Part of this surge in scholarly attention and artistic projects is premised on the idea that sound and sound recordings are important additions to cultural heritage in documenting histories and personal evidence, and yet, they are often viewed as supplementary adjuncts to more physical or visual archival artefacts. This subjugation to the primacy of the visual extends to the arts, humanities, and social sciences, but this is beginning to change as scholars across these fields increasingly argue that sound (with its attendant listening) is an especially critical medium for cultivating different modes of attention, forging affective relations, producing alternative knowledges, revealing hidden narratives, and attuning to neglected pasts.
Two digital sound archival projects created in response to the pandemic, The Pandemic SensoryArchive and#StayHomeSounds, are especially instructive in thinking about sound as a key medium for engaging with the monumental a/effects of the present and as important contributions to cultural history. Like other pandemic digital sound archival projects, these two projects sought to document the present for the future – creating a “past” in real time, based on the underlying assumption that sound – as a material-discursive apparatus – can offer particularly generative possibilities in this context. The methods, scope, and presentation design employed by these two web-based archival platforms generates a sense of intimacy, proximity, andcollectivity in otherwise surreal, secluded, uncertain, detached, and disconnected situations, much like in radio and podcasting though in this case with different infrastructure and interactivity.
In these online, mediated spaces where worlds intensely collide and conflate, and users become flattened out and disembodied, new configurations of intimacy, subjectivities, and world-building emerge through alternative forms of affective archival engagement. This was (and still is) particularly important and complex during COVID-19, which is marked not only by a series of indefinite lockdowns and uneven distribution of intervention measures, but an affective logic whereby life is completely reconfigured and capacities within the world are diminished and redistributed. Part of making mass sound archives usable relies on the medium for circulation, the presentation for users, and what user participation empowers for these living histories, as Fabiola Hanna makes clear. These two projects generate what Hanna identifies as a particular orientation in digital humanities projects through a politics of listening that necessitates an active mode of participation that is not simply one-directional but a two-way engagement.
The Archive of Intimacy, later renamed The Pandemic Sensory Archive (PSA), wascreated by professors William Tullett (Associate Professor in Sensory History, Anglia Ruskin University, U.K.) and Hannah McCann (Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia) with the goal of exploring the senses through a digital platform and to act as an open data bank of contributions from the public. Their open call for contributions asks for a response that considers two questions: What smells, sights, sounds, touch, and/or tastes do you associate with the pandemic? Has your experiences of the senses (smell/sight/hearing/touching/taste) changed at all as a result of the pandemic? Contributors are then asked to drop a pin on the map (though this is not a typical Google Maps rendition of a specific locale, but a sort of simplified graphic representation of sensory input/output waves) and follow the prompts to anonymously submit. The digital map is divided among the five senses and features the entries that contain a title and brief response, such as:
Quiet where there should not be quiet: “Being in my flat in the centre of town on my own with nobody else around on a Saturday. Everything weirdly, eerily, quiet.”
Birdsong: “Hearing birdsong in the garden having not noticed it before, no longer drowned out.”
You’re on mute! “Did the conversation in meetings become less robust as we all sit there on mute, politely waiting for our turn to speak?”
Less sound, more sound: “Blissfully quiet at night as curfew curtails the normal constant traffic roars, far more voices in the early morning and through the day as people‘exercise together’ to socialize in the park”
Complimenting this map, which may seem limited in scope but allows users to engage without having to sift through an overwhelming amount of content, is the Sound category page, where four interviews are embedded with “sensory experts on sound during the Covid-19 pandemic,” including Shoshana Rosenberg, Andrew Mitchell, Martin Stewart, and Stephen Sullivan. One interview considers how the pandemic clarified the immensely relational dimension of artistic sound practice and that the lack of access to intimacy during lockdown instigated a radical reformatting and questioning of what it means, more broadly and now, to be intimate and close in creating sound art. For them, what the pandemic spelled out is that intimacy is fragile and valuable, and that this delicate balance and fluctuating ratio has come to the fore during this time.
The initial designation for the platform, “the archive of intimacy,” is worth meditating on to consider the particular forms of intimacy in this context, perhaps through Lauren Berlant’s “intimate publics” – a concept that captures the affective and collective dimensions of intimacy among strangers. The notion lends itself to understanding the mediated social intimacy in these spaces and the different affective experiences they invite in varying capacities through sound.The connection between imagined publics and community through sound has, of course, been conceptualized by scholars who do historical work on radio and podcast studies, but it can also be extended to these digital, affective, pandemic sound archives. Evidenced in the submission prompts and interview data, the emphasis on the distinct shifts and palpable changes resulting from this new situation, and its accompanying affective logic, can be read as a strategy for cultivating intimacy and connection because attending to these changes may render their intensities as less alarming.
“Listening” by Flickr User Silvia Siri, April 4, 2020CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED
Through the descriptions and dialogues of these new affective environments grounded in sound, some users might feel a sense of camaraderie, connection, and affinity to these novel experiences and how it relates or compares to one’s own (or the sense of not being so alone), especially in the personalized, diaristic, idiosyncratic tone in the short text extracts and longer interview forms. According to Tizian Zumthurm and Stefan Krebs (2022), digital spaces enable this type of “self-affirmation: by contributing and following the contributions of others, users are assured that they are not alone in whatever they experienced” (492). They also point out that as a result crowdsourced archives, particularly related to traumatic events, have a curative function.
Although the PSA may not be what likely comes to mind when thinking about a digital sound archive, presumably composed exclusively of musical or field recordings, it provides an entry point into a confluence of concerns to grapple with some of the key questions and issues related to sound, intimacy, and affect during the pandemic. In particular, diversity in form – between short excerpts and lengthier conversations, creates different engagement options for users based on preference and capacity (quick snapshots of the sonic changes in daily life or deeper explorations concerning sonic worlds), and across sensory inputs. Moreover, interviews add an oral history aspect to the project, which some scholars argue is more empowering and intimate than other modes of telling or sharing history. As a historically feminist practice, oral history has the potential to expose ignored topics and present diversified perspectives on traumatic pasts (like the 1918 pandemic) which is also especially important considering the research areas and professional backgrounds among the interview experts.
#StayHomeSounds is part of a larger project led by UK-based sound artist Stuart Fowkes, who created Cities and Memories in 2014, which Milena Droumeva describes as a “one-of-a-kind sonic portal dedicated to the exploration of place, sound and memory” (147). The website boasts being the largest sound project in the world with over 5000 sound recordings from over 1000 different contributors across 100 territories worldwide. It encompasses field recordings, sound art, and sound mapping, and each location features two sounds: the original field recording of that place and a reimagined sound that presents that place and time as somewhere, something else. The listener can explore sites through their actual sounds or the reimagined versions, flipping between the two different sound worlds. #StayHomeSounds is one of the latest ongoing sub-projects on the site and it is a collection of recordings during the pandemic from all over the world mostly done using cell phone recordings.
Bari lockdown sound recorded by Roberto Lippolis.
Although there is a wide range of quality and content, #StayHomeSounds offers a glimpse into the everyday sonic realities of quarantine life that cut across geography, life, and circumstances. The immensely mundane soundscapes and sheer multitude of recordings across cities and regions allows us to listen comparatively and try to notice the striking sonic cultures of different places even in lockdown. Those submitting sounds are required to provide a reflective text, and an elective representative image, to accompany their recording which details the changes in the soundscape as well as any a/effects that change has produced on other aspects of life.
An entry from Vancouver reads “Their chorus runs day and night and is a most pleasant soundtrack to both fall asleep with and wake up to. In this clip the background birds have joined in to add their avian melody to the amphibian bass line.”
Another from the Greek island of Crete, “after a heavy rain last night, the chirping of the birds woke me up this morning. It was such a powerful sound, like waking up from a sweet dream or a bad nightmare. I think that due to quarantine measures the nature’s sounds are more clear than even before.”
Athens, Greece lockdown sound recorded by Stamatis Mitrou.
In New Orleans, “I’m thankful for my quiet spot out here on the edges of town, but I worry about how the city can recover and for all those sick, out of work, or unable to stay home.”
New Orleans lockdown sounds recorded by Elizabeth Joan Kelly.
The objectives of the project, as described by Fowkes in the online text, are largely affective or affectively oriented, that is, to establish a sense of connection in the present, “how it feels at this unique moment,” by being able to discover new relations to place, to others, and to our sentient selves, through these sonic recordings and texts. In an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Fowkes said, “(You can) see what other people are hearing around the world and also read their stories and see that actually people are feeling similarly… hopefully that helps to make us feel a little bit more connected.” The breadth of contributions in terms of different locations and number of entries helps build this sense of connection, increasing the possibility of similar experiences to be seen and heard.
Lockdown sound from Lagos, Nigeria recorded by Ibukun Sunday.
By attending to personal struggles, observations, and speculations in relation to sound, these two digital sound archival projects gesture towards the intersections of intimacy, memory, and world-building, and alleviate and mediate some of the dominant and pervading affects that marked lockdown and remote life. In undertaking this project, I found pleasure in the informality of the responses and both the fresh insights and shared resonances, creating an experience that was jointly intimate (feeling seen and validated) and expansive (an opening to alternative experiences). In cultivating openness and a space for difference, and making the reflections and recordings publicly available, so that we can listen together but apart, the projects cultivate new forms of intimacy, empathy, collectivity, and nostalgia.
Dhaka, Bangladesh lockdown sound recorded by youKnowWho.
But, of course, the potential affective experience with the entries and recordings is not a given, much like with any critical scholarly intervention or artwork that attempts to raise awareness (in this case, to both the grave and minute effects of the pandemic) and resist dominant narratives (that the pandemic is under-control, over, or effects only one’s respiratory system), there is no guarantee that the intended experience will transpire in every engagement, but the possibility to do so – to cultivate intimacy and world-building at a time of profound uncertainty and physical distance – is nonetheless still valuable. Much like the diversity in responses, undoubtedly there are varying degrees and types of resonances, perceptions, and impacts within each visit.
Using an open access, crowdsourced approach, the PSA and #soundsathome construct participatory, community archives, creating and remediating documents and recordings for collective access and engagement on behalf of a global community that underwent monumental change, disruption, and loss. Calling explicit attention to palpable sensory shifts and disruptions is a central way to track, record, and make sense of the immense changes in this historical moment, and to illuminate the inequalities in environments and experiences that have been exacerbated by the (lack of) responses by governments and policy. The very existence of these projects and their participation through listening marks a resistance to the discourses of a “return to normalcy” or that we are on the other end of the pandemic. Because affects live in the body and are not often considered as objects of knowledge, the ongoing presence, use, and discussion of these two projects amplifies the a/effects, and a resistance to the affective logic of the pandemic, that they seek to produce. By considering COVID as an unprecedented, deeply affective, traumatic event, these online spaces operate to archive this moment in time and its myriad sonic dimensions, bringing these affective worlds into dialogue through an intimate exchange and assemblage between different bodies, experiences, and locations.
