 1976, when the South Bronx native transferred from Bronx Community College to Binghamton University. It wasn’t until ‘79 that he would be introduced to the station by a friend of his who was hosting a Latin music show on the campus station WHRW 90.5, which had Freddie instantly hooked. Coming from a Puerto Rican family, it meant a lot to Freddie to join his friend in the station’s Latin Department; he became the first Latino program director in 1981 and the first Latino general manager in 1982. While serving leadership roles and maintaining his weekly programming, Freddie attended Binghamton through the work-study program BOCES (Boards of Cooperative Educational Services). It’s here that he trained to become an electrician, further intertwining his personal connection to WHRW:

BOCES… they taught you the fundamentals and at that time, I was getting involved at the station, and it was like a synergy of that, you know? Between electronics and radio broadcasting. So, at that time I was going to school in the evening, I went to the BOCES program 8-4/8-5, went to school at night, was doing radio, so everything was involved and influencing each other.

As a leading member of his department, Freddie embraced the alternative radio that WHRW was known for, broadcasting an assortment of music ranging from Latin Jazz to Cumbia, Disco, Salsa, and Santana… not to mention his confirmed favorite song: “Sofrito” by Mongo Santamaria.

In the decades following his transfer to BU, he has established a home and marriage in Binghamton, describing his life’s journey in the city as “a long, strange trip.” 

WHRW has been a free format station since it began in 1966, giving each DJ and engineer freedom to play their favorite pieces of music within the FCC guidelines. WHRW has always been, according to Freddie, about “protecting that alternativeness on campus and off campus… we weren’t copying anybody.” He brings attention to what he calls the “great social redeeming value” of alternative broadcasting, which surpasses the confines of the station and not only enriches the surrounding community, but influences future forms of expression by DJs, or “broadcasters” as Freddie calls them. 

When you record your shows and listen to yourself that’s how you develop your sense of style… The voice is an instrument, and you learn to modulate when you turn that mic on, always make sure you have on your headset, and that’s how you develop your style. ‘Cause at first you don’t realize these things, but as you evolve, you’ll notice these different nuances.

Freddie on air at WHRW 90.5 Binghamton

As his career progressed and Freddie became an installer technician, he increased accessibility to new musical programs for local residents, most notably, MTV. Combining this work with his many hours at the station, Freddie felt a great sense of pride and responsibility in bringing the forefront of new music to the lives of countless listeners. “I always called it therapeutic radio,” he explained to me, bringing attention to WHRW’s commercial-free programming, and the station’s ability to allow for its broadcasters to express their personalities. Freddie has never felt the need to possess an alter-ego while broadcasting as many do, explaining that members of the station are “audiophiles experiencing music, certain different genres, and that’s what we’re presenting. And when you do a show, you’re that show. That is your artwork in action.”

In addition to producing unique art on air, each WHRW broadcaster makes and plays hourly “carts,” public service announcements that are the closest thing to commercials on 90.5. There too, the station’s members have managed to transform the regulation-required station identifiers, PSAs, promos, and announcements into pre-recorded miniature productions; each about a minute long. During Freddie’s earlier years at the station, engineers made carts on Ampex audio track tape machines, quite different from the digital editing software utilized today. While traditional, bulky tape machines offered creative possibilities, they were be far less forgiving of errors than modern audio editing software. As Freddie told me,

there’s a certain thing that you can do with reel-to-reel recorders, where you could do sound-on-sound and sound-with-sound, and what that does is it creates an echo effect that is different from the electronic echos that you can do with the software… The mixing and the editing was hardcore, it was physical.

One of Freddie’s favorite promotional carts was “La Emisora Que Vuela,” made several years ago on the Ampex by a DJ apprentice of his, Francisco Reyes. Freddie remembered that it took eight full hours of recording, splicing, and layering for the minute-long audio production. Rightfully so, he refers to both the production process and final recording as true art, going on to describe the context of the dialogue:

So it’s like a gathering in a Latin household talking about different foods. And… It’s like a sitcom in a sense because he’s goofing with the different characters and he’s talking about, you know, the foods to be prepared. You say, well, who is this guy? That’s when he starts talking and saying: ‘you’ve got to be listening to WHRW in Binghamton.

“La Emisora Que Vuela” (“The Station That Flies”) -Francisco Reyes

The Ampex isn’t the only thing that has changed during Freddie’s 45+ years at WHRW. Other significant changes to the technologies utilized for broadcasting over the years. Because the station has always operated 24 hours a day, it required a certified broadcaster to remain on air at any given time for many decades. More recently, an automated system has allowed for some time slots to be occupied by a digital playlist, inevitably creating a distinct gap between WHRW’s night owls and early risers. Additionally, physical media such as vinyl records and CDs are no longer necessary for radio shows on WHRW. After the implementation of a Eurorack–which allows DJs to use an aux chord to play their shows–most current station members went digital. Despite this change and preference, Freddie remains loyal to the art of digging through physical media, for him primarily CDs, in order to find music that portrays his personality and taste. 

Not too many people have FM radios at home, which was the norm. Everybody had records, they were listening to FM radio, and the only way you could listen to the station was tuning in with an FM radio. Today, everybody’s into Spotify… they’re not pulling records, they’re not pulling CDs, there’s no more really hands-on, it’s all plug in a laptop and sitting back… But that’s just me because I came from a different era, you know, where we had the hands-on with vinyl… once they put that Eurorack in there, it’s not the same. That’s why we have to have turntable classes to teach people how to work with the vinyl cause most of the younger crowd didn’t grow up playing 45s or lps, you know?… That’s when you’re definitely an audio aficionado.

An older man in a vinyl record library holds an album up, Ruben Blades's Buscando America.
Ferdinand Montalvo holds a favorite record, Ruben Blades’s Buscando America inside the music library at WHRW, 90.5 Binghamton. Image courtesy of Montalvo.

Despite the sonic and technological changes that have permanently altered radio broadcasting, Freddie urges people of all backgrounds to get involved with radio given the opportunity; especially on the rare occasion that the station is free-format like WHRW has been since its inception. Technological changes aside, WHRW harbors the unique and deeply personal environment that deems college radio so valuable. Today, more than ever it is vital to understand the importance of large-scale audial expression in the face of vastly different musical soundscapes, as explained by Freddie:

This (the station) is the focal point for social interaction relating to music but, you know, today it’s more Spotify based, which is not the greatest because with a CD or an LP, you’re able to read the line-in notes, you get to read about the musicians, the group, the transition of between groups. Just think about Led Zeppelin. Zeppelin, let’s say Led Zeppelin 1, 2, and 3: different LPs, different flavors in their musical repertoire, you know? And you’re reading the LP, and you’re reading about the musicians and all the songs and the line and all… I’m not sure if Spotify has the same thing today… it’s not interactive. With LP’s, you’re fully engaged with that LP as you’re listening to it, whereas with that it’s just, you know, a certain song, or if you go looking for a little bit of tidbit, but it’s not the same experience. With the LP you get to see, you get to feel the artwork… it has to be different from the laptop experience… it’s more tactile.

