Master of Arts Interdisciplinary Studies (MAIS) 752

Overview/Outline

This course introduces graduate students to listening as a method for collecting and analyzing data in interdisciplinary research. Researchers have lately turned to sound and listening as a way of knowing events, people, ideas, spaces and times, and to acquaint themselves with the vibrational energies of bodies and/in places. The past two decades have seen an explosion of scholarly work in sound by writers in the human sciences. There are many histories and ethnographies of listening, studies of soundscape and soundscape design, and a proliferation of books and articles on sound media, sound art, and sound works, as well as a recent interest in the epistemologies of sound and in knowing science through the sonic and sonification. Researchers are rethinking longstanding pieties about the nature of sound and listening, the role of speech, hearing and music in modern life and modern thought, and the relations among the senses. Our goal will be to map and assess this work. As we proceed, we will consider how scholars ask questions of sound, and what important methodological questions might be emerging at this moment. We will explore in-depth three ways of knowing through sound: sound recording, soundwalking, and soundmapping.

The students will not be required to have a working familiarity with anything to do with sound. Despite the assignments being sound-based, students will learn that sound methods require very little technical knowledge about sound recording and very little specialist knowledge about acoustics. The course assumes that students live in and through sound, in some capacity or another, and that sound is a route of access to a student’s subjective research interests.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

• Describe the individual benefits of listening as a research method;
• Articulate the main arguments and intellectual directions contemporary sound studies scholars are working with;
• Analyze critical theories and their readings of how we know through sound;
• Define and pursue individual interests in the scholarly treatment of sound.

Student Evaluation

• 20% Sound Recording Assignment
• 30% Weekly Forum Discussion Posts
• 20% Soundwalking Assignment
• 30% Soundmapping and Research Essay Assignment

Readings

All readings will be made available online. They will primarily be from academic peer-reviewed journals accessible through the Study Guide and Digital Reading Room. The following are specialty journals in the field of sound studies:

• Interference
• Sound Effects
• Sound Studies: An International Journal
• The Journal of Sonic Studies

These are some of the other, broader, journals that contain articles about sound in the context of interdisciplinary social sciences and humanities:

• American Quarterly
• Annals of Tourism Research
• Anthropological Theory
• Body & Society
• Communication and the Public
• Theory, Culture & Society
• Convergence
• Cultural Geographies
• Space & Culture
• Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies
• Emotion, Space & Society
• Environment and Planning [A, B, C, D, and E]
• Geohumanities
• Journal of Material Culture
• differences
• Journal of Visual Culture
• Media, Culture & Society
• Mobilities
• Progress in Human Geography
• Qualitative Inquiry
• Social and Cultural Geography
• Social Studies of Science
• Stasis
• The Senses and Society
• Time and Society
• Tourist Studies

The previous offering of the MAIS 752 Graduate Seminar can be viewed here.

For more information about upcoming offerings, please contact the MA-IS Office.