—
Emily Collins is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, educator, and PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University in Tkaronto (Toronto) whose work draws on sound studies, feminist theory, critical disability studies, and cultural theory to examine sonic social relations and materiality through entanglements of resistance and care within contemporary artworks and creative practices. As a cultural worker and active member in the arts community, Emily has worked at diverse film, visual arts, and digital media organizations, institutions, and research networks within Canada and abroad, including Archive/Counter-Archive, PUBLIC Journal, VUCAVU, Festival Scope (Paris), the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
—
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
Part of this surge in scholarly attention and artistic projects is premised on the idea that sound and sound recordings are important additions to cultural heritage in documenting histories and personal evidence, and yet, they are often viewed as supplementary adjuncts to more physical or visual archival artefacts. This subjugation to the primacy of the visual extends to the arts, humanities, and social sciences, but this is beginning to change as scholars across these fields increasingly argue that sound (with its attendant listening) is an especially critical medium for cultivating different modes of attention, forging affective relations, producing alternative knowledges, revealing hidden narratives, and attuning to neglected pasts.
Two digital sound archival projects created in response to the pandemic, The Pandemic SensoryArchive and#StayHomeSounds, are especially instructive in thinking about sound as a key medium for engaging with the monumental a/effects of the present and as important contributions to cultural history. Like other pandemic digital sound archival projects, these two projects sought to document the present for the future – creating a “past” in real time, based on the underlying assumption that sound – as a material-discursive apparatus – can offer particularly generative possibilities in this context. The methods, scope, and presentation design employed by these two web-based archival platforms generates a sense of intimacy, proximity, andcollectivity in otherwise surreal, secluded, uncertain, detached, and disconnected situations, much like in radio and podcasting though in this case with different infrastructure and interactivity.
In these online, mediated spaces where worlds intensely collide and conflate, and users become flattened out and disembodied, new configurations of intimacy, subjectivities, and world-building emerge through alternative forms of affective archival engagement. This was (and still is) particularly important and complex during COVID-19, which is marked not only by a series of indefinite lockdowns and uneven distribution of intervention measures, but an affective logic whereby life is completely reconfigured and capacities within the world are diminished and redistributed. Part of making mass sound archives usable relies on the medium for circulation, the presentation for users, and what user participation empowers for these living histories, as Fabiola Hanna makes clear. These two projects generate what Hanna identifies as a particular orientation in digital humanities projects through a politics of listening that necessitates an active mode of participation that is not simply one-directional but a two-way engagement.
The Archive of Intimacy, later renamed The Pandemic Sensory Archive (PSA), wascreated by professors William Tullett (Associate Professor in Sensory History, Anglia Ruskin University, U.K.) and Hannah McCann (Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia) with the goal of exploring the senses through a digital platform and to act as an open data bank of contributions from the public. Their open call for contributions asks for a response that considers two questions: What smells, sights, sounds, touch, and/or tastes do you associate with the pandemic? Has your experiences of the senses (smell/sight/hearing/touching/taste) changed at all as a result of the pandemic? Contributors are then asked to drop a pin on the map (though this is not a typical Google Maps rendition of a specific locale, but a sort of simplified graphic representation of sensory input/output waves) and follow the prompts to anonymously submit. The digital map is divided among the five senses and features the entries that contain a title and brief response, such as:
Quiet where there should not be quiet: “Being in my flat in the centre of town on my own with nobody else around on a Saturday. Everything weirdly, eerily, quiet.”
Birdsong: “Hearing birdsong in the garden having not noticed it before, no longer drowned out.”
You’re on mute! “Did the conversation in meetings become less robust as we all sit there on mute, politely waiting for our turn to speak?”
Less sound, more sound: “Blissfully quiet at night as curfew curtails the normal constant traffic roars, far more voices in the early morning and through the day as people‘exercise together’ to socialize in the park”
Complimenting this map, which may seem limited in scope but allows users to engage without having to sift through an overwhelming amount of content, is the Sound category page, where four interviews are embedded with “sensory experts on sound during the Covid-19 pandemic,” including Shoshana Rosenberg, Andrew Mitchell, Martin Stewart, and Stephen Sullivan. One interview considers how the pandemic clarified the immensely relational dimension of artistic sound practice and that the lack of access to intimacy during lockdown instigated a radical reformatting and questioning of what it means, more broadly and now, to be intimate and close in creating sound art. For them, what the pandemic spelled out is that intimacy is fragile and valuable, and that this delicate balance and fluctuating ratio has come to the fore during this time.
The initial designation for the platform, “the archive of intimacy,” is worth meditating on to consider the particular forms of intimacy in this context, perhaps through Lauren Berlant’s “intimate publics” – a concept that captures the affective and collective dimensions of intimacy among strangers. The notion lends itself to understanding the mediated social intimacy in these spaces and the different affective experiences they invite in varying capacities through sound.The connection between imagined publics and community through sound has, of course, been conceptualized by scholars who do historical work on radio and podcast studies, but it can also be extended to these digital, affective, pandemic sound archives. Evidenced in the submission prompts and interview data, the emphasis on the distinct shifts and palpable changes resulting from this new situation, and its accompanying affective logic, can be read as a strategy for cultivating intimacy and connection because attending to these changes may render their intensities as less alarming.
“Listening” by Flickr User Silvia Siri, April 4, 2020CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED
Through the descriptions and dialogues of these new affective environments grounded in sound, some users might feel a sense of camaraderie, connection, and affinity to these novel experiences and how it relates or compares to one’s own (or the sense of not being so alone), especially in the personalized, diaristic, idiosyncratic tone in the short text extracts and longer interview forms. According to Tizian Zumthurm and Stefan Krebs (2022), digital spaces enable this type of “self-affirmation: by contributing and following the contributions of others, users are assured that they are not alone in whatever they experienced” (492). They also point out that as a result crowdsourced archives, particularly related to traumatic events, have a curative function.
Although the PSA may not be what likely comes to mind when thinking about a digital sound archive, presumably composed exclusively of musical or field recordings, it provides an entry point into a confluence of concerns to grapple with some of the key questions and issues related to sound, intimacy, and affect during the pandemic. In particular, diversity in form – between short excerpts and lengthier conversations, creates different engagement options for users based on preference and capacity (quick snapshots of the sonic changes in daily life or deeper explorations concerning sonic worlds), and across sensory inputs. Moreover, interviews add an oral history aspect to the project, which some scholars argue is more empowering and intimate than other modes of telling or sharing history. As a historically feminist practice, oral history has the potential to expose ignored topics and present diversified perspectives on traumatic pasts (like the 1918 pandemic) which is also especially important considering the research areas and professional backgrounds among the interview experts.
#StayHomeSounds is part of a larger project led by UK-based sound artist Stuart Fowkes, who created Cities and Memories in 2014, which Milena Droumeva describes as a “one-of-a-kind sonic portal dedicated to the exploration of place, sound and memory” (147). The website boasts being the largest sound project in the world with over 5000 sound recordings from over 1000 different contributors across 100 territories worldwide. It encompasses field recordings, sound art, and sound mapping, and each location features two sounds: the original field recording of that place and a reimagined sound that presents that place and time as somewhere, something else. The listener can explore sites through their actual sounds or the reimagined versions, flipping between the two different sound worlds. #StayHomeSounds is one of the latest ongoing sub-projects on the site and it is a collection of recordings during the pandemic from all over the world mostly done using cell phone recordings.
Bari lockdown sound recorded by Roberto Lippolis.
Although there is a wide range of quality and content, #StayHomeSounds offers a glimpse into the everyday sonic realities of quarantine life that cut across geography, life, and circumstances. The immensely mundane soundscapes and sheer multitude of recordings across cities and regions allows us to listen comparatively and try to notice the striking sonic cultures of different places even in lockdown. Those submitting sounds are required to provide a reflective text, and an elective representative image, to accompany their recording which details the changes in the soundscape as well as any a/effects that change has produced on other aspects of life.
An entry from Vancouver reads “Their chorus runs day and night and is a most pleasant soundtrack to both fall asleep with and wake up to. In this clip the background birds have joined in to add their avian melody to the amphibian bass line.”
Another from the Greek island of Crete, “after a heavy rain last night, the chirping of the birds woke me up this morning. It was such a powerful sound, like waking up from a sweet dream or a bad nightmare. I think that due to quarantine measures the nature’s sounds are more clear than even before.”
Athens, Greece lockdown sound recorded by Stamatis Mitrou.
In New Orleans, “I’m thankful for my quiet spot out here on the edges of town, but I worry about how the city can recover and for all those sick, out of work, or unable to stay home.”
New Orleans lockdown sounds recorded by Elizabeth Joan Kelly.
The objectives of the project, as described by Fowkes in the online text, are largely affective or affectively oriented, that is, to establish a sense of connection in the present, “how it feels at this unique moment,” by being able to discover new relations to place, to others, and to our sentient selves, through these sonic recordings and texts. In an interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, Fowkes said, “(You can) see what other people are hearing around the world and also read their stories and see that actually people are feeling similarly… hopefully that helps to make us feel a little bit more connected.” The breadth of contributions in terms of different locations and number of entries helps build this sense of connection, increasing the possibility of similar experiences to be seen and heard.
Lockdown sound from Lagos, Nigeria recorded by Ibukun Sunday.
By attending to personal struggles, observations, and speculations in relation to sound, these two digital sound archival projects gesture towards the intersections of intimacy, memory, and world-building, and alleviate and mediate some of the dominant and pervading affects that marked lockdown and remote life. In undertaking this project, I found pleasure in the informality of the responses and both the fresh insights and shared resonances, creating an experience that was jointly intimate (feeling seen and validated) and expansive (an opening to alternative experiences). In cultivating openness and a space for difference, and making the reflections and recordings publicly available, so that we can listen together but apart, the projects cultivate new forms of intimacy, empathy, collectivity, and nostalgia.
Dhaka, Bangladesh lockdown sound recorded by youKnowWho.
But, of course, the potential affective experience with the entries and recordings is not a given, much like with any critical scholarly intervention or artwork that attempts to raise awareness (in this case, to both the grave and minute effects of the pandemic) and resist dominant narratives (that the pandemic is under-control, over, or effects only one’s respiratory system), there is no guarantee that the intended experience will transpire in every engagement, but the possibility to do so – to cultivate intimacy and world-building at a time of profound uncertainty and physical distance – is nonetheless still valuable. Much like the diversity in responses, undoubtedly there are varying degrees and types of resonances, perceptions, and impacts within each visit.
Using an open access, crowdsourced approach, the PSA and #soundsathome construct participatory, community archives, creating and remediating documents and recordings for collective access and engagement on behalf of a global community that underwent monumental change, disruption, and loss. Calling explicit attention to palpable sensory shifts and disruptions is a central way to track, record, and make sense of the immense changes in this historical moment, and to illuminate the inequalities in environments and experiences that have been exacerbated by the (lack of) responses by governments and policy. The very existence of these projects and their participation through listening marks a resistance to the discourses of a “return to normalcy” or that we are on the other end of the pandemic. Because affects live in the body and are not often considered as objects of knowledge, the ongoing presence, use, and discussion of these two projects amplifies the a/effects, and a resistance to the affective logic of the pandemic, that they seek to produce. By considering COVID as an unprecedented, deeply affective, traumatic event, these online spaces operate to archive this moment in time and its myriad sonic dimensions, bringing these affective worlds into dialogue through an intimate exchange and assemblage between different bodies, experiences, and locations.