Today, everything is digitized, it’s not like we have our live broadcaster or radio DJ… it’s not visceral in that sense… radio is different today. ‘Corporate radio’, as they refer to it… There’s no personality in it, and if there is a personality, it’s more blahblahblahblahblah and very little with the music and all… Even today, I listen to some DJs that I was listening to then and they’re still around today, and there’s a difference between that time and today. But, their influence must have influenced me unknowingly, and so as I experienced radio here, it’s vastly different from what I thought about radio at that time.

The thing is, when you do radio here [at WHRW], it is different than if you weren’t doing radio just listening to your laptop or Spotify. When you’re doing radio, you are engaging actively and producing your own show… It will influence you too, you know, we always used to say here: ‘expand your horizons’ and not just stay in a certain genre. As you experience WHRW, you will be listening to certain things, or you should be listening to certain things, and exposed to certain things, and that’s what opens your whole view, you know, musically, orally. And so, what you were listening to two years ago might be vastly different from what you are listening to today. And, when you go back home and you listen to radio you say ‘man, I could do better than that shit!

WHRW is vital for those who have ever been involved in its community, expressed to its truest extent by Ferdinand Montalvo. Members define the atmosphere within the station and the growth of the station outside of it. Despite the many technological changes to broadcasting, college radio has continued to build a symbiotic relationship with its members and the local community of listeners.

Featured Images: Courtesy of Ferdinand “Freddie” Montalvo

Sean Broder is a recent graduate of Binghamton University in Binghamton, NY, where he was a trained DJ at WHRW 90.5 FM as well as an English Literature major. He was a Sounding Out! intern in Spring and Summer 2025. He’s from New Rochelle, New York and has always had a great love for music.

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

“Vous Ecoutez La Voix du Peuple”: The Kreyol Language Pirate Radio Stations of Flatbush, Brooklyn–David Goren

Listening (Loudly) to Spanish-language Radio–Dolores Inés Casillas

Chicana Radio Activists and the Sounds of Chicana Feminisms“–Monica De La Torre

Radio and the Voice of the Aymara People – Karl Swinehart

“A Long, Strange Trip”: An Engineer’s Journey Through FM College Radio

Today is World College Radio Day, and it’s more important than ever to honor and preserve free airwaves for our communities, now and for the generations to come. Sounding Out! is marking the day with a special post devoted to the intergenerational relationships that power college radio and keep it lit, whether over the terrestrial airwaves or via online streaming. College radio binds campus and community in tangible ways and builds deep and long lasting connections, as Sean Broder’s (WHRW 90.5 Class of 2025) conversation with Freddie Montalvo (WHRW 90.5 Class of 1987) certainly shows. Tune in to the people and keep it locked on college radio. –SO! Eds

In 2026, Binghamton University’s WHRW 90.5FM will celebrate its 60th birthday. Ferdinand “Freddie” Montalvo has been an prominent member of the station for 45 of those years, which means he has experienced many changes in radio’s culture and technology. Supplemented by his experience as a professional electrician, Freddie’s enthusiasm for a traditional approach to broadcasting has remained unchanged through the station’s many alterations, bringing undeniable authenticity to the forefront of the station, and showing newcomers how they can do the same.

An expressive medium, college radio has enabled students of all backgrounds to project their voice and music taste as far as the radio waves take them. Whereas some former college radio DJs apply their newfound power of expression to other professional fields, others like Freddie have only continued to develop their broadcasting style, which is why I wanted to get his perspective on college radio’s evolutions. Freddie has never lost sight of the art and the value of individualized broadcasting in the age of streaming music, and he generously shares it with incoming members who seek their own voices.

An image of a Puerto Rican man in his 30s in the 1980s wearing a Black leather jacket and white shirt.

I met Freddie for this interview in the station’s current location in the basement of the university union. WHRW has three studios, one of the largest record libraries in the northeastern United States, and a common space that’s layered in stickers, posters, and graffiti spanning several generations of broadcasters. I found him in WHRW’s primary studio, CR-1, serving as the required broadcaster for a student talk show. As this was the end of the Spring ‘25 semester at BU, I was able to briefly catch the thank yous and goodbyes of the hosts at the conclusion of their final show. Freddie continues to host his own weekly radio show–Dimenciones on Saturdays from 7-10 PM on terrestrial radio and WHRW’s livestream–but his additional involvement as an engineer for others at the station continues to enable newcomers to develop and project their own voices, even if they’re not certified broadcasters themselves. This post offers some excerpts of our in-depth conversation concerning Freddie’s life and rich history with WHRW, as well as his perspective on the continued importance of college radio, and of course some of the many valuable music recommendations he shared over our two hours together.

Freddie’s journey into the world of FM radio began in 1976, when the South Bronx native transferred from Bronx Community College to Binghamton University. It wasn’t until ‘79 that he would be introduced to the station by a friend of his who was hosting a Latin music show on the campus station WHRW 90.5, which had Freddie instantly hooked. Coming from a Puerto Rican family, it meant a lot to Freddie to join his friend in the station’s Latin Department; he became the first Latino program director in 1981 and the first Latino general manager in 1982. While serving leadership roles and maintaining his weekly programming, Freddie attended Binghamton through the work-study program BOCES (Boards of Cooperative Educational Services). It’s here that he trained to become an electrician, further intertwining his personal connection to WHRW:

BOCES… they taught you the fundamentals and at that time, I was getting involved at the station, and it was like a synergy of that, you know? Between electronics and radio broadcasting. So, at that time I was going to school in the evening, I went to the BOCES program 8-4/8-5, went to school at night, was doing radio, so everything was involved and influencing each other.

As a leading member of his department, Freddie embraced the alternative radio that WHRW was known for, broadcasting an assortment of music ranging from Latin Jazz to Cumbia, Disco, Salsa, and Santana… not to mention his confirmed favorite song: “Sofrito” by Mongo Santamaria.

In the decades following his transfer to BU, he has established a home and marriage in Binghamton, describing his life’s journey in the city as “a long, strange trip.” 

WHRW has been a free format station since it began as ith the freedom of each DJ and engineer to play their favorite pieces of music within the FCC guidelines, WHRW has always been, according to Freddie, “protecting that alternativeness on campus and off campus… we weren’t copying anybody.” He brings attention to the “great social redeeming value” of this alternative broadcasting, which surpasses the confines of the station and not only enriches the surrounding community, but influences future forms of expression by DJs, or “broadcasters” as Freddie calls them. 

When you record your shows and listen to yourself that’s how you develop your sense of style… The voice is an instrument, and you learn to modulate when you turn that mic on, always make sure you have on your headset, and that’s how you develop your style. ‘Cause at first you don’t realize these things, but as you evolve, you’ll notice these different nuances.

