Listening to Wicked Problems: Sound Studies as Transversal Studies
GUEST LECTURE BY PROF. SALOMÉ VOEGELIN
At Climate Change & Sonic Agency Lecture & Workshop Series
March 24, 2022, 17:00 to 18:30, University of Copenhagen, Southern Campus, room 15a.0.13
Climate change and global health emergencies manifest as complexly interwoven problems that are at once cultural, economic, social, and political. They can be identified as “wicked problems” (K. Popper), “because of the incomplete knowledge of effects and interdependencies, (…) and because they are intertwined with other problems in complex and, to a large extent, unmanageable systems” (P. M. Schiefloe). Salomé Voegelin will propose that the relational capacity of sound, its connecting logic and entangled mattering, offers novel ways to engage these complex inter-dependencies. Thus she appeals for Sound Studies as an interdisciplinary study that remains “undisciplined” but embeds itself and works across every discipline, to broker their entanglements. Such a transversal Sound Studies generates, from a feminist and new materialist sensibility, novel methodologies that hear climate and health and other emergencies from how they sound together.