—
Emily Collins is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, educator, and PhD Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at York University in Tkaronto (Toronto) whose work draws on sound studies, feminist theory, critical disability studies, and cultural theory to examine sonic social relations and materiality through entanglements of resistance and care within contemporary artworks and creative practices. As a cultural worker and active member in the arts community, Emily has worked at diverse film, visual arts, and digital media organizations, institutions, and research networks within Canada and abroad, including Archive/Counter-Archive, PUBLIC Journal, VUCAVU, Festival Scope (Paris), the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Walter Phillips Gallery at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.
—
REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
How does a biblical scholar come to write a book on Walt Whitman? For me it was in part because Whitman was in my blood (so to speak); in part because his poetry helped me figure out the nature of biblical poetry’s free-verse rhythms; and in part because I came to believe I had something to contribute to the study of Whitman as a biblical scholar. My love for Whitman ultimately is an inheritance from my mom, an English professor who taught Whitman as often as she could. I became reacquainted with Whitman’s poetry as a doctoral student when I picked up a used copy of Leaves of Grass. I was then writing a dissertation on the biblical book of Lamentations, a collection of five poems that lament the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, and beginning to think seriously about the nature of biblical Hebrew poetry. In (re)reading Whitman at that time I was immediately struck by the seeming familiarity of his rhythms, use of parallelism, and fondness for parataxis, all aspects reminiscent of biblical poetic style. I returned to Whitman on and off over the years as I continued to explore the nature of biblical verse in my teaching and writing. Eventually, in a chapter on the nonmetrical nature of biblical poetic rhythm I decided to use a brief assessment of Whitman’s free verse as an entree into my own analysis of the free rhythms of biblical verse. My intent was to decenter the place of meter, rhyme schemes, and regular stanza structure in how biblical scholars tended to conceptualize poetry—biblical poetry has none of these features and nonmetrical verse has had a prominent place in English-language poetry since Whitman’s days. As this introductory section grew to more than 80 pages I knew I had to find another outlet for my ideas about Whitman and the Bible. It was then that the germinal idea for this book was born. A happy yet decisive coincidence was also my putting a three-week pro-seminar at the center of a course on translation technique in 2011 as a way of celebrating the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible (KJB). I had not previously studied the KJB. As it turns out, the story of the making of the KJB is fascinating, especially when its 16th-century predecessors are also folded in, including those first translations of William Tyndale, the stylistic genius behind so much of the KJB’s adored language. And it is a style that would become consequential for so many writers of English, including Walt Whitman.
The general topic of Whitman and the English Bible is one of the older preoccupations of Whitman scholarship. Divine Style focuses specifically on the question of style, Whitman’s poetic style, and is framed explicitly from the perspective of a biblical scholar. I leverage the field-specific knowledge of a biblicist in querying what role the KJB—the version of the English Bible Whitman read and used—played in the evolution of Whitman’s mature poetic style. No Hebrew Bible scholar can read Leaves and fail to hear and feel its familiar rhythms, style, and even, at times, its unique manner of phrasing. My study gives these impressions precise articulation and illustration. The center of attention is the immediate run-up to the 1855 Leaves and the general period of the first three editions of Whitman’s remarkable book. My intent is to press the idea that the KJB’s influence was consequential for many of the leading elements of Whitman’s mature style. In anticipation of the conclusions reached and stated most positively, those aspects most reminiscent of the English Bible—Whitman’s signature long lines, the prevalence of parallelism and the “free” rhythms it helps create, his prosiness and tendency towards parataxis, aspects of diction and phrasing, and the decidedly lyrical bent of the entire project—are all characteristics of the style that begins to emerge in the immediate run-up to the 1855 Leaves and come into full bloom in that volume (and the succeeding two editions ), but which are either entirely absent or not prominent in Whitman’s earlier writings (prose and poetry). And what is more, in almost every instance, as far as I can tell, what Whitman takes from the Bible he reshapes, recasts, extends, molds, modifies—even contorts and warps, such that it becomes his own. That is, this is the kind of collaging that M. Miller notes is “essential” to Whitman’s “writing process,” and thus by its nature such taking—in many instances at least—often requires the sense and sensibility of a Hebraist for its detection and (fuller) appreciation. Whitman’s use of the English Bible cannot of its own fully account for the genius of his mature style but it seems to me to be an impactful force in shaping key aspects of that style. Or put more provocatively, it is hard to imagine Whitman evolving the poetic style that typifies the early Leaves absent the mediating impress of the King James Bible.
In many ways this is a straightforward literary-critical piece of scholarship. How I handle texts, the mode of close reading I employ, my attention to historical context (of Whitman, of the KJB, of the underlying biblical texts), and the kinds of arguments I make will all be familiar to literary critics and comparativists. However, in one respect it is totally a product of the digital turn in the humanities. Twenty years ago it would have been extremely difficult for a non-specialist like myself to undertake a project like this one. The advent of digital repositories like the Walt Whitman Archive and the ever-increasing availability of journals and monographs in digital or online formats has made possible fully interdisciplinary projects like this. What I have accomplished correlates directly with the increase in accessibility enabled by the use of new digital technologies. This digital turn has been doubly beneficial for me. Over the course of the project, as a result of a degenerative eye disease, I have lost my ability to read print and have become fully dependent on digital mediation for access to both primary and secondary sources. In this way, the project is both a manifestation of digital methodologies, and it is a testament to the way that digital technologies make scholarship accessible for people with disabilities. Indeed, the opportunity to publish with Open Book Publishers, a publisher with commitments to Open Access publishing, publishing high quality scholarship, and exploring how digital technologies can expand and enhance the academic monograph, is hugely appealing to me precisely because anyone interested in the topic, including especially people like me with print disabilities, will be able to access my work.
This is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in all available print and ebook formats below.
Usually when we celebrate our year in review, we get a little bit loud. . .okay, well, maybe we get REAL loud! We’re not usually ones to shy away from joyous bombast, especially when celebrating the hard work of our writers and editors, and the deep relationship we have with our readers. We wouldn’t be here without your clicks, your sharing, and your inspiration, and we love the excitement of readers becoming writers. It’s our favorite! But we don’t want our joy and celebration to be drowned out by 2023’s many loudnesses. We’re starting off 2024 with neither a bang nor a wimper, but instead, with the quiet but powerful resonance of ripples in water, which is exactly the energy our top ten posts bring. Please enjoy them, and keep these ideas spreading far and wide, near and far. Thank you. We’ll be dropping more gems in the pond in 2024. –JS
“On the night of September 12, Colombian pop star Shakira made history as the first predominantly Spanish-language artist to be honored as MTV’s Video Vanguard at the Video Music Awards (VMAs). The award recognizes artists who have had a major and innovative impact on music videos and popular music. Shakira played a 10-minute medley of Spanish and English hits from her three-decades long career. Her performance demonstrated her breadth as an artist as she shifted from pop to rock to reggaetón.
Not only did she demonstrate her impressive musical range, but of her 69 singles, Shakira selected those that represent two significant crossover moments for Latin music. She sang hits like “Wherever, Whenever,” “Hips Don’t Lie,” and “She Wolf” from her English-language crossover in the early 2000s as part of the so-called “Latin Boom.” She sang 2001’s “Objection (Tango)” with the same samba/rock music arrangement she used at her very first VMA performance in 2002.”
“[. . .] The past few years may have been a remarkable advancement in voice tech with companies such as Amazon and Sanas AI, a voice recognition platform that allows a user to apply a vocal filter onto any human voice, with a discernible accent, that transforms the speech into Standard American English. Yet their hopes for accent elimination and voice mimicry foreshadow a future of design without justice and software development sans cultural and societal considerations, something I work through in my artwork in progress, The Cyborg’s Prosody (2022-present).
The Cyborg’s Prosody is an interactive web-based artwork (optimized for mobile) that requires participants to read five vignettes that increasingly incorporate Tagalog words and phrases that must be repeated by the player. The work serves as a type of parody, as an “accent induction school” — providing a decolonial method of exploring how language and accents are learned and preserved. The work is a response to the creation of accent reduction schools and coaches in the Philippines. Originally, the work was meant to be a satire and parody of these types of services, but shifted into a docu-poetic work of my mother’s immigration story and learning and becoming fluent in American English.”
Geographically, the Paso del Norte (PdN) region includes the city of El Paso, Texas, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as well as neighboring cities in the state of New Mexico (see map). U.S. citizens live and play in Juárez, and those in Juárez (Juarenses), live and work in El Paso with families extended on both sides; continually moving back and forth. Yet, this broader region has long been plagued with sensationalizing headlines, both in the U.S. and in Mexico, that cast violent and limiting portrayals of these borderland communities. Recognized as sister cities, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez are seen less as close-knit siblings and more like distant cousins with Juárez routinely referred to undesirably as the little sister or ugly sister in comparison to El Paso. Indeed these hierarchical north/south (first world/not-quite-first-world) distinctions are products of histories of colonialism, unequal trade policies, and racial capitalist systems galvanized by immigrant detention camps (a tenant of the Immigration Industrial Complex). Within larger conversations about border cities, both Tijuana (San Diego) and Reynosa (McAllen) are recognized as the “primary” border cities due to their larger population size, transnational capital, and industrious reputations.
Two decades ago, Josh Kun’s concept of the “aural border” invited scholars to consider the US/Mexico border as a “field of sound, a terrain of musicality and music-making, of melodic convergence and dissonant clashing” (2000). Kun’s writings over the years have roused generations of sound scholars to listen to borders, border crossings, border communities and how they reverberate their economic, social, and migrant conditions. This essay intentionally moves away from Kun’s (beloved) border city of Tijuana and towards a less-referenced US/Mexico border city: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Here, 1,201 kilometers east of Tijuana, we offer an opportunity to listen to Juárez’s everyday bustling of migratory life through the digital sound repository, the Border Soundscapes Project.
“[. . .] I have a particular interest in extended and experimental vocality, especially gained through my time singing with Musarc Choir and working with artist Fani Parali. In these instances, I have experienced the pleasurable challenge of being asked to vocalise the mythical, animal, imagined, alien and otherworldly edges of the sonic sphere, to explore complex relations between bodies, ecologies, space and time, illuminated through vocal expression.
Following from [Nina] Eidsheim, and through my own vocal practice, I believe AI’s prerequisite of voices as “fixed, extractable, and measurable ‘sound object[s]’ located within the body” is over-simplistic and reductive. Voices, within systems of AI, are made to seem only as computable delineations of person, personality and identity, constrained to standardised stereotypes. By highlighting vocal potential, I offer a unique critique of the way voices are currently comprehended in AI recognition systems. When we appreciate the voice beyond the homogenous, we give it authority and autonomy, ultimately leading to a fuller understanding of the voice and its sounding capabilities.”
