Listening To Racism in the US - Or Why Sound Matters
Media and Communication Studies 10th Anniversary Event
Location
Library and Gallery, Albin O. Kuhn : Library Gallery
Date & Time
March 1, 2018, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Description
Media and Communications Studies 10th Anniversary Event
Jennifer Lynn Stoever, Associate Professor of English, Binghamton University - State University of New York
We talk too often about race and racism as if they are solely visual concepts. Jennifer Stoever’s lecture will unsettle the assumed relationship between race and looking by introducing the concept of the sonic color line and exploring the often undetected ways in which sound and listening have also functioned to produce and enforce racial hierarchies throughout U.S. history and in our present moment. Stoever argues that sound matters in our everyday lives and that we can work to shift our historically and culturally conditioned listening practices toward a more equitable world.
A book signing will follow the program.
Speaker bio: Jennifer Lynn Stoever received her PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from USC and is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Binghamton where she teaches courses on African American literature and race and gender representation in popular music. She is Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of the influential Sounding Out! The Sound Studies Blog and she has published in Social Text, Social Identities, Sound Effects, American Quarterly, Radical History Review, and Modernist Cultures among others. During 2011-2012, she was a fellow at The Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, participating in the research group on Sound: Culture, Theory, Politics. She recently published her first book, The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening with NYU Press and is currently working on a large-scale community sound art project in Binghamton, New York.
Sponsored by the Media and Communication Studies Department; the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences; the Dresher Center for the Humanities; the Africana Studies Department; and the English Department.
