Power in Listening
The Sounding Out! Reader
Liana Silva editor Aaron Trammell editor Jennifer Lynn Stoever editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:New York University Press
Publishing:25th Aug '26
£26.99
This title is due to be published on 25th August, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
How listening shapes power
Power in Listening explores how listening shapes – and is shaped by – power. From the politics of "sad girl" Spotify playlists to the sonic architectures of surveillance and the gendered voices of Siri and Alexa, this collection investigates how sound and listening inform identity, embodiment, and social life. How does Beyoncé's remix of her "elevator incident" expose the surveillance of Black bodies? How do deaf listeners use multiple senses to navigate sound? How are Latina voices racialized through ideas of volume and tone?
Building from the groundbreaking Sounding Out! blog, Power in Listening curates forty revised and expanded essays from scholars, artists, DJs, and activists across more than twenty disciplines. Together, they trace how auditory culture intersects with race, gender, sexuality, technology, and media – from radio and tape to streaming and AI.
Accessible yet rigorous, this reader reveals sound studies in motion: a field that listens as a form of inquiry, protest, and care. Each essay connects theory and everyday experience, offering tools to hear the world – and each other – more critically. Power in Listening invites readers to experience listening as a social practice, a political act, and a method of understanding one's place within a resonant and contested public sphere.
"Spotlighting the work of emerging scholars under innovative rubrics like space, gender, time, race, and power, Power in Listening curates an impressive array of authors and disciplinary approaches of the highest caliber. This is a welcome, fresh take on the field of sound studies." - Roshanak Kheshti, author of Modernity's Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music
"From voice and memoir to technology, space, race, surveillance, and activism, Power in Listening centers captivating soundworkers. and shows how listening can unsettle hierarchies and make new worlds audible. This sharply curated collection brings together newly revised classics from the blog as well as bold new essays that treat listening not as neutral perception, but as a site of power, struggle, pleasure, and possibility. Smart, generous, and unapologetically loud, this book doesn't just reflect a field. It changes how you hear it." - Karen Tongson, University of Southern California
"Not only chronicles the dynamism of the field of sound studies, but also beckons readers to find the listening experience to be an unmistakably political social practice. Power in Listening is an exceptional achievement, uniting scholars and artists across countless disciplines to foster conversations and new scholarship for years to come." - Ivan Ramos, author of Unbelonging: Inauthentic Sounds in Mexican and Latinx Aesthetics
ISBN: 9781479838042
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
400 pages