“Sound has a peculiar relationship to mindfulness; zoning in and out, active and passive forms of listening while we situate our listening practices alongside other daily activities. Especially when it comes to driving, listening to something or someone or just singing aloud by myself, I have realized, helps me drown out other noises of alertness. Over the years I have come to value background music or chatter and especially radio programming that takes the burden of curation and scheduling off my back, in all sorts of tasks that require deep concentration. Enough and more has been said about the visual-bias in various forms of ethnographic inquiry (see Andrew C. Sparkes’s “Ethnography and the senses” for a good example). Without belaboring these arguments, I also find that knowing through listening and listening as a mode of non-haptic yet immersive and intimate engagement can also prove to be a fruitful method of inquiry, especially in our post-pandemic worlds, where it feels a lot harder to establish intimacy. The United Nations noted that radio, in particular, “provided solace” during that period of physical distancing and social isolation.
For me, radio sparked my accidental realization and foregrounding of sonic methods as an itinerant means of getting to know new things, people and surroundings in life and research when I moved from New York to the San Francisco Bay Area in mid-2022 to start a new position as a postdoctoral researcher. Knowing that I would continue living in California for the near future, after eight long years of having deferred driving in America, I decided to learn driving and buy a car.”
“[. . .] My mother grew up listening to her father sing boleros, and she would later sing with the Florida Grand Opera Chorus when I was a child. My early knowledge of opera came from her. Growing up in Miami Beach, I would also listen to reggaetón and hip-hop in afterschool programs. The Parks & Recreation department would host dances for us, and that was where I first learned to dance perreo. My early musical surroundings represent what it means to be a colonial subject, to hear the Italianate vocal legacies of opera mixed with the Afro-Diasporic and Indigenous rhythms of reggaetón. This post contextualizes my experience within bolero’s colonial history and legacy particularly its operatic disciplining of brown and Black bodies and voices. Reggaetóneras provide models for sonic subversion by being ronca, raspy, or breathy, and thus overriding internalized Eurocentric dichotomies of feminine and masculine vocal timbres.
When I began my own operatic training in college, I was constantly told to “purify” my voice, to resist vocal “fry,” and to handle my acid reflux by avoiding spicy foods. I was steered away from singing the pop songs I had grown up with, and kept many musical activities secret, like when I soloed for the tango ensemble and my a cappella group. In graduate school, thanks to my Latina roommates, I began listening to reggaetón again. I reunited with the voices that raised me and was reassured that their teachings of resistance would always present themselves when I needed them”
“[. . .]The app currently known as TikTok began as Musical.ly, which was shuttered in 2017 and then rebranded in 2018. By March of 2021, the app boasted one billion worldwide monthly users, indicative of a growth rate of about 180%. This explosion was in many ways catalyzed by successive lockdowns during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the relaxation and subsequent abandonment of COVID mitigation measures, the app has retained a large volume of its users, remaining one of the highest grossing apps in the iOS environment. TikTok’s viral success (both as noun and adjective) has worked to create a kind of vibe economy in which artists are now subject to producing a particular type of sound in order to be rendered legible to the pop charts. [. . .] The app, which is the perfect–if chaotic–fusion of both radio and video is enmeshed in a wider media ecosystem where social networking and platform capitalism converge, and as a result, it seems that TikTok is changing the music industry. . .”
The cold winds staked their claim over Toronto, where my parents had recently arrived from the Philippines. They were underdressed and making their way down Parliament Street. Despite being warned of a shift in temperature, they were not expecting the brutal intensities of Canadian winter. I’m not sure how anyone anticipates the sharp sting of negative temperatures when they are arrivants used to tropical climates. Undeterred, my mother and father headed to a small Filipino grocer, hoping to encounter a semblance of domestic familiarity. Pressed against the biting winds, my mother abruptly stopped, looked at my father and said, “Tumutolo ang sipon” – you have a runny nose. To which my father replied, “Ikaw din” – you do too! They both started laughing and laughed again when they retold me this story 48 years later. When faced with the challenges of migrating to a new and very cold country, they managed to mine humour from a deep well of difficult circumstances. We had been listening to the song “In My Life” by the Beatles (Lennon & McCartney 1965). Something in its expression, melody, and feeling caused my parents to be transported to this small but important moment.
“In October 2019, Google released an ad for their Google Assistant (GA), an intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) that initially debuted in 2016. As revealed by onscreen text and the video’s caption, the ad’s announced that the GA would soon have a new celebrity voice. The ten-second promotion includes a soundbite from this unseen celebrity—who states: “You can still call me your Google Assistant. Now I just sound extra fly”— followed by audio of the speaker’s laughter, a white screen, the GA logo, and a written question: “Can you guess who it is?”
Consumers quickly speculated about the person behind the voice, with many posting their guesses on Reddit. The earliest comments named Tiffany Haddish, Lizzo, and Issa Rae as prospects, with other users affirming these guesses. These women were considered the most popular contenders: two articles written about the new GA voice cited the Reddit post, with one calling these women Redditors’ most popular guesses and the other naming only them as users’ desired choices. Those who guessed Rae were proven correct. One day after the ad, Google released a longer promo revealing her as the GA’s new voice, including footage of Rae recording responses for the assistant. The ad ends with Rae repeating the “extra fly” line from the initial promo, smiling into the camera.
Google’s addition of Rae as an IVA voice option is one of several recent examples of Black people’s voices employed in this manner. Importantly, this trend toward Black-voiced IVAs deviates from the pre-established standard of these digital aides. While there are many voice options available, the default voices for IVAs are white female voices with flat dialects. This shift toward Black American voices is notable not only because of conversations about inclusion—with some Black users saying they feel more represented by these new voices—but because this influx of Black voices marks a spiritual return to the historical employment of Black people as service-providing, labor-performing entities in the United States, thus subliminally reinforcing historical biases about Black people as uniquely suited for performing this type of work.”
“In the 1992 Hollywood film Sneakers, depicting a group of hackers led by Robert Redford performing a heist, one of the central security architectures the group needs to get around is a voice verification system. A computer screen asks for verification by voice and Robert Redford uses a “faked” tape recording that says “Hi, my name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify me.” The hack is successful and Redford can pass through the securely locked door to continue the heist. Looking back at the scene today it is a striking early representation of the phenomenon we now call a “deep fake” but also, to get directly at the topic of this post, the utter ubiquity of voice ID for security purposes in this 30-year-old imagined future.
Usually when we celebrate our year in review, we get a little bit loud. . .okay, well, maybe we get REAL loud! We’re not usually ones to shy away from joyous bombast, especially when celebrating the hard work of our writers and editors, and the deep relationship we have with our readers. We wouldn’t be here without your clicks, your sharing, and your inspiration, and we love the excitement of readers becoming writers. It’s our favorite! But we don’t want our joy and celebration to be drowned out by 2023’s many loudnesses. We’re starting off 2024 with neither a bang nor a wimper, but instead, with the quiet but powerful resonance of ripples in water, which is exactly the energy our top ten posts bring. Please enjoy them, and keep these ideas spreading far and wide, near and far. Thank you. We’ll be dropping more gems in the pond in 2024. –JS
“On the night of September 12, Colombian pop star Shakira made history as the first predominantly Spanish-language artist to be honored as MTV’s Video Vanguard at the Video Music Awards (VMAs). The award recognizes artists who have had a major and innovative impact on music videos and popular music. Shakira played a 10-minute medley of Spanish and English hits from her three-decades long career. Her performance demonstrated her breadth as an artist as she shifted from pop to rock to reggaetón.
Not only did she demonstrate her impressive musical range, but of her 69 singles, Shakira selected those that represent two significant crossover moments for Latin music. She sang hits like “Wherever, Whenever,” “Hips Don’t Lie,” and “She Wolf” from her English-language crossover in the early 2000s as part of the so-called “Latin Boom.” She sang 2001’s “Objection (Tango)” with the same samba/rock music arrangement she used at her very first VMA performance in 2002.”
“[. . .] The past few years may have been a remarkable advancement in voice tech with companies such as Amazon and Sanas AI, a voice recognition platform that allows a user to apply a vocal filter onto any human voice, with a discernible accent, that transforms the speech into Standard American English. Yet their hopes for accent elimination and voice mimicry foreshadow a future of design without justice and software development sans cultural and societal considerations, something I work through in my artwork in progress, The Cyborg’s Prosody (2022-present).
The Cyborg’s Prosody is an interactive web-based artwork (optimized for mobile) that requires participants to read five vignettes that increasingly incorporate Tagalog words and phrases that must be repeated by the player. The work serves as a type of parody, as an “accent induction school” — providing a decolonial method of exploring how language and accents are learned and preserved. The work is a response to the creation of accent reduction schools and coaches in the Philippines. Originally, the work was meant to be a satire and parody of these types of services, but shifted into a docu-poetic work of my mother’s immigration story and learning and becoming fluent in American English.”
Geographically, the Paso del Norte (PdN) region includes the city of El Paso, Texas, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, as well as neighboring cities in the state of New Mexico (see map). U.S. citizens live and play in Juárez, and those in Juárez (Juarenses), live and work in El Paso with families extended on both sides; continually moving back and forth. Yet, this broader region has long been plagued with sensationalizing headlines, both in the U.S. and in Mexico, that cast violent and limiting portrayals of these borderland communities. Recognized as sister cities, El Paso and Ciudad Juárez are seen less as close-knit siblings and more like distant cousins with Juárez routinely referred to undesirably as the little sister or ugly sister in comparison to El Paso. Indeed these hierarchical north/south (first world/not-quite-first-world) distinctions are products of histories of colonialism, unequal trade policies, and racial capitalist systems galvanized by immigrant detention camps (a tenant of the Immigration Industrial Complex). Within larger conversations about border cities, both Tijuana (San Diego) and Reynosa (McAllen) are recognized as the “primary” border cities due to their larger population size, transnational capital, and industrious reputations.
Two decades ago, Josh Kun’s concept of the “aural border” invited scholars to consider the US/Mexico border as a “field of sound, a terrain of musicality and music-making, of melodic convergence and dissonant clashing” (2000). Kun’s writings over the years have roused generations of sound scholars to listen to borders, border crossings, border communities and how they reverberate their economic, social, and migrant conditions. This essay intentionally moves away from Kun’s (beloved) border city of Tijuana and towards a less-referenced US/Mexico border city: Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Here, 1,201 kilometers east of Tijuana, we offer an opportunity to listen to Juárez’s everyday bustling of migratory life through the digital sound repository, the Border Soundscapes Project.
“[. . .] I have a particular interest in extended and experimental vocality, especially gained through my time singing with Musarc Choir and working with artist Fani Parali. In these instances, I have experienced the pleasurable challenge of being asked to vocalise the mythical, animal, imagined, alien and otherworldly edges of the sonic sphere, to explore complex relations between bodies, ecologies, space and time, illuminated through vocal expression.