Freddie on air at WHRW 90.5 Binghamton

As his career progressed and Freddie became an installer technician, he increased accessibility to new musical programs for local residents, most notably, MTV. Combining this work with his many hours at the station, Freddie felt a great sense of pride and responsibility in bringing the forefront of new music to the lives of countless listeners. “I always called it therapeutic radio,” he explained to me, bringing attention to WHRW’s commercial-free programming, and the station’s ability to allow for its broadcasters to express their personalities. Freddie has never felt the need to possess an alter-ego while broadcasting as many do, explaining that members of the station are “audiophiles experiencing music, certain different genres, and that’s what we’re presenting. And when you do a show, you’re that show. That is your artwork in action.”

In addition to producing unique art on air, each WHRW broadcaster makes and plays hourly “carts,” public service announcements that are the closest thing to commercials on 90.5. There too, the station’s members have managed to transform the regulation-required station identifiers, PSAs, promos, and announcements into pre-recorded miniature productions; each about a minute long. During Freddie’s earlier years at the station, engineers made carts on Ampex audio track tape machines, quite different from the digital editing software utilized today. While traditional, bulky tape machines offered creative possibilities, they were be far less forgiving of errors than modern audio editing software. As Freddie told me,

there’s a certain thing that you can do with reel-to-reel recorders, where you could do sound-on-sound and sound-with-sound, and what that does is it creates an echo effect that is different from the electronic echos that you can do with the software… The mixing and the editing was hardcore, it was physical.

One of Freddie’s favorite promotional carts was “La Emisora Que Vuela,” made several years ago on the Ampex by a DJ apprentice of his, Francisco Reyes. Freddie remembered that it took eight full hours of recording, splicing, and layering for the minute-long audio production. Rightfully so, he refers to both the production process and final recording as true art, going on to describe the context of the dialogue:

So it’s like a gathering in a Latin household talking about different foods. And… It’s like a sitcom in a sense because he’s goofing with the different characters and he’s talking about, you know, the foods to be prepared. You say, well, who is this guy? That’s when he starts talking and saying: ‘you’ve got to be listening to WHRW in Binghamton.

“La Emisora Que Vuela” (“The Station That Flies”) -Francisco Reyes

The Ampex isn’t the only thing that has changed during Freddie’s 45+ years at WHRW. Other significant changes to the technologies utilized for broadcasting over the years. Because the station has always operated 24 hours a day, it required a certified broadcaster to remain on air at any given time for many decades. More recently, an automated system has allowed for some time slots to be occupied by a digital playlist, inevitably creating a distinct gap between WHRW’s night owls and early risers. Additionally, physical media such as vinyl records and CDs are no longer necessary for radio shows on WHRW. After the implementation of a Eurorack–which allows DJs to use an aux chord to play their shows–most current station members went digital. Despite this change and preference, Freddie remains loyal to the art of digging through physical media, for him primarily CDs, in order to find music that portrays his personality and taste. 

Not too many people have FM radios at home, which was the norm. Everybody had records, they were listening to FM radio, and the only way you could listen to the station was tuning in with an FM radio. Today, everybody’s into Spotify… they’re not pulling records, they’re not pulling CDs, there’s no more really hands-on, it’s all plug in a laptop and sitting back… But that’s just me because I came from a different era, you know, where we had the hands-on with vinyl… once they put that Eurorack in there, it’s not the same. That’s why we have to have turntable classes to teach people how to work with the vinyl cause most of the younger crowd didn’t grow up playing 45s or lps, you know?… That’s when you’re definitely an audio aficionado.

An older man in a vinyl record library holds an album up, Ruben Blades's Buscando America.
Ferdinand Montalvo holds a favorite record, Ruben Blades’s Buscando America inside the music library at WHRW, 90.5 Binghamton. Image courtesy of Montalvo.

Despite the sonic and technological changes that have permanently altered radio broadcasting, Freddie urges people of all backgrounds to get involved with radio given the opportunity; especially on the rare occasion that the station is free-format like WHRW has been since its inception. Technological changes aside, WHRW harbors the unique and deeply personal environment that deems college radio so valuable. Today, more than ever it is vital to understand the importance of large-scale audial expression in the face of vastly different musical soundscapes, as explained by Freddie:

This (the station) is the focal point for social interaction relating to music but, you know, today it’s more Spotify based, which is not the greatest because with a CD or an LP, you’re able to read the line-in notes, you get to read about the musicians, the group, the transition of between groups. Just think about Led Zeppelin. Zeppelin, let’s say Led Zeppelin 1, 2, and 3: different LPs, different flavors in their musical repertoire, you know? And you’re reading the LP, and you’re reading about the musicians and all the songs and the line and all… I’m not sure if Spotify has the same thing today… it’s not interactive. With LP’s, you’re fully engaged with that LP as you’re listening to it, whereas with that it’s just, you know, a certain song, or if you go looking for a little bit of tidbit, but it’s not the same experience. With the LP you get to see, you get to feel the artwork… it has to be different from the laptop experience… it’s more tactile.

Today, everything is digitized, it’s not like we have our live broadcaster or radio DJ… it’s not visceral in that sense… radio is different today. ‘Corporate radio’, as they refer to it… There’s no personality in it, and if there is a personality, it’s more blahblahblahblahblah and very little with the music and all… Even today, I listen to some DJs that I was listening to then and they’re still around today, and there’s a difference between that time and today. But, their influence must have influenced me unknowingly, and so as I experienced radio here, it’s vastly different from what I thought about radio at that time.

The thing is, when you do radio here [at WHRW], it is different than if you weren’t doing radio just listening to your laptop or Spotify. When you’re doing radio, you are engaging actively and producing your own show… It will influence you too, you know, we always used to say here: ‘expand your horizons’ and not just stay in a certain genre. As you experience WHRW, you will be listening to certain things, or you should be listening to certain things, and exposed to certain things, and that’s what opens your whole view, you know, musically, orally. And so, what you were listening to two years ago might be vastly different from what you are listening to today. And, when you go back home and you listen to radio you say ‘man, I could do better than that shit!

WHRW is vital for those who have ever been involved in its community, expressed to its truest extent by Ferdinand Montalvo. Members define the atmosphere within the station and the growth of the station outside of it. Despite the many technological changes to broadcasting, college radio has continued to build a symbiotic relationship with its members and the local community of listeners.

Featured Images: Courtesy of Ferdinand “Freddie” Montalvo

Sean Broder is a recent graduate of Binghamton University in Binghamton, NY, where he was a trained DJ at WHRW 90.5 FM as well as an English Literature major. He was a Sounding Out! intern in Spring and Summer 2025. He’s from New Rochelle, New York and has always had a great love for music.

