Audible Imaginations: Listening, Technologies and Coloniality

One day for sharing, connecting, and imagining sonic worlds through cultures, technologies, and sounds from the Americas (in-person)

The registration is for in-person attendance.

The world is living with rising tensions: wars and trade wars, economic instability, political polarization, ethnic cleansing, xenophobia, racism, and authoritarianism. It is also growing its dependence on constantly evolving technologies: new digital companies and intermediaries, generative AI, and media and social media devices. These conditions are directly related to a resurgence in imperialist logics made possible by lingering structures of colonialism, even after years of supposed decolonization.

In the Americas, all populations are connected by the legacy of colonization, present in our economies but especially in our cultures and technologies: it influences how we think, express, and produce our knowledge and shape information; how we make and circulate art and media; and how we enjoy them.

AI invites people whose work involves understanding and explaining how this legacy persists, from a fresh, less-explored modality of expression, production, and creativity: sound. We invite our audience of scholars, students, community educators, technologists, and civil society to explore how listening is a form of getting to know things, understanding our world, and imposing or negotiating power.

For one day, we will listen to and interact with scholarship, art, and practice in Indigenous sound studies, sound and music production, music education, urban sound and noise, the sounds of political activism, Brazilian experimental music genres, Africanity and African metal, and sampling as challenges to the datafication of music. The goal is to expand vocabulary, deepen understanding, and motivate action to resist and confront the challenges of lingering colonialism: those that affect the livelihoods of all on this continent and the globe.