Following from [Nina] Eidsheim, and through my own vocal practice, I believe AI’s prerequisite of voices as “fixed, extractable, and measurable ‘sound object[s]’ located within the body” is over-simplistic and reductive. Voices, within systems of AI, are made to seem only as computable delineations of person, personality and identity, constrained to standardised stereotypes. By highlighting vocal potential, I offer a unique critique of the way voices are currently comprehended in AI recognition systems. When we appreciate the voice beyond the homogenous, we give it authority and autonomy, ultimately leading to a fuller understanding of the voice and its sounding capabilities.”
“Sound has a peculiar relationship to mindfulness; zoning in and out, active and passive forms of listening while we situate our listening practices alongside other daily activities. Especially when it comes to driving, listening to something or someone or just singing aloud by myself, I have realized, helps me drown out other noises of alertness. Over the years I have come to value background music or chatter and especially radio programming that takes the burden of curation and scheduling off my back, in all sorts of tasks that require deep concentration. Enough and more has been said about the visual-bias in various forms of ethnographic inquiry (see Andrew C. Sparkes’s “Ethnography and the senses” for a good example). Without belaboring these arguments, I also find that knowing through listening and listening as a mode of non-haptic yet immersive and intimate engagement can also prove to be a fruitful method of inquiry, especially in our post-pandemic worlds, where it feels a lot harder to establish intimacy. The United Nations noted that radio, in particular, “provided solace” during that period of physical distancing and social isolation.
For me, radio sparked my accidental realization and foregrounding of sonic methods as an itinerant means of getting to know new things, people and surroundings in life and research when I moved from New York to the San Francisco Bay Area in mid-2022 to start a new position as a postdoctoral researcher. Knowing that I would continue living in California for the near future, after eight long years of having deferred driving in America, I decided to learn driving and buy a car.”
“[. . .] My mother grew up listening to her father sing boleros, and she would later sing with the Florida Grand Opera Chorus when I was a child. My early knowledge of opera came from her. Growing up in Miami Beach, I would also listen to reggaetón and hip-hop in afterschool programs. The Parks & Recreation department would host dances for us, and that was where I first learned to dance perreo. My early musical surroundings represent what it means to be a colonial subject, to hear the Italianate vocal legacies of opera mixed with the Afro-Diasporic and Indigenous rhythms of reggaetón. This post contextualizes my experience within bolero’s colonial history and legacy particularly its operatic disciplining of brown and Black bodies and voices. Reggaetóneras provide models for sonic subversion by being ronca, raspy, or breathy, and thus overriding internalized Eurocentric dichotomies of feminine and masculine vocal timbres.
When I began my own operatic training in college, I was constantly told to “purify” my voice, to resist vocal “fry,” and to handle my acid reflux by avoiding spicy foods. I was steered away from singing the pop songs I had grown up with, and kept many musical activities secret, like when I soloed for the tango ensemble and my a cappella group. In graduate school, thanks to my Latina roommates, I began listening to reggaetón again. I reunited with the voices that raised me and was reassured that their teachings of resistance would always present themselves when I needed them”
“[. . .]The app currently known as TikTok began as Musical.ly, which was shuttered in 2017 and then rebranded in 2018. By March of 2021, the app boasted one billion worldwide monthly users, indicative of a growth rate of about 180%. This explosion was in many ways catalyzed by successive lockdowns during the first waves of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the relaxation and subsequent abandonment of COVID mitigation measures, the app has retained a large volume of its users, remaining one of the highest grossing apps in the iOS environment. TikTok’s viral success (both as noun and adjective) has worked to create a kind of vibe economy in which artists are now subject to producing a particular type of sound in order to be rendered legible to the pop charts. [. . .] The app, which is the perfect–if chaotic–fusion of both radio and video is enmeshed in a wider media ecosystem where social networking and platform capitalism converge, and as a result, it seems that TikTok is changing the music industry. . .”
The cold winds staked their claim over Toronto, where my parents had recently arrived from the Philippines. They were underdressed and making their way down Parliament Street. Despite being warned of a shift in temperature, they were not expecting the brutal intensities of Canadian winter. I’m not sure how anyone anticipates the sharp sting of negative temperatures when they are arrivants used to tropical climates. Undeterred, my mother and father headed to a small Filipino grocer, hoping to encounter a semblance of domestic familiarity. Pressed against the biting winds, my mother abruptly stopped, looked at my father and said, “Tumutolo ang sipon” – you have a runny nose. To which my father replied, “Ikaw din” – you do too! They both started laughing and laughed again when they retold me this story 48 years later. When faced with the challenges of migrating to a new and very cold country, they managed to mine humour from a deep well of difficult circumstances. We had been listening to the song “In My Life” by the Beatles (Lennon & McCartney 1965). Something in its expression, melody, and feeling caused my parents to be transported to this small but important moment.
“In October 2019, Google released an ad for their Google Assistant (GA), an intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) that initially debuted in 2016. As revealed by onscreen text and the video’s caption, the ad’s announced that the GA would soon have a new celebrity voice. The ten-second promotion includes a soundbite from this unseen celebrity—who states: “You can still call me your Google Assistant. Now I just sound extra fly”— followed by audio of the speaker’s laughter, a white screen, the GA logo, and a written question: “Can you guess who it is?”
Consumers quickly speculated about the person behind the voice, with many posting their guesses on Reddit. The earliest comments named Tiffany Haddish, Lizzo, and Issa Rae as prospects, with other users affirming these guesses. These women were considered the most popular contenders: two articles written about the new GA voice cited the Reddit post, with one calling these women Redditors’ most popular guesses and the other naming only them as users’ desired choices. Those who guessed Rae were proven correct. One day after the ad, Google released a longer promo revealing her as the GA’s new voice, including footage of Rae recording responses for the assistant. The ad ends with Rae repeating the “extra fly” line from the initial promo, smiling into the camera.
Google’s addition of Rae as an IVA voice option is one of several recent examples of Black people’s voices employed in this manner. Importantly, this trend toward Black-voiced IVAs deviates from the pre-established standard of these digital aides. While there are many voice options available, the default voices for IVAs are white female voices with flat dialects. This shift toward Black American voices is notable not only because of conversations about inclusion—with some Black users saying they feel more represented by these new voices—but because this influx of Black voices marks a spiritual return to the historical employment of Black people as service-providing, labor-performing entities in the United States, thus subliminally reinforcing historical biases about Black people as uniquely suited for performing this type of work.”
“In the 1992 Hollywood film Sneakers, depicting a group of hackers led by Robert Redford performing a heist, one of the central security architectures the group needs to get around is a voice verification system. A computer screen asks for verification by voice and Robert Redford uses a “faked” tape recording that says “Hi, my name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify me.” The hack is successful and Redford can pass through the securely locked door to continue the heist. Looking back at the scene today it is a striking early representation of the phenomenon we now call a “deep fake” but also, to get directly at the topic of this post, the utter ubiquity of voice ID for security purposes in this 30-year-old imagined future.
As we conclude the year, we take immense pride in reflecting on the multitude of exciting events that unfolded at OBP throughout 2023!
From the introduction of new open access titles to receiving awards and engaging in thrilling projects, this year has proven to be truly remarkable for us. Continue reading to discover more!
Announcements
Celebrating 15 Years of Knowledge, Innovation, and Open Access!
Proud to be in SE's Top 100
Book Prizes
Our Titles are Now in SCOPUS!
Open Book Publishers takes leading role in £5.8 million project to significantly expand open access book infrastructures
Open Book Publishers and the Open Book Collective
Open Access Books Network
Global Geographical Statistics & Annual Readership by Measure Report
Our Most Accessed Titles (2023)
Books, libraries and content
New OA Publications by New & Returning Authors
Our 2023 OA Series: Calls for Proposal
Blogs and Resources
New Library Members
People
Our Volunteers
New Team Members
Support Us!
Celebrating 15 Years of Knowledge, Innovation, and Open Access!
Fifteen years ago, our journey began with a vision for knowledge, innovation, and the fundamental belief in the power of open access. This year, we celebrate this remarkable milestone and express our heartfelt gratitude to each one of you who has been a part of this incredible journey.
Thank you for your unwavering support, enthusiasm, and commitment to advancing scholarship. It's your passion for open access that has driven us to make knowledge more accessible and fostered innovation in ways we couldn't have imagined.
Here's to the next chapter, where our collective efforts will forge a path toward a more knowledgeable and inclusive world.
Proud to be in SE's Top 100!
We are delighted to announce our inclusion in this year's NatWest SE100 Index, which showcases the most exceptional Social Enterprises in the UK! This marks our fifth consecutive year on the list.This recognition celebrates the growth, impact, and resilience of social ventures across the country, acknowledging the top 100 social enterprises of the year. Further details about this achievement can be found here.
Book Prizes
This year, two of our books have been recognised with prizes for the quality of their scholarship:
All our published books are now listed in the SCOPUS abstract and citation database, showcasing enriched data and linked scholarly literature across a wide variety of disciplines.
Furthermore, we assure you that forthcoming titles will be promptly included in the database shortly after their release.
Open Book Publishers takes leading role in £5.8 million project to significantly expand open access book infrastructures
Open Book Publishers (OBP) is playing a key role in the Open Book Futures (OBF) initiative, a £5.8 million project funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development Fund. Led by Lancaster University, OBF aims to enhance community-owned Open Access (OA) book publishing infrastructures. Building on the COPIM project, OBP will expand Thoth metadata management and the Thoth Archiving Network. The initiative, guided by 'Scaling Small' principles, will be led by OBP's co-director Rupert Gatti and involve outreach efforts by Lucy Barnes, and software development by Javier Arias, Ross Higman and Brendan O'Connell. OBF will run from May 2023 to April 2026, fostering inclusivity globally and engaging with diverse partners and linguistic contexts. OBP, along with COPIM partners and new collaborators, will contribute to this transformative endeavor, fostering open access, collaboration, and diversity in scholarly publishing.
OBP co-director Rupert Gatti said,
OBP is hugely excited to continue developing the infrastructure that will support inclusive, non-commercial and community-owned OA book publishing, guided by the principles of collaboration and openness that have animated the COPIM project and that will continue to thrive within Open Book Futures.Having created the basic underlying infrastructures within COPIM, this grant enables us to significantly expand and develop that framework in order to support small and medium-sized open access book publishers globally, preserving the diversity and scholarly independence of book publishing while making its output open for all.’
Almost a year has passed since we officially announced that we had joined the Open Book Collective (OBC). Since then, over 30 current library members have decided to renew their Open Book Publishers Membership via the collective and support a fairer OA book publishing ecosystem. We have also welcomed new library members that have kindly decided to support OBP via the collective. To both current and new members - THANK YOU!
The Open Book Collective has been developed by Copim, an international partnership funded by Research England and Arcadia Fund. COPIM is building non-profit, community-owned infrastructure to support a resilient future for open access book publishing that enables smaller and more community-focused presses to thrive and multiply.
If you are a library member and would like to find out more about the collective or renew through them, contact our Marketing and Library Relations Officer, Laura Rodriguez, at laura@openbookpublishers.com.