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:

“Vous Ecoutez La Voix du Peuple”: The Kreyol Language Pirate Radio Stations of Flatbush, Brooklyn–David Goren

Listening (Loudly) to Spanish-language Radio–Dolores Inés Casillas

Chicana Radio Activists and the Sounds of Chicana Feminisms“–Monica De La Torre

Radio and the Voice of the Aymara People – Karl Swinehart

Reflections on Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism

The first Radical Open Access Conference (2015) responded to the proliferation of corporate profit-centred approaches to open access (OA) publishing and put forward a radical, scholar-led, non-profit alternative. This conference ultimately paved the way for the formation of the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC), a community that, today, consists of around 80 not-for-profit presses, journals, and other open access projects promoting mutual support with ‘a shared investment in taking back control over the means of knowledge production in order to rethink what publishing is and what it can be.’

Ten years later, Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism explored what is next for radical forms of open access (OA) publishing, moving beyond narrow discourses on openness toward social justice activism. The conference asked how the act of publishing itself – writing, editing, translating, reviewing, facilitating – might forge meaningful alliances with broader movements for social justice, critical care, anti-fascism, and planetary survival. Held on 10 and 11 April 2025 at the Milstein Room at Cambridge University Library, Radical OA III brought together a community of publishers, editors, librarians, and technologists across geographic, disciplinary, and institutional boundaries to discuss radical OA publishing as a site of collective experimentation, transformative critique of dominant academic and publishing structures, and mutual support across situated, social justice-oriented approaches. The hybrid conference was structured around three panels held across two afternoons.

The conference opened with a welcome and introduction by Samuel Moore (ROAC, Cambridge University Library), followed by the launch of the Publishing Activism within/without a Toxic University experimental conference booklet by Janneke Adema and Rebekka Kiesewetter (ROAC, Coventry University). Expanding the conversation beyond the conference, this experimental booklet brings together a series of short reflections from conference contributors and members of the ROAC on publishing activism and its relationship to the neoliberal university. It adapts and (ab)uses the cadavre exquis method, developed and practised by the Surrealists in the 1920s and 1930s, to foster collaborative, responsive forms of writing. The booklet departs from three key books published by members of the ROAC under licences that allow reuse. These books – Harney and Moten’s The Undercommons. Fugitive Planning & Black Studies (Minor Compositions), Luescher, Klemenčič, and Jowi’s Student Politics in Africa (African Minds), and Conio’s (ed.) Occupy. A People Yet to Come (Open Humanities Press) – focus on protest and activism, higher education and capitalism, and student politics and served as a starting point, reference, and inspiration for reflecting on the current condition of Higher Education (HE) from the position of social justice publishing activism. 

This was followed by a tribute to the work of the open science advocate Florence Piron (1966-2021), who, throughout her career as a scholar, publisher, and activist, worked to transform the normative framework of scientific research in the name of cognitive justice – which, according to her own definition, ‘refers to an epistemological, ethical, and political idea that seeks to foster the emergence and free circulation of socially relevant knowledges across the planet’. Florence Piron put these principles into practice through initiatives such as the SOHA project (a transnational action-research project promoting open, locally rooted, and decolonial science in Francophone Africa and Haiti), the creation of science shops across Francophone Africa and Haiti (university‑affiliated facility that provides participatory research support to bring academic and non-academic communities and their communities closer together through joint projects, Le Grenier des savoirs (a cooperative digital platform supporting the creation and dissemination of African and Haitian open access journals), and the founding of the Diamond OA press Éditions Science et Bien Commun. The presentation was given by the editor and anthropologist Élisabeth Arsenault (Université de Montréal) and the musicologist and composer Sarah-Anne Arsenault (Université Laval, Québec). 

The first panel, moderated by Janneke Adema, featured presentations from Ela Przybyło (Illinois State University, Feral Feminisms), Ashwani Sharma (darkmatter) Marc Herbst (Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Journal of Aesthetics and Protest), and Jeff Pooley (University of Pennsylvania, mediastudies.press). The second day of the conference started with panel two, moderated by Rebekka Kiesewetter, including contributions by Simon Batterbury (University of Melbourne, Journal of Political Ecology), Angela Okune (Engaging Science, Technology, and Society), Stevphen Shukaitis (University of Essex, Minor Compositions), and Charmaine Pereira (Feminist Africa). The third and final panel, moderated by Toby Steiner (ROAC, Thoth Open Metadata), featured Lucy Barnes (Open Book Publishers), Lauren Smith (Queen Margaret University, Journal of Radical Librarianship), Magalí Rabasa (Lewis & Clark College Portland, Oregon), and Vincent van Gerven Oei (Dotawo, punctum books, Thoth Open Metadata).

Contribution recordings playlist – Day 1: https://fair.tube/w/p/cSN8u1x4jk4GfouaYAP5Pu

Situating Open Access Publishing in Contemporary Academia

Many contributors began with a critical diagnosis of the current scholarly publishing landscape. Since the postwar expansion of higher education, large corporations such as Elsevier, Springer Nature, and Taylor & Francis have steadily consolidated control over the infrastructures, processes and practices of scholarly knowledge creation, validation and dissemination – including peer review systems, submission platforms, citation tracking and metrics dashboards. These services are now packaged as supposedly cost- and time-efficient solutions for managing, assessing and distributing academic outputs, tailored to the demands of neoliberal universities competing in global knowledge economies. In this system – increasingly also in the humanities and social sciences – the metrics provided by these companies (such as journal rankings or citation counts) are used to assess scholarly performance, narrowing the definition of academic value to measurable research outputs. These outputs are often directly tied to job security, funding access and institutional status in a climate of scarcity (of jobs and resources, for example) – pressuring scholars to align their work with what is legible, trackable and institutionally rewarded. For example, to maximise visibility and hence citations, journals and publishers tend to privilege research in English that appears rigorous, transferable and globally relevant – which in practice often means empirical, objective and generalisable.

In this context, as Simon Batterbury (panel 2) noted, ‘the current publishing landscape in several disciplines and at many institutions is a de facto breach of academic freedom. Forcing scholars down a particular professionalisation route to get a job or to hold one – that feeds the commercial publishers.’ Angela Okune (panel 2) highlighted the impact on scholarly subjectivity and the epistemic effects of these normative pressures. She described how, by stepping outside academia, she felt freed

‘from the constraints of chasing a tenure-track job that would require me to be a solo author, stand out, stand on top, be number one, white supremacy culture. Instead, I forge collaboratively, walking together, instead of alone or apart, writing with rather than writing about … I’m freed of the alienation of performing objectivity. Instead, I can be matchmaker, notetaker, noisemaker’.

Ela Przybyło (panel 1), described the psychological strain of academic publishing under productivity-driven, output-focused and ableist conditions: ‘Universities make us unwell’. She suggested that publishing may at times function as ‘ancillary to wall production – to the unjust university’, referring to the reproduction of institutional barriers such as rigid publishing timelines, normative authorship expectations, metrics-driven evaluation and exclusionary editorial cultures that marginalise disabled, racialised and otherwise nonconforming scholars.

