S4E7: Republic of Noise with Jeremy Gordon
Claudia talks to Jeremy Gordon about the concept “Republic of Noise”. They discuss the relationship between noise and politics and think through how noise might be used as a tool that enables listening and democracy. They “riff” with each other trying to think through the tensions between noise and harmony as well as whose sounds are considered pleasant or not and how that shapes how one belongs to place.
Jeremy Gordon is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Gonzaga University who studies and teaches where environmental communication, environmental studies, and critical animal studies get entangled. He is obsessed with questions of how ecological relations are “rhetorically” animated – by human and more-than-human messmates. Specifically, how urban ecologies and feral spaces are, and should be, shaped by everyday creaturely encounters. Jeremy has co-edited a special volume on “animal rhetoric” for Rhetoric Society Quarterly, and is currently enchanted by, and kinning with, the feral chickens of Tampa, Florida’s Ybor City. Those chickens have scratched and strutted their way into The Journal of Urban Affairs and Dr. Laura Reese’s edited book on Animals in the City. Find out more about Jeremy on his University website.
Mentioned:
A fowl politics of urban dwelling. Or, Ybor City’s republic of noise by Jeremy G. Gordon;
Of fowl feet, beaks, and streets: eyes on the ground in Ybor City by Jeremy G. Gordon;
The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening by Jennifer Lynn Stoever
Practices of Space and Walking in the City by Michel De Certeau
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World by David Abram
Wild dog dreaming: Love and Extinction by Deborah Bird Rose
When Species Meet by Donna Haraway
Ordinary Cities by Jennifer Robinson
Space Dogs by Elsa Kremser and Levin Peter
Gunda by Victor Kossakovsky
The noisiest Guys on the Planet by Jana Winderen
Cock Crowing from the British Library of Sound
"If language is always in its depths, physically sensorially resonant, then it can never be definitively separated from the evident expressiveness of birdsong, or the evocative howl of a wolf late at night, The chorus of frogs gurgling in unison at the edge of a pond, the snarl of a wild cat as it springs upon its prey, or the distant honking of wild Canadian geese veering South for the winter, all reverberate with affective, gestural significance, the same significance that vibrates through our own conversations and soliloquies, moving us as times to tears, or to anger, or to intellectual insights we could never have anticipated. Language as a bodily phenomenon accrues to all expressive bodies not just the human. Our own speaking, then, does not set us outside of the animate landscape but - whether or not we are aware of it - inscribes us more fully in its chattering, whispering, soundful depths" - David Abram, the Spell of the Sensuous
Thank you to Animals in Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics (A.P.P.L.E) for sponsoring this podcast; the Sonic Arts Studio and the Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory (SAPLab) for sponsoring this season; Gordon Clarke (Instagram: @_con_sol_) for the bed music, Jeremy John (Website) for the logo, and Hannah Hunter for the Animal Highlight