We would also like to invite you to read our official announcement where we explain why we’re joining the Collective and what this will mean for libraries (including our current Library Members), our authors and our readers.
Global Geographical Statistics & Annual Readership by Measure Report
Global Geographical Statistics
Our Open Access titles can be accessed through various platforms, providing readers with multiple avenues to explore our content. The compilation of usage statistics for our books poses a challenge, and it is evident that any reported data represents a conservative estimate of the actual usage. Due to the unavailability of data from some platforms, the figures may be at the lower end of the true usage spectrum.
Presented below are our global geographical statistics for the year 2023, showcasing that readers from every country, state, and territory around the world have engaged with our titles. This confirms the widespread global reach of our publications.
In the landscape of our readership, North America, Europe, and Asia emerge as the primary contributors in 2023, solidifying their positions at the top tier. Following closely are Africa, Oceania, and South America, each playing a crucial role in our community. Looking forward, we are committed to increasing our global influence, fostering a deeper connection with readers worldwide in the coming years.
In the global landscape of readership, discernible patterns emerge across countries. The United States of America leads with a substantial readership, followed by the United Kingdom, India, Germany, and Canada. Noteworthy engagement can also be seen in Russia, France, the Philippines, and China. Further contributing to the readership spectrum are the Netherlands, Australia, Italy, Ireland, and Spain as well as Singapore, Finland, Nigeria, Indonesia, and South Africa.
This year's readership shows the diverse and widespread impact of our books on a global scale!
Below you can find the full map of readership by country:
Annual Readership by Measure Report
We are proud to say this year, we have received 896,129 accesses from the various platforms below!
Please be advised that access to our books in HTML format has been tracked until July 2023. Unfortunately, the platform we relied on for recording this information is no longer available. Our dedicated developers at OBP are actively exploring solutions to address this issue promptly.
We are able to record different types of usage across certain platforms, which can tell us, for each platform: how much a book is being used there (according to the platform’s own choice of measurement); in which formats; over time; where in the world it is being accessed from (in some cases); and to what extent it is being accessed from particular domains (which is valuable to our Library Members wishing to see how much their students and staff are taking advantage of the Membership).
However, please remember that this is by no means a complete picture. Our books can be downloaded from many sites where we don’t receive any usage reports and our geographical data is limited by certain platforms or individuals choosing to block the collection of such information (we specify on our maps the percentage of the book’s total statistics for which we have geographical data). Once a book has been downloaded, we don’t track how that file is used and shared (in this respect, download figures are similar to sales figures for hard copies and ebook editions). To find out more about the data we have been collecting and how the process of retrieving this information works, please visit our page on how we collect our readership statistics.
As always, thank you so much for accessing, reading and sharing our titles. It is thanks to the support shown by our readers, our member libraries and our authors that we can keep working towards a fairer publishing landscape!
And we are delighted to announce that we have also published 13 new high-quality Open Access titles written/edited by returning authors and editors who have published one or more books with us in the past:
Thanks to all our authors for deciding to publish with us - it's our privilege to work with you!
Our 2023 OA Series: Call for Proposals
As you may know, wehave various Open Access series all of which are open for proposals, so feel free to get in touch if you or someone you know is interested in submitting a proposal!
Global Communications Global Communications is a new book series that looks beyond national borders to examine current transformations in public communication, journalism and media. Special focus is given on regions other than Western Europe and North America, which have received the bulk of scholarly attention until now.
St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture St Andrews Studies in French History and Culture, a successful series published by the Centre for French History and Culture at the University of St Andrews since 2010 and now in collaboration with Open Book Publishers, aims to enhance scholarly understanding of the historical culture of the French-speaking world. This series covers the full span of historical themes relating to France: from political history, through military/naval, diplomatic, religious, social, financial, cultural and intellectual history, art and architectural history, to literary culture.
Studies on Mathematics Education and Society This book series publishes high-quality monographs, edited volumes, handbooks and formally innovative books which explore the relationships between mathematics education and society. The series advances scholarship in mathematics education by bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives to the study of contemporary predicaments of the cultural, social, political, economic and ethical contexts of mathematics education in a range of different contexts around the globe.
The Global Qur'an The Global Qur’an is a new book series that looks at Muslim engagement with the Qur’an in a global perspective. Scholars interested in publishing work in this series and submitting their monographs and/or edited collections should contact the General Editor, Johanna Pink. If you wish to submit a contribution, please read and download the submission guidelines here.
The Medieval Text Consortium Series The Series is created by an association of leading scholars aimed at making works of medieval philosophy available to a wider audience. The Series' goal is to publish peer-reviewed texts across all of Western thought between antiquity and modernity, both in their original languages and in English translation. Find out more here.
Applied Theatre Praxis This series publishes works of practitioner-researchers who use their rehearsal rooms as "labs”; spaces in which theories are generated and experimented with before being implemented in vulnerable contexts. Find out more here.
Digital Humanities Overseen by an international board of experts, our Digital Humanities Series: Knowledge, Thought and Practice is dedicated to the exploration of these changes by scholars across disciplines. Books in this Series present cutting-edge research that investigate the links between the digital and other disciplines paving the ways for further investigations and applications that take advantage of new digital media to present knowledge in new ways. Proposals in any area of the Digital Humanities are invited. We welcome proposals for new books in this series. Please do not hesitate to contact us (a.tosi@openbookpublishers.com) if you would like to discuss a publishing proposal and ways we might work together to best realise it.
[video series] The audiovisual resources supplementing specific chapters and providing brief and accessible introductions to the key components of the filmmaking process created for our Open Access title Documentary Making for Digital Humanists are now available here.
[video series] Dive into the world of literary exploration with our curated playlist featuring the authors of 'Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages.' Join the minds behind this book as they delve into the intricacies of their essays, offering a thought-provoking journey through the prism of languages and cultures that shape Charlotte Brontë's timeless classic.
[article] PISA: Mission Failure: With so much evidence from student testing, why do education systems continue to struggle? Read this article by author Montse Gomendio
Since January 2023, 34 new libraries have become members, thus supporting our OA mission of providing academic research free of charge to everyone, everywhere in the world.
You can find the full list of current members here and the list of benefits here. Membership for libraries in Economically Developing Countries is free of charge. If you are a librarian at a university or library in such a country, and would be interested in receiving more information on how to become a member, please contact us at libraries@openbookpublishers.com
We are very grateful for the support our member libraries give us, and we are keen to find out what more we could be doing in return so please, do not hesitate to contact us at libraries@openbookpublishers.com if you would like to share your suggestions or comments on how we can improve.
Thanks to all the institutions that have decided to join us this year as well as those that have renewed their membership from previous years - the support we receive from libraries is vital to help us continue our work!
Our Volunteers
We offer training placements in all aspects of Open Access publishing, free of charge. In the past we have provided placements as part of university courses (such as the MSt in Creative Writing at the University of Oxford, the Master in Publishing at City University of London), work placements (School of Arts, Birbeck, University of London) and to other Open Access publishers, such as UGA Editions and Firenze University Press. Placements usually cover editorial skills, marketing, or technical aspects such as the creation of XML editions. For more information or to discuss a possible placement, please contact Alessandra Tosi.
However, we also welcome volunteers of different levels of skill and experience who want to work with us. This 2023 we have had the pleasure of working along some great volunteers and we would like to take this opportunity to thank them for all their help and hard work - we strongly appreciated their support and assistance!
Thea Phillips Peio Pinuaga Arriaga Emma Carter Annie Hine Sara Harris Sacha Tanna Caitlin Broadie Michaela Buna Cecilia Thon Almudena Jimenez Virosta Evie Rowan Elisabeth Pitts Maria Teresa Renzi-Sepe Alex Carabine Maria Eydmans Jeremy Bowman James Hobson Evie Rowan Debbie Lee Anja Pritchard Shauna Hagan Katie Stevens
If you or someone you know would like to have the opportunity to try a range of key publishing aspects, including marketing, editorial and text-formatting tasks in a non-corporate environment, please contact Alessandra Tosi.
New Team Members
This year we welcomed three new team members:
Book Production, Digital Product Development and Illustration Management Cameron Craig: Cameron Craig has worked as a graphic designer for more than 25 years. He is responsible for typesetting and producing the print and digital editions of our titles.
Editorial Jen Moriarty: Jen Moriarty holds postgraduate degrees in both Publishing and Victorian Studies. Most recently, she completed a PhD in English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London with a thesis on nineteenth-century Protestant eschatological reforms. She is responsible for editorial and production tasks at OBP.
Software Engineering Brendan O'Connell: Brendan O’Connell is a software engineer at OBP working on Thoth. He previously worked in academic libraries in roles at the intersection of teaching and technology. He holds a Master of Science in Library Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
We are delighted to have Cameron, Jen and Brendan onboard - welcome!
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La réflexion déployée dans cet ouvrage offre une perspective contemporaine sur les pratiques narratives et biographiques, dans le champ des sciences de l’éducation, de la formation, de l’orientation, l’éducation à la santé et, plus largement, dans les domaines relevant des sciences humaines et sociales. Les douze chapitres qui le constituent – qui couvrent six pays, trois continents – interrogent l’actualité de ce qui a été désigné comme « le tournant narratif » durant les années 1990. Cela est réalisé à partir de différentes approches adaptées à divers contextes : recherche qualitative, recherche narrative, histoire de vie en formation, autobiographie raisonnée, groupes de discussion, intervention en milieux sensibles… La démarche conduite, croisant les perspectives interdisciplinaire et internationale, rend compte de la vitalité d’un paradigme, celui des pratiques narratives en formation et recherche. Des perspectives de recherche s’en trouvent caractérisées, entre recherches via les récits et recherches sur les récits, entre narration de soi et formation de soi.
Avec les contributions de Ayoub Ait Dra, Hervé Breton, Marie-Claude Bernard, Livia Cadei, Varvara Ciobanu-Gout, Maria Amália de Almeida Cunha, Denise Gisele de Britto Damasco, Priscila de Oliveira Coutinho, Laurizete Ferragut Passos, Matthias Finger, José González-Monteagudo, Davide Lago, Maria Helena Menna Barreto Abrahão, Claire Moreau, Grace Perside Poeri, Isabelle Vachon.
Photo of Francisco and Emma Mecija in their apartment near Parliament Street. December 1975. Courtesy of Francisco and Emma Mecija.
December 1975.
The cold winds staked their claim over Toronto, where my parents had recently arrived from the Philippines. They were underdressed and making their way down Parliament Street. Despite being warned of a shift in temperature, they were not expecting the brutal intensities of Canadian winter. I’m not sure how anyone anticipates the sharp sting of negative temperatures when they are arrivants used to tropical climates. Undeterred, my mother and father headed to a small Filipino grocer, hoping to encounter a semblance of domestic familiarity. Pressed against the biting winds, my mother abruptly stopped, looked at my father and said, “Tumutolo ang sipon” – you have a runny nose. To which my father replied, “Ikaw din” – you do too! They both started laughing and laughed again when they retold me this story 48 years later. When faced with the challenges of migrating to a new and very cold country, they managed to mine humour from a deep well of difficult circumstances. We had been listening to the song “In My Life” by the Beatles (Lennon & McCartney 1965). Something in its expression, melody, and feeling caused my parents to be transported to this small but important moment.