As other contributors stressed, governments, research funders, and universities have begun embedding OA requirements into broader frameworks of research evaluation and funding eligibility. In these contexts, OA publishing becomes directly tied to institutional and individual competitiveness, positioned as a prerequisite for securing grants, increasing international visibility, and sustaining a competitive edge in performance-based academic environments. As a result, scholars often experience OA publishing as an administrative obligation – detached from ethical, political, or intellectual commitments, and entangled with metrics-driven evaluations where the value of scholarship is measured by outputs and their quantified impact through citation counts and journal rankings, as Lucy Barnes (panel 3) stressed. Instead of treating OA publishing as a checkbox exercise in compliance, she added, ‘it’s really important to stop focusing on open access as an output and instead to talk about open access publishing in the way that many people have been doing at this conference, as a process and as a means to achieve socially just goals.’ Similarly, Angela Okune (panel 2) and Stevphen Shukaitis (panel 2) described (OA) publishing as something that unfolds through relational, situated, and often open-ended processes. Stevphen Shukaitis emphasised that ‘we should decenter the book or journal as the end goal. I love books, but my 13-year-old son doesn’t care about physical media. What matters isn’t the object – it’s the context. Books were meaningful to me because of the social relations around them – punk shows, zine trades, reading groups. Maybe the point isn’t the book itself, but what happens around it.’ Angela Okune similarly described publishing as a collaborative research methodology: ‘For us, the focus is on relationships – on making time to ask questions with one another.’

She emphasised the importance of experimental OA projects such as the experimental book pilot project Database as Book and Lively Community Archive her panel contribution evolved around, act as devices for developing ‘a shared vocabulary and skills to hone our imagination for other possibilities – other ways of writing, publishing, [and] sharing knowledge and information’, particularly when working across diverse institutional positions, skill sets, and lived experiences. For Okune, these projects form part of ‘an interim social-technical infrastructure’ that supports the cultivation of future alternatives – a process she described as ‘growing together’.

Doing Open Access Publishing Otherwise: Activism & Solidarity

Similar to Angela Okune (panel 2) other speakers located the origins of their OA initiatives in the tension between how institutions expect academic work and publishing to be done, how academics often internalise and reproduce these expectations, and how scholarly communities and their allies outside the university want to do this work based on their own political commitments, collective responsibilities and experiences of marginalisation. As Marc Herbst (panel 1) put it, there is always a ‘weight and pull between individual ambition, the clarity of what institutional structures demand, and the pull of politics, life, and time’.

As Lauren Smith (panel 3), a founding member of the Journal of Radical Librarianship recalled,

‘around 2014, a lot of librarians were angry online… We were disappointed in our professional body feeling that everything was … a bit uninspired in terms of action … someone said, “We should probably start a journal.” So we did … it was suggested that publishing work on radical librarianship in the form of an academic journal would be a way to bring theory and practice together’.

Similarly, for Ela Przybyło (panel 1), the journal Feral Feminisms emerged as an attempt to build ‘something else’ – a space for those pushed to the edges of the academy by its formal and informal walls: graduate students, artists, disabled scholars, creative writers, activists. As Przybyło put it, it was never just about journals or outputs:

‘It was about relationships, shared labour, and refusal. It was about making space – for each other, for alternative forms of scholarship, and for survival.’

Charmaine Pereira (panel 2) discussed the origin of the Feminist Africa journal in response to a lack of spaces for feminist thought and activism on the African continent. As she described, Feminist Africa, through their editorial practices, aims not only to produce and proliferate feminist knowledge but to sustain feminist community – through mentoring authors, fostering dialogue across texts, and holding scholarly and activist commitments in productive tension. Similarly, Vincent van Gerven Oei (panel 3) described the journal Dotawo as emerging from the disintegration of institutional infrastructure around Nubian studies and a need to support both scholarly collaboration and community access in contexts marked by colonial neglect and infrastructural precarity. The journal, hosted by the open access press punctum books, uses an open-source, low-bandwidth platform tailored for offline distribution – including through USB sticks – to ensure accessibility for scholars and communities in Egypt and Sudan.

As Simon Batterbury (panel 2) reflected,

‘The academic spring never took off… we’ve gone from protests and boycotts back to what I would argue is a … type of mutual aid, where we’re actually offering demonstrable models for journals and book publishing. We are not experimental. We’re looking to get readers and to offer a sound and very stable publication.’

As he continued, the Journal of Political Ecology is hosted by the University of Arizona Library, using Janeway – an open-source, scholarly publishing platform developed by the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) at Birkbeck, University of London – and is run with zero budget. ‘Our model is sustained by mutual aid and volunteer labour. I do all the copyediting, every reference, every DOI. I’ve personally edited over 950 articles. This is care work – time-consuming, but worth it.’ Ashwani Sharma (panel 1) described the journal darkmatter as a response to institutional constraints and epistemic violence – a post-institutional, unfunded project grounded in anti-racist and anti-colonial – not managerial, but reparative – countering the extractive logics of neoliberal publishing. Quoting Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization (2012), he stated: ‘Globalisation takes place only in capital and data. Everything else is damage control. Information command has ruined knowing and reading.’ In this context, darkmatter is a ‘journal without conditions’ – a refusal of academic legibility and an act of epistemological resistance to the violence of racial capitalism.

The Politics of Labour

Across the conference, contributors called attention to the politics of labour that underpin radical approaches to open access publishing. Many highlighted how this labour is often unpaid, precarious, and invisibilised – done in evenings, on weekends, or from sickbeds, without compensation, job security or institutional recognition. As Ela Przybyło (panel 1) noted,

‘first-time authors may proudly list their piece in Feral Feminisms on their CV, but they rarely see the hours of editorial spoon labour that got it there – by unpaid reviewers, overworked guest editors, and me, entering metadata into WordPress from bed.’

Several contributors acknowledged the difficulty of sustaining such labour in the long term. Many projects rely on what Simon Batterbury (panel 2) described as ‘a kind of mutual aid economy’ – driven by volunteer effort and collective goodwill. ‘Publishing like this is hard,’ he reflected. ‘You need time, energy, tech skills, and institutional cover. But it’s worth it. We provide access, visibility, and dignity to scholars marginalised by the commercial system.’ Marc Herbst (panel 1) offered a similarly situated reflection on the limits and realities of sustaining The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. ‘Our journal never had a firm structure to hold it all together,’ he said. ‘It’s always been a kind of art project, shaped as much by life’s unpredictability as by design.’ Over time, its contributors have navigated illness, burnout, unemployment and dislocation – often without clarity about roles, timelines or outcomes. What kept the work going, he suggested, was not institutional scaffolding but fragile and persistent ties between people:

‘We are afraid, but we remain committed – to love, to struggle, to care.
To holding onto the theoretical narratives that once helped us believe something else was possible.’

