My work as an editor and other selected writing

Besides our open call for manuscripts, Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture has one special series currently:

Militarized Ecologies: Auralities, Incorporations, Terrain

Resonance seeks manuscripts, essays, commentaries and artist’s writings that engage Achille Mbembe’s claim that colonial occupations “manufacture a large reservoir of cultural imaginaries.” (Mbembe 2003). These imaginaries draw from intersecting military, scientific, artistic and experiential modes of producing knowledge. Mindful of Jim Sykes’ criticisms of a tendency in sound studies scholarship to attend to the most spectacular aspects of ‘wartime sound and listening” (Sykes, 2018), we are particularly interested in contributions that describe a decentering of “war”, and perhaps reveal how it is already dispersed through militarized ecologies (Kosek 2010). We seek research and creative expressions that remain mindful of the profoundly uneven asymmetries that mark the workings, experience, spatializations, and life-and-death gradations and permutations of militarized ecologies. How is sound central to these processes? (Ochoa, 2014 & 2006). We do not conceive of “militarized ecologies'' as a thing, as an already constituted field of inquiry or current topic, or as a discrete set of sites and sounds that can be archived, but as an invitation to consider how these auralities and terrains have come to distinguish themselves and in turn prompt proliferating interpretive gestures. What role(s) does aurality play in these contexts and might these powerful “hallucinatory multiplicities” (Arbona) be connected to our experience of sound as a wartime imaginary? Additionally, what are the sonic traces when “the ends of war and the means of war” (Mbembe) collapse into one another? Where do those auralities begin and where do the margins of the terrains reside? We are seeking scholarly and creative approaches that consider how sound, broadly understood, participates in, and challenges these questions. The special series will be guest edited by Mª Edurne Zuazu and Alejandra Bronfman, with assistance by a diverse team of scholars and artists from within the Resonance community.

Please email all documents to resonance@ucpress.edu

About the journal:

Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture is an interdisciplinary, international peer reviewed journal that features research and writing of scholars and artists working in fields typically considered to be the domain of sound art and sound studies. These fields may include traditional and new forms of radio, music, performance, installation, sound technologies, immersive realities, and studies-based disciplines such as musicology, philosophy, and cultural studies. The journal also welcomes research and approaches that explore cultural boundaries and expand upon the concept of sound as a living, cultural force whose territories and impacts are still emerging.

Other selected writing and editing