In her conversation with Christine Bacareza Balance, “‘Revolutions in Sound’: Keynote Duet” (2022) Alexandra T. Vazquez writes: “The popular…leaves so much room for engagement with sound artists (musicians without the gallery). None of them need theorists to argue for them, to argue for their mattering because to so many, they already do. How do they instead invite theorists to take part in something alongside them?” (12). I was never a big fan of the Beatles, but regardless of my opinions, they were popular. As a relentlessly oppositional teenager, I was put off by their mass popularity. As Vazquez suggests, despite one’s musical taste, songs are invitations, not scholarly conquests. The memory re-opened by my parents’ connection to “In My Life” was an invitation for me to take stock of the song’s affective and, for them, diasporic trajectories. As Balance (2022) suggests songs request us to “listen long so we hear where another is coming from” (15). For her, “long” describes temporality and commitment. To “listen long” implies that duration and attention are the pretext for empathic relations.
“In My Life” was released in 1965. My mother was fifteen years old when she first heard the song on the radio in a boarding house in Marbel, Philippines. One year later, on July 16, 1966 the Philippine Free Press would announce, “The Beatles Are Coming” (de Manila as cited by Robert Nery in “The Hero Takes a Walk” 2018). At that time, Ferdinand Marcos was the newly elected president of the Philippines, and Imelda Marcos was his First Lady. The Marcoses would later unleash an era of violent dictatorial power and impose Martial Law in 1972, escalating political suppression (Burns 2013). My mother recalls that the band’s first and only appearance in the Philippines was remembered by many less for their two scheduled concerts and more for their “snub” of Imelda. The Beatles were noticeably absent at a lunch reception they were expected to attend with the First Lady at the Presidential Palace. Their absence, attributed to a communication error between the concert promoter and the band’s manager, incited public disapproval and resulted in the sudden disappearance of their security escort and hotel and porter service. Unlike in other cities, the band was refused room service and was forced to carry their own luggage (Nery 2018).
What is striking about this moment is that it breaks from preoccupations with Filipinx desires for assimilation and mimicry of Western imperial projects. In Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East, British travel writer Pico Iyer (1988) famously stated that Filipinx people are the “[m]aster of every American gesture, conversant with every western song…the Filipino plays minstrel to the entire continent (153)” Turning against imperial scripts and the band’s documented disdain of “Mosquito City” and even worse, John Lennon’s comment that a return to the Philippines would require “an H-bomb,” the soured residues of their visit marks a queer rupture in Beatlemania. The public decried that Filipinx people deserved better from the band, capturing what Balance describes in Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America (2016),as “disobedience” in that “disavows a belief in the promises of assimilation” (5). For me, Filipinx non-compliance textures the sonic substance of “In My Life.” While the shadow of the Marcoses cronyism and corruption is an inescapable footnote, it is the defiant voices of hotel employees, dismayed fans, and airport workers that insisted on the “ordinariness” (Wofner & Smeaton, 2003) of the Beatles that holds the song’s queer decibels.
Photo of Hannah Dyer and Casey Mecija at their baby shower. December 2017. Image by Sarah Creskey.
There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed. Some forever, not for better. Some have gone, and some remain.
“In My Life” (Lennon & McCartney 1965).
January 2018.
I am sitting on my couch watching a Toronto Raptors game. The television emits light that flickers through a large window that frames a bright winter moon. I am 41 weeks pregnant at this point (feeling similarly shaped and sized as the moon outside). My stubborn queer resistance to the Beatles somehow dissipated during my pregnancy, and the song “In My Life” made its way to me. I would quietly sing the song to my pregnant belly. Then, that January night, I felt a snap inside my body and a rush of water down my legs. I won’t go into much gratuitous detail other than to say that at 12:49 pm the next day, Asa Cy Dyer-Mecija was born at home.
And these memories lose their meaning when I think of love as something new.
“In My Life” (Lennon & McCartney 1965)
Sometimes, I needed to couch the queerness of pregnancy in words that were not mine. The distance between these words and the ones I had yet to find would help to structure my unfolding love for Asa. Here, queerness presented a modality of encounter with uncensored desires. Queerness is often theorized as a utopian impulse; the queerness of my pregnancy jostled both the hopes and fears brought up by the unknown terrain of parenting amidst heteronormativity. For me, “In My Life” is riven by sentimentality and nostalgia, but it also gave melody to a tender relationship with myself and my new role in the world. This was the sonic throughline to my parents, a queer inheritance of tension made from the hopes for kinder contexts amidst the limitations of harsh realities.
Photo of Asa Cy Dyer-Mecija and Casey Mecija at home. January 2018. Image by Casey Mecija.
December 2022.
I was invited to perform as part of the Queer Songbook Orchestra’s holiday fundraiser. The Queer Songbook Orchestra is a chamber pop ensemble that hosts an annual concert focused on songs and stories about “chosen family and queer joy” (Queer Songbook n.d.). At that time, Asa was four years old. He is a child of the pandemic. He’s a kid with two moms, a present and kind donor, and is dearly loved by his Lolo and Lola, his grandparents, aunts, titas, uncles, cousins, kuya, ate, and his beautiful chosen family. My partner, Hannah, and I sometimes worry about how his world will be affected by reactions to the makeup of our family, but mostly, we know he’ll be sure he’s loved by many.
To me, the song “In My Life” offers a useful sonic response to homophobia. As a baby, after Asa’s baths, I would often wrap him in a towel, and while rocking him back and forth, I would sing these lyrics from the song: “Though I know I’ll never lose affection for people and things that went before, I know I’ll often stop and think about them. In my life, I love you more” (Lennon & McCartney 1965). To me, this statement is a queer ethos. We know that 2SLGBTQ+ people have necessarily and creatively reworked and reimagined the organization and expression of kinship. When family is so often bounded by what Julianne Pidduck calls “constraints of relationality” in “Queer Kinship and Ambivalence”(2008: 441), the lyrics “In my life, I love you more” are a call to action. More is a word used comparatively to insist that there is something greater, something more exists, something more is possible. I embrace the challenge to love more. My queerness urges me to love more, and parenting Asa does, too. On the evening of the performance, indexed by my parents’ struggles and our shared disdain for the chill of winter, Asa and I performed “In My Life” together. The video of our performance will remain a treasured sonic archive that I will return to often, and as Asa gets older, I hope it reminds him of how beautiful he’s always been.
Video credit: Directed by Colin Medley
—
Casey Mecija is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies at York University. Her current research examines sound as a mode of affective, psychic, and social representation, specifically in relation to diasporic experience. Drawing on sound studies, queer diaspora studies and Filipinx Studies, her research considers how sensorial encounters are enmeshed and disciplined by social and psychic conditions. In this work, she theorizes sounds made in and beyond Filipinx diaspora to make an argument about a “queer sound” that permeates diasporic sensibilities. She is also a musician and filmmaker whose work has received several accolades and has been presented internationally.
Photo of Francisco and Emma Mecija in their apartment near Parliament Street. December 1975. Courtesy of Francisco and Emma Mecija.
December 1975.
The cold winds staked their claim over Toronto, where my parents had recently arrived from the Philippines. They were underdressed and making their way down Parliament Street. Despite being warned of a shift in temperature, they were not expecting the brutal intensities of Canadian winter. I’m not sure how anyone anticipates the sharp sting of negative temperatures when they are arrivants used to tropical climates. Undeterred, my mother and father headed to a small Filipino grocer, hoping to encounter a semblance of domestic familiarity. Pressed against the biting winds, my mother abruptly stopped, looked at my father and said, “Tumutolo ang sipon” – you have a runny nose. To which my father replied, “Ikaw din” – you do too! They both started laughing and laughed again when they retold me this story 48 years later. When faced with the challenges of migrating to a new and very cold country, they managed to mine humour from a deep well of difficult circumstances. We had been listening to the song “In My Life” by the Beatles (Lennon & McCartney 1965). Something in its expression, melody, and feeling caused my parents to be transported to this small but important moment.
In her conversation with Christine Bacareza Balance, “‘Revolutions in Sound’: Keynote Duet” (2022) Alexandra T. Vazquez writes: “The popular…leaves so much room for engagement with sound artists (musicians without the gallery). None of them need theorists to argue for them, to argue for their mattering because to so many, they already do. How do they instead invite theorists to take part in something alongside them?” (12). I was never a big fan of the Beatles, but regardless of my opinions, they were popular. As a relentlessly oppositional teenager, I was put off by their mass popularity. As Vazquez suggests, despite one’s musical taste, songs are invitations, not scholarly conquests. The memory re-opened by my parents’ connection to “In My Life” was an invitation for me to take stock of the song’s affective and, for them, diasporic trajectories. As Balance (2022) suggests songs request us to “listen long so we hear where another is coming from” (15). For her, “long” describes temporality and commitment. To “listen long” implies that duration and attention are the pretext for empathic relations.
“In My Life” was released in 1965. My mother was fifteen years old when she first heard the song on the radio in a boarding house in Marbel, Philippines. One year later, on July 16, 1966 the Philippine Free Press would announce, “The Beatles Are Coming” (de Manila as cited by Robert Nery in “The Hero Takes a Walk” 2018). At that time, Ferdinand Marcos was the newly elected president of the Philippines, and Imelda Marcos was his First Lady. The Marcoses would later unleash an era of violent dictatorial power and impose Martial Law in 1972, escalating political suppression (Burns 2013). My mother recalls that the band’s first and only appearance in the Philippines was remembered by many less for their two scheduled concerts and more for their “snub” of Imelda. The Beatles were noticeably absent at a lunch reception they were expected to attend with the First Lady at the Presidential Palace. Their absence, attributed to a communication error between the concert promoter and the band’s manager, incited public disapproval and resulted in the sudden disappearance of their security escort and hotel and porter service. Unlike in other cities, the band was refused room service and was forced to carry their own luggage (Nery 2018).
What is striking about this moment is that it breaks from preoccupations with Filipinx desires for assimilation and mimicry of Western imperial projects. In Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East, British travel writer Pico Iyer (1988) famously stated that Filipinx people are the “[m]aster of every American gesture, conversant with every western song…the Filipino plays minstrel to the entire continent (153)” Turning against imperial scripts and the band’s documented disdain of “Mosquito City” and even worse, John Lennon’s comment that a return to the Philippines would require “an H-bomb,” the soured residues of their visit marks a queer rupture in Beatlemania. The public decried that Filipinx people deserved better from the band, capturing what Balance describes in Tropical Renditions: Making Musical Scenes in Filipino America (2016),as “disobedience” in that “disavows a belief in the promises of assimilation” (5). For me, Filipinx non-compliance textures the sonic substance of “In My Life.” While the shadow of the Marcoses cronyism and corruption is an inescapable footnote, it is the defiant voices of hotel employees, dismayed fans, and airport workers that insisted on the “ordinariness” (Wofner & Smeaton, 2003) of the Beatles that holds the song’s queer decibels.