Lauren Smith (panel 3) emphasised the need for more intentional community-building to support such fragile efforts. ‘Everyone is doing this work in their spare time, often in isolation,’ she said. ‘’Right now, tasks get done, but there’s little sense of active community. I know I have a role to play in changing that. It would be great to intentionally connect with others involved, especially since many of us are already casually connected online. As Dolly Parton said, doing it on purpose matters’.

Contributors also spoke about this labour as relational and affective – driven not by prestige or metrics, but by love, care, and shared purpose. Stevphen Shukaitis (panel 2), describing his work with Minor Compositions as a labour-intensive

‘side-hustle on top of a full-time academic job’, spoke of ‘a deliberate amateurism – in the original sense of the word: “amateur” from amator, a lover…
there’s a certain sense of doing things out of love, rather than for professional recognition or metrics.’

Angela Okune (panel 2) similarly reflected: ‘Now I carve time from a full-time job that pays the bills to enter collaborations I truly love – that nourish and fill me up, not collaborations for EU and US funding.’ These projects, she continued, are sustained in the ‘in-betweens’ of busy lives: ‘It’s never enough, but it’s always enough – to energise us, exhaust us with all the possibilities… It’s because we are in the in-betweens that it is still rewarding.’ Life, she added, ‘is always moving, alive – a gushing waterfall, an unexpected thunderstorm, a bottomless pothole. So there will never be a perfect time, a perfect collaboration, for a perfect knowledge.’

For some, the emotional and psychological toll of publishing was inseparable from its material precarity. Ela Przybyło (panel 1), reflected on how academic labour continues even when one is unwell, and how the pressures of productivity and institutional surveillance persist in moments of vulnerability. Drawing on insights from Mad Studies, she called for more expansive understandings of publishing – ones that centre refusal, rest, and collective care. ‘Mad people collaborate differently,’ she suggested – not through performance or co-signing, but through ‘reciprocity, mutual care, mutual recognition of suffering.’ Publishing, she added, must be capable of holding the messiness of being unwell, of being human.

This labour, while precarious, also sustains alternative infrastructures of care. Magalí Rabasa (panel 3) described how publishing rooted in amistad política – political friendship – offers a logic distinct from the academy or the market. It is, she argued, ‘a relation without an end – an endless loop shaped by shared intentions, but without predetermined outcomes’, enabling new forms of collective organisation, mutual support, and shared purpose. For Rabasa, care in publishing means attending to historically devalued forms of labour – especially those feminised and marginalised – and working toward conditions that make that care more possible and more just.

Radical Open Access beyond Openness

Shifting the focus in OA publishing away from openness as the default mode of research outputs shifts the labour in radical OA publishing towards ‘cultivating and sustaining the material, infrastructural, epistemological, and affective conditions’ (Rabasa) under which different ways of working, thinking, and relating around and through scholarly publications could be experimented with. A focus here was put on the existential and agency-sustaining dimensions of alternative editorial processes and practices – offering support communities among those working in isolation (Smith), the possibility of ‘survival’ in and against the violences of the university (Przybyło), and an attunement to unfinished, improvised, and often fugitive nature of collective scholarly work under conditions of uncertainty and constraint. Mark Herbst (panel 1) stressed: ‘Meanwhile, capitalism, planetary destruction, and systemic cruelty continue unabated. Our newest journal issue is about making arrangements. The submission call – still unreleased – will say something like this: We are afraid, but we remain committed. To love, to struggle, to care. To justice and equality’. For Ashwani Sharma (panel 1) darkmatter is a social project situated ‘within activist conviviality and sociality’. ‘Open access is only one prerequisite,’ he stated. ‘Damage control is a bare minimum for global social justice in the crisis of fascist racial capitalism.’ And for Vincent van Gerven Oei (panel 3), publishing is not the end point, but part of ‘a broader cultural and political ecology of survival,’ particularly for what he called ‘the minor humanities’: fields and languages on the edge of extinction, often unsupported by dominant academic systems. As he put it, open access publishing is ‘perhaps the only way’ to keep such worlds alive.

Contribution recordings playlist – Day 2: https://fair.tube/w/p/3njqqopvGpQHoqpVPz6hTw

The vulnerability and contingency of these arrangements – and the positionality of the actors that sustain them – was also emphasised by other speakers. Contributors reflected on how they are differently situated in the hierarchies of funding, employment, institutional affiliation, and precarity. As Lucy Barnes (panel 3) noted, non-commercial, independent publishers such as Open Book Publishers can be more agile and responsive in times of political and institutional crisis:

‘If censorship or ideological restrictions arise within universities, we aren’t beholden to a single institution’s politics. We can support research that challenges the status quo.’

Similarly, Simon Batterbury (panel 2) highlighted the responsibility senior scholars such as himself have to use their relative security to support and protect alternative publishing efforts: ‘It’s a pretty lame conclusion, but I think people with the ability to do so should try and devote some fragments of their time to this sort of work. In universities that offer you just enough time to do it.’ Jeff Pooley (panel 1) echoed this call, pointing to the urgent need for more people to get involved in building and sustaining collective infrastructures: ‘These are still very fragile. But there’s a real window of opportunity right now. We don’t have to accept the market’s terms.’

As Lucy Barnes (panel 3) asked in her input, which also concluded the conference: ‘What more could we be doing – and doing collectively? In a time of financial, governmental, and ecological crisis, are there opportunities for change? Is this a moment for the Radical Open Access Collective? The status quo is breaking down. It no longer works for many. So – what next?’


Resources

📺 Video documentation of most panelists is available in two Peertube playlists dedicated to each of the two days of the conference, via FairTube:

📺 All videos are also available via the Internet Archive

📃 Presentation slidedecks of most contributions are openly available on Zenodo, via https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17252325

SO! Podcast #82: Living Sounds: Rhythms of Belonging

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOADSO! Podcast #82: Living Sounds: Rhythms of Belonging

SUBSCRIBE TO THE SERIES VIA APPLE PODCASTS

FOR TRANSCRIPT: ACCESS EPISODE THROUGH APPLE PODCASTS , locate the episode and click on the three dots to the far right. Click on “view transcript.”

It’s been a minute for the SO! podcast but we are glad to be back–however intermittently–with a podcast episode that shares a discussion between women sound studies artists and scholars. The panel “Living Sounds: Rhythms of Belonging,” was held on September 19 at 6-7pm EDT at The Soil Factory arts space in Ithaca, New York. Moderator Jennifer Lynn Stoever, sound studies scholar and our Ed. in Chief, talks with four women sound artists about their praxis: Marlo de Lara, Bonnie Han Jones, Sarah Nance and Paulina Velazquez Solis.

