Produce, Reduce, Recycle: Phonocenes of Citizenship

This chapter explores soundscapes as forms of citizenship and engagement. We start from the concept of a phonocene as proposed by Donna Haraway, focusing our attention on the sonic and audio dimensions of the Anthropocene. We explore what a posthumanist attention to sound means for the concept of citizenship by using 3 different vignettes to explore what it means to produce, reduce, and recycle sounds, and end by reflecting on what this shift in attention might mean for education.
We start with an examination of the production of sound as citizenship, focusing on the ‘Clap for Our Carers’ phenomenon that occurred at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe and the UK. We examine the notion of a collective production of sound on a nation-wide level, often unheard by intended recipients, that became an obligation of a collective performance of sonic appreciation.
We then move to explore the recycling of sound as a form of citizenship, focusing specifically on TikTok as a space of reusing and repurposing audio. We examine the ways that audio meme generation encourages the spread and copying of sounds, layering additional meanings and contexts onto existing audio. We use this to explore how the use of sound on TIkTok presents a new space of engagement in in a collective citizenship through repurposing sound (here comes the boy).
In the final vignette we focus on the purposeful reduction of sound as a form of citizenship, explore the policing of reduced sound through the act of ‘taking of the knee’ as a protest to racism in sport. Here the absence of sound is used powerfully and pointedly as a form of engaged citizenship to highlight inequity. This act quickly became a contested form of citizenship, with a counter attempt emerging to control and negate the silence by drowning it out with sound. This was added to by a white hegemonic discourse that attempted to dictate what the form of protest should not only look like but sound like in order to be seen as acceptable citizenship. Through this contested act we focus on the redirection of sonic attention as a form of engaged and disputed citizenship.
The chapter ends with a reflection on the important of the phonocene for education, and call for education to begin to embrace the concept of noise and sound beyond individuals in order to consider the boundaries and negotiation of sound as part of an actor-network of contested educational possibilities.