Photo of Hannah Dyer and Casey Mecija at their baby shower. December 2017. Image by Sarah Creskey.
There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed. Some forever, not for better. Some have gone, and some remain.
“In My Life” (Lennon & McCartney 1965).
January 2018.
I am sitting on my couch watching a Toronto Raptors game. The television emits light that flickers through a large window that frames a bright winter moon. I am 41 weeks pregnant at this point (feeling similarly shaped and sized as the moon outside). My stubborn queer resistance to the Beatles somehow dissipated during my pregnancy, and the song “In My Life” made its way to me. I would quietly sing the song to my pregnant belly. Then, that January night, I felt a snap inside my body and a rush of water down my legs. I won’t go into much gratuitous detail other than to say that at 12:49 pm the next day, Asa Cy Dyer-Mecija was born at home.
And these memories lose their meaning when I think of love as something new.
“In My Life” (Lennon & McCartney 1965)
Sometimes, I needed to couch the queerness of pregnancy in words that were not mine. The distance between these words and the ones I had yet to find would help to structure my unfolding love for Asa. Here, queerness presented a modality of encounter with uncensored desires. Queerness is often theorized as a utopian impulse; the queerness of my pregnancy jostled both the hopes and fears brought up by the unknown terrain of parenting amidst heteronormativity. For me, “In My Life” is riven by sentimentality and nostalgia, but it also gave melody to a tender relationship with myself and my new role in the world. This was the sonic throughline to my parents, a queer inheritance of tension made from the hopes for kinder contexts amidst the limitations of harsh realities.
Photo of Asa Cy Dyer-Mecija and Casey Mecija at home. January 2018. Image by Casey Mecija.
December 2022.
I was invited to perform as part of the Queer Songbook Orchestra’s holiday fundraiser. The Queer Songbook Orchestra is a chamber pop ensemble that hosts an annual concert focused on songs and stories about “chosen family and queer joy” (Queer Songbook n.d.). At that time, Asa was four years old. He is a child of the pandemic. He’s a kid with two moms, a present and kind donor, and is dearly loved by his Lolo and Lola, his grandparents, aunts, titas, uncles, cousins, kuya, ate, and his beautiful chosen family. My partner, Hannah, and I sometimes worry about how his world will be affected by reactions to the makeup of our family, but mostly, we know he’ll be sure he’s loved by many.
To me, the song “In My Life” offers a useful sonic response to homophobia. As a baby, after Asa’s baths, I would often wrap him in a towel, and while rocking him back and forth, I would sing these lyrics from the song: “Though I know I’ll never lose affection for people and things that went before, I know I’ll often stop and think about them. In my life, I love you more” (Lennon & McCartney 1965). To me, this statement is a queer ethos. We know that 2SLGBTQ+ people have necessarily and creatively reworked and reimagined the organization and expression of kinship. When family is so often bounded by what Julianne Pidduck calls “constraints of relationality” in “Queer Kinship and Ambivalence”(2008: 441), the lyrics “In my life, I love you more” are a call to action. More is a word used comparatively to insist that there is something greater, something more exists, something more is possible. I embrace the challenge to love more. My queerness urges me to love more, and parenting Asa does, too. On the evening of the performance, indexed by my parents’ struggles and our shared disdain for the chill of winter, Asa and I performed “In My Life” together. The video of our performance will remain a treasured sonic archive that I will return to often, and as Asa gets older, I hope it reminds him of how beautiful he’s always been.
Video credit: Directed by Colin Medley
—
Casey Mecija is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication & Media Studies at York University. Her current research examines sound as a mode of affective, psychic, and social representation, specifically in relation to diasporic experience. Drawing on sound studies, queer diaspora studies and Filipinx Studies, her research considers how sensorial encounters are enmeshed and disciplined by social and psychic conditions. In this work, she theorizes sounds made in and beyond Filipinx diaspora to make an argument about a “queer sound” that permeates diasporic sensibilities. She is also a musician and filmmaker whose work has received several accolades and has been presented internationally.
I am writing a series of blog posts that outline the contents and arguments presented in 'A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice'. In this entry, I briefly summarise the third chapter, dedicated to the morphogenetic paradigm. As the paradigm is the basis of later chapters, an overview is provided, followed by a proposed revision. The revision will provide a conceptual model in which orders of social relationality are morphogenetically anchored in relational reflexivity that steers the direction of relations.
Key terms are italicised in the article - to access definitions of these terms, please refer to the glossary of 'A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice'.
The Morphogenetic Paradigm: Conceptualising the Human in the Social
The articulation and application of social policies are emergent from social relations. Within social relations, individual and corporate agents meet their needs and create relational mechanisms that generate and re-generate responsive institutional structures. The morphogenetic paradigm explains the relational dynamics that define the interdependence between personal identity and social morphogenesis. In 'A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice', I presented an overview of the morphogenetic paradigm. In this overview, I documented its emphasis on the internal conversation, in the form of world-directed deliberations, as Personal Emergent Properties (PEP). The focus on PEPs is to affirm the efficacy and irreducibility of personal deliberations to the objectivity of third-person ideas.
Thus, Archer (2003) distinguishes socio-cultural structures (context) from the deliberations of active agents (concerns). The nature of deliberation extends beyond the concerns of the discursive order to include the natural and practical orders. Accordingly, the subjective interiority that distinguishes the self from its environment leads to an authority to act in the world in an autonomous way that is not reducible to the discursive order. With authority to act in the world comes the explanatory capacity to account for the activity resulting from subjective authority on the forces of socialisation.
Between the mind and world are Personal Emergent Properties (PEP), through which people distance themselves from their biological origins in the process of social becoming. The existence of these properties means self-conscious reflexivity from a first-person perspective – with an irreducible subjective interiority and authority – is logically and ontologically before any social role. Therefore, system outcomes produced by morphogenetic processes are anchored in the reflexive capacities of persons (internal conversation) as they encounter collectives. First, the 'I' initially reflexively deliberates on its natal context ('Me') – the outcome of reflexive deliberation can lead to a dedication to reproduce or work to transform 'Me'. When seeking to change the natal context, the 'I' becomes part of a 'We', i.e., a corporate agent. In turn, the emergent personal identity aligns with a social role following the deliberative process that will affect the socio-cultural context. Hence, in Archer's morphogenetic paradigm, the deliberation of the 'I', which is ontologically and logically before a social role, anchors the process in which personal identity and socio-cultural context are co-emergent.
Revising the morphogenetic paradigm
In 'A Relational Realist Vision for Education Policy and Practice', I propose revising the morphogenetic paradigm. The revision builds on its relational starting point that affirms the irreducibility of personal reflexivity as part of a stratified understanding of an emergent personal identity. The proposed revision understands the reflexivity of the interactional order to be the anchor of personal and socio-cultural morphogenesis. The revision is based on two points:
1. Reflexivity is a meaning-based capacity: As noted, to affirm the efficacy of subjective interiority and authority, Archer understands reflexivity to be irreducible to the discursive domain. However, considering a developmental perspective of the self, subjective authority can be maintained when contextualised within the developmental genesis of reflexivity.
2. When reflexivity is viewed as a meaning-making mechanism, it extends beyond personal reflexivity. As a result, personal reflexivity is considered an element of social morphogenesis rather than its anchor.
Regarding the first point, drawing on Neisser's model, selfhood consists of five developmental stages – the ecological, interpersonal, extended, private and conceptual selves. The conceptual self – representing the capacity to mentally approximate – is emergent from other forms of self-knowledge that refer to these different developmental selves. As a result, affirming a developmental understanding of reflexivity as a semantic capacity leads to a stratified conception of personal identity. As an emergent property, it is grounded in pre-discursive mechanisms (identified in different developmental selves) that enable its efficacy.
Reflexivity can be extended beyond the personal when understood as a meaning-based deliberation. Hence, the activities of corporate agents ('We') can be described as reflexive, as part of multiple nodes within social networks. These deliberations seek to affect the outcome of morphogenetic processes. Personal reflexivity, therefore, is an element in relational morphogenesis. The interaction between the personal and collective gives social networks new properties and powers that result in relational reflexivity anchoring social morphogenesis in a meta-reflexive way. Relational outcomes fall in the order of possibilities, and the interaction between the personal and collective infuses social networks with reflexivity, monitoring the outcomes it produces. In a morphogenetic cycle, the interactive process monitors the initial structural order and how it regulates relations. Relational reflexivity is directed at the characteristics of the relationship that go beyond the personal perspective of the internal conversation.
Consequently, reflexivity is not restricted to how the subject sees and deliberates on relations as it arrives at a specific dedication. It also pertains to reflexive activity directed at the characteristics of the relation. Accordingly, it is a steering mechanism attuned to the direction of a relationship (Donati 2021). Personal reflexivity operates as an element of the relation, as the 'I' dedicates itself to a social role. After dedication, the 'I' is part of the operation of corporate agents as they seek to transform the structural order. Therefore, what anchors transformation (morphogenesis) or reproduction (morphostasis) is the entwining of agents' internal conversations. When this entwining is part of a meta-reflexive activity, it becomes relational reflexivity that exceeds individual personal reflexivity and is directed at the characteristics of the relation:
What needs to be highlighted is the fact that the social network operates with a reflexivity of its own that is characterised in that it entwines agents' internal conversations between them and in this way generates a relational reflexivity between the nodes in the network which exceeds the individual (personal) reflexivity of agents. (Donati 2021: 97)
The implications of anchoring morphogenesis in relational reflexivity
The morphogenetic dynamics of social relationality are demarcated into two orders: (1) The relational structural order that impinges on agents/actors; (2) The processual relational order in the form of interactions and transactions that reproduce or change the relational structural order (Donati 2021). In morphogenesis, these two orders of social relationality are anchored in relational reflexivity that can be identified in the transaction between the nodes of social networks.
Figure 1: Different order of social relationality: Processual (interactional/transactional) and structural (Donati 2021: 56).
The implications of anchoring morphogenesis in relational reflexivity are explored in the context of a post-functionalist approach to education. A notion of the curriculum that distinguishes between the lived, planned, and experienced dimensions is proposed. These different dimensions can be mapped to orders of social relationality. In the interactional stage (T2-T3), the curriculum is represented in its lived and experienced forms. On the other hand, the planned curriculum is represented in the structural order in its initial form at stage T1 and in its transformed form at stage T4. In this educational dynamic, assessment is part of relational reflexivity that focuses on the internal dynamics of learning to ascertain changing development points of the student at stages T2-T3. In turn, the planned curriculum is reproduced or transformed based on its role in regulating learning to enable students to meet the learning criteria. The curriculum, assessment and learner development are interconnected aspects of orders of social relationality.
References:
Archer, M. (2003). Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge University Press.
Archer, M. (2000). Being Human: The Problem of Agency (First). Cambridge University Press.
Donati, P. (2011). Relational Sociology: A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences. Routledge.
Donati, P. (2021). Transcending Modernity with Relational Thinking (First). Routledge.
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