How does sound, shape, and structure pattern our worlds and ways of belonging? Can sound also undo – and remake exclusionary structures that have harmed, injured and extracted us?
 
How often do the rhythms and pulses of our everyday lives offer forms of belonging that are interrelational, interconnected, and sustainable? Come think with contemporary sound artists and scholars as they interweave their practices , research, archives, memories and dreams toward answers to these questions.

Bios

Marlo De Lara (they/siya) obtained a PhD in Cultural Studies (University of Leeds) and an MA in Psychosocial Studies from the Centre of Psychoanalytic Studies at Essex. Their creative practice works within the realms of sound performance, visual distraction, and film. Using found objects, installation, and various forms of amplification, environments/structures use sound to impart meaning and affect for the participant. As the child of Philippine migrants, De Lara’s unabashed feminist sociopolitical practice/research editorializes on contemporary global conditions. As an arts facilitator, using their critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex and institutional learning, De Lara aims to transgress and subvert traditional hierarchical ways of managing contemporary art spaces. In the role of community care, Marlo uses mutual aid and emergent strategies in combination with decolonial ways of nourishing equity, diversity, and inclusion practices to ensure safety and access for all. Marlo is a Certified Deep Listening Facilitator and shaping a career as Counsellor/Coach/Guide in therapeutic healing methods informed by Western psychotherapeutic/psychological, healing arts, expressive therapies, and various indigenous practices, most specifically sikolohiyang pilipino.

Bonnie Han Jones is a Korean-American improvising musician, poet, and performer working with electronic sound and text. She performs solo and in numerous collaborative music, film, and visual art projects. Bonnie was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and is currently a member of the High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, along with Suzanne Thorpe she co-founded TECHNE, an organization that develops anti-racist, feminist workshops that center on technology-focused art making, improvisation, and community collaboration. She has received commissions from the London ICA and Walters Art Museum and has presented her work extensively at institutions in the US, Mexico, Europe and Asia. Bonnie was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Born in South Korea, she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, spent her formative years in Baltimore, Maryland and Providence RI and currently resides in Chicago, IL.

Sarah Nance is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intersections of geologic processes and human experience in archived, constructed, and speculative landscapes. Her work has been performed and exhibited widely, at venues in China, France, Canada, Iceland, South Korea, Germany, and Italy, as well as across the U.S. 

Paulina Velázquez Solís is a multimedia artist and curator from Mexico and Costa Rica. She works with installation, sound, sculpture, drawing, animation/video, and media performance. She is interested in the body and the biological and natural world in interaction with the cultural and social notions of normalcy and experiences as a multinational individual. Her work has been shown in places like Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo and TEOR/éTica in Costa Rica; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Ex Teresa Arte Actual in México City; Casa de las Americas in La Havana, Cuba; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Panamá City; Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC; and Root Division and The Lab in San Francisco.

Jennifer Lynn Stoever is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, founding Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Out!, and author of The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016). Her research has been supported by the Whiting Foundation, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Thank you to Travis Johns for the recording and mixing.

tape reel

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
SO! Podcast #48: Languages of Exile

SO! Podcast #53: H. Cecilia Suhr’s “From Ancient Soul to Ether”

SO! Podcast #55: The New Brunswick Music Scene Symposium

SO! Podcast #82: Living Sounds: Rhythms of Belonging

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOADSO! Podcast #82: Living Sounds: Rhythms of Belonging

SUBSCRIBE TO THE SERIES VIA APPLE PODCASTS

FOR TRANSCRIPT: ACCESS EPISODE THROUGH APPLE PODCASTS , locate the episode and click on the three dots to the far right. Click on “view transcript.”

It’s been a minute for the SO! podcast but we are glad to be back–however intermittently–with a podcast episode that shares a discussion between women sound studies artists and scholars. The panel “Living Sounds: Rhythms of Belonging,” was held on September 19 at 6-7pm EDT at The Soil Factory arts space in Ithaca, New York. Moderator Jennifer Lynn Stoever, sound studies scholar and our Ed. in Chief, talks with four women sound artists about their praxis: Marlo de Lara, Bonnie Han Jones, Sarah Nance and Paulina Velazquez Solis.

How does sound, shape, and structure pattern our worlds and ways of belonging? Can sound also undo – and remake exclusionary structures that have harmed, injured and extracted us?
 
How often do the rhythms and pulses of our everyday lives offer forms of belonging that are interrelational, interconnected, and sustainable? Come think with contemporary sound artists and scholars as they interweave their practices , research, archives, memories and dreams toward answers to these questions.

Bios

Marlo De Lara (they/siya) obtained a PhD in Cultural Studies (University of Leeds) and an MA in Psychosocial Studies from the Centre of Psychoanalytic Studies at Essex. Their creative practice works within the realms of sound performance, visual distraction, and film. Using found objects, installation, and various forms of amplification, environments/structures use sound to impart meaning and affect for the participant. As the child of Philippine migrants, De Lara’s unabashed feminist sociopolitical practice/research editorializes on contemporary global conditions. As an arts facilitator, using their critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex and institutional learning, De Lara aims to transgress and subvert traditional hierarchical ways of managing contemporary art spaces. In the role of community care, Marlo uses mutual aid and emergent strategies in combination with decolonial ways of nourishing equity, diversity, and inclusion practices to ensure safety and access for all. Marlo is a Certified Deep Listening Facilitator and shaping a career as Counsellor/Coach/Guide in therapeutic healing methods informed by Western psychotherapeutic/psychological, healing arts, expressive therapies, and various indigenous practices, most specifically sikolohiyang pilipino.

Bonnie Han Jones is a Korean-American improvising musician, poet, and performer working with electronic sound and text. She performs solo and in numerous collaborative music, film, and visual art projects. Bonnie was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and is currently a member of the High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, along with Suzanne Thorpe she co-founded TECHNE, an organization that develops anti-racist, feminist workshops that center on technology-focused art making, improvisation, and community collaboration. She has received commissions from the London ICA and Walters Art Museum and has presented her work extensively at institutions in the US, Mexico, Europe and Asia. Bonnie was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Born in South Korea, she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, spent her formative years in Baltimore, Maryland and Providence RI and currently resides in Chicago, IL.

Sarah Nance is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intersections of geologic processes and human experience in archived, constructed, and speculative landscapes. Her work has been performed and exhibited widely, at venues in China, France, Canada, Iceland, South Korea, Germany, and Italy, as well as across the U.S. 

Paulina Velázquez Solís is a multimedia artist and curator from Mexico and Costa Rica. She works with installation, sound, sculpture, drawing, animation/video, and media performance. She is interested in the body and the biological and natural world in interaction with the cultural and social notions of normalcy and experiences as a multinational individual. Her work has been shown in places like Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo and TEOR/éTica in Costa Rica; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Ex Teresa Arte Actual in México City; Casa de las Americas in La Havana, Cuba; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Panamá City; Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC; and Root Division and The Lab in San Francisco.

