Black Geosonicologies

CONTACT:  april-l-graham@berkeley.edu(link sends e-mail)sibahle@berkeley.edu


The Black Geosonicologies Working Group explores the racialization of sound and how it is mediated, contextualized, and experienced through place-based orientation. We draw from Black geographies, sound studies, and ethnomusicology to examine what it means to be a racialized “listening subject” and how Blackness as sound is managed through auditory governance and sociosonic processes that structure our worlds. Methodologically, we draw attention to the ways Western epistemologies privilege the act of seeing that ignores how sonic methodologies and deep audible engagement informs new modes for understanding the confluence of race, sound, music, and geography. Through Black acoustemologies—how Black people know and order their environments through sound—we emphasize the sonic fluidity of a “Black sense of place” across multiple scales. We also diagram the “sonics of intersectionality” to examine how audible experiences and positioning is interlaced with overlapping identities within the self and its multiple geographies.

Our central questions, include:

What is Black sound?

What is geosonicology?

What are the sociosonics of a Black sense of place?

What are the sonics of intersectionality?

In what ways do Black people produce auditory ways of knowing?

How do various forms of institutional power produce racialized “listening subjects” through auditory governance and sociogeographic processes?


Black Geosonicologies Events

BGGS Conference Banner

Black Geographies Graduate Student Conference

03.17 & 03.18.2023 | 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM  | CRG Research Working Group Event  | 370 Dwinelle Hall


Black Geographies Graduate Student Conference

The Black Geographies Graduate Student Conference promotes critical dialogue on the racial, ecological, sociopolitical, cultural, economic, and sociospatial processes that constitute the materialities of Black life and its everyday contours. The BGGSC foregrounds the geographical practices, knowledge, and interventions of African Diasporic communities while challenging, reorienting, and refuting racialized colonial conceptions of space, place, time, scale, diffusion, landscapes, and Black life. This collective gathering is designed for graduate students and advanced undergraduates to collaborate and engage with each other through Black geographical thought across disciplines, academic affiliations, and communities. Learn more.

Friday, March 17, 2023
9:00 -10:00 am: Breakfast
10:00 - 10:50 am: Keynote Lecture by Dr. Jovan Scott Lewis
11:00 - 12:45 pm: Black Sound 
1:00 - 2:00 pm: Lunch Break
2:15 - 4:00 pm Black California 
4:10 - 5:00 pm: Black Horror Geographies Roundtable

Saturday, March 18, 2023
9:00 -10:00 am: Breakfast 
10:00 -11:45 am: Black Earth 
12:00 -12:50 pm: Spatial Matters Are Black Matters Roundtable 
1:00 - 2:00 pm: Lunch Break
2:15 -4:00 pm: Black Futures
4:10 -5:00 pm: Fellowship and Gathering 

---
The Black Geographies Graduate Student Conference is organized by graduate students from Berkeley Black Geographies, the Geography and History departments at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University’s History Department and Black Studies Collective (a research workshop sponsored by the program in African & African American Studies).