Jennifer Lynn Stoever is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, founding Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Out!, and author of The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016). Her research has been supported by the Whiting Foundation, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Thank you to Travis Johns for the recording and mixing.

tape reel

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
SO! Podcast #48: Languages of Exile

SO! Podcast #53: H. Cecilia Suhr’s “From Ancient Soul to Ether”

SO! Podcast #55: The New Brunswick Music Scene Symposium

SO! Podcast #82: Living Sounds: Rhythms of Belonging

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOADSO! Podcast #82: Living Sounds: Rhythms of Belonging

SUBSCRIBE TO THE SERIES VIA APPLE PODCASTS

FOR TRANSCRIPT: ACCESS EPISODE THROUGH APPLE PODCASTS , locate the episode and click on the three dots to the far right. Click on “view transcript.”

It’s been a minute for the SO! podcast but we are glad to be back–however intermittently–with a podcast episode that shares a discussion between women sound studies artists and scholars. The panel “Living Sounds: Rhythms of Belonging,” was held on September 19 at 6-7pm EDT at The Soil Factory arts space in Ithaca, New York. Moderator Jennifer Lynn Stoever, sound studies scholar and our Ed. in Chief, talks with four women sound artists about their praxis: Marlo de Lara, Bonnie Han Jones, Sarah Nance and Paulina Velazquez Solis.

How does sound, shape, and structure pattern our worlds and ways of belonging? Can sound also undo – and remake exclusionary structures that have harmed, injured and extracted us?
 
How often do the rhythms and pulses of our everyday lives offer forms of belonging that are interrelational, interconnected, and sustainable? Come think with contemporary sound artists and scholars as they interweave their practices , research, archives, memories and dreams toward answers to these questions.

Bios

Marlo De Lara (they/siya) obtained a PhD in Cultural Studies (University of Leeds) and an MA in Psychosocial Studies from the Centre of Psychoanalytic Studies at Essex. Their creative practice works within the realms of sound performance, visual distraction, and film. Using found objects, installation, and various forms of amplification, environments/structures use sound to impart meaning and affect for the participant. As the child of Philippine migrants, De Lara’s unabashed feminist sociopolitical practice/research editorializes on contemporary global conditions. As an arts facilitator, using their critiques of the nonprofit industrial complex and institutional learning, De Lara aims to transgress and subvert traditional hierarchical ways of managing contemporary art spaces. In the role of community care, Marlo uses mutual aid and emergent strategies in combination with decolonial ways of nourishing equity, diversity, and inclusion practices to ensure safety and access for all. Marlo is a Certified Deep Listening Facilitator and shaping a career as Counsellor/Coach/Guide in therapeutic healing methods informed by Western psychotherapeutic/psychological, healing arts, expressive therapies, and various indigenous practices, most specifically sikolohiyang pilipino.

Bonnie Han Jones is a Korean-American improvising musician, poet, and performer working with electronic sound and text. She performs solo and in numerous collaborative music, film, and visual art projects. Bonnie was a founding member of the Transmodern Festival and CHELA Gallery and is currently a member of the High Zero Festival collective. In 2010, along with Suzanne Thorpe she co-founded TECHNE, an organization that develops anti-racist, feminist workshops that center on technology-focused art making, improvisation, and community collaboration. She has received commissions from the London ICA and Walters Art Museum and has presented her work extensively at institutions in the US, Mexico, Europe and Asia. Bonnie was a 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Born in South Korea, she was raised on a dairy farm in New Jersey, spent her formative years in Baltimore, Maryland and Providence RI and currently resides in Chicago, IL.

Sarah Nance is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intersections of geologic processes and human experience in archived, constructed, and speculative landscapes. Her work has been performed and exhibited widely, at venues in China, France, Canada, Iceland, South Korea, Germany, and Italy, as well as across the U.S. 

Paulina Velázquez Solís is a multimedia artist and curator from Mexico and Costa Rica. She works with installation, sound, sculpture, drawing, animation/video, and media performance. She is interested in the body and the biological and natural world in interaction with the cultural and social notions of normalcy and experiences as a multinational individual. Her work has been shown in places like Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo and TEOR/éTica in Costa Rica; Taipei Fine Arts Museum; Ex Teresa Arte Actual in México City; Casa de las Americas in La Havana, Cuba; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Panamá City; Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC; and Root Division and The Lab in San Francisco.

Jennifer Lynn Stoever is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University, founding Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Out!, and author of The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016). Her research has been supported by the Whiting Foundation, the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Thank you to Travis Johns for the recording and mixing.

tape reel

REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
SO! Podcast #48: Languages of Exile

SO! Podcast #53: H. Cecilia Suhr’s “From Ancient Soul to Ether”

SO! Podcast #55: The New Brunswick Music Scene Symposium

Unsettled

Unsettled Erin Manning  Explores what it means to be claimed, not just by blood, but by history, land, and the fragile web of human connection. To belong is never a simple matter. For Erin Manning, ancestry has always been more of an entanglement than a strict lineage: a collection of stories, fabulations, and echoes of […]

Marginalia

Marginalia is a free and open-source, collaborative article annotation and publishing platform. Annotations have historically served as a method of assistance for reading dense and difficult texts and have existed in the margins of the “original” or “main” text. While the concept of marginalia includes not just annotations, but drawings, critiques, illuminations, scribbles and the like.

We think of margins as a space of not often recognized knowledge creation, that is just as important, if not more so than the main body of text. This platform foregrounds non-linear, messy, entangled knowledge making. It is for those seeking online space for communal learning, wild experiments in reading and writing, and intervening into the text to make room for themselves in it.

This project is being developed for the use of collectives and initiatives, research groups, reading clubs, collective learning endeavors and students that need open-source free tools for collaborative work or hybrid working environments. We’ve built Marginalia trying to embrace principles related to feminist methodology, knowledge-sharing, sustainability, accessibility.

If you’d like to get in contact with us, send us an email at hello@margi-nalia.site
This project is supported by Creative Industries Fund NL.

Post-War Surrealism and Anti-authoritarianism

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 38 Post-War Surrealism and Anti-authoritarianism This discussion brings together Abigail Susik and Michael Löwy to explore the international history of surrealism after 1945, with a focus on its enduring anti-authoritarian spirit. Often misunderstood as an avant-garde movement confined to the interwar years and extinguished by World War II or the death […]

Post-War Surrealism and Anti-authoritarianism

Minor Compositions Podcast Episode 38 Post-War Surrealism and Anti-authoritarianism This discussion brings together Abigail Susik and Michael Löwy to explore the international history of surrealism after 1945, with a focus on its enduring anti-authoritarian spirit. Often misunderstood as an avant-garde movement confined to the interwar years and extinguished by World War II or the death […]