Listening to Wicked Problems: Sound Studies as Transversal Studies

Climate change and overlapping global health emergencies manifest as complexly interwoven problems that are at once cultural, economic, social and political. They can be identified as “wicked problems” (Popper 1963, Rittel&Webber 1973),“because of the incomplete knowledge of effects and interdependencies, because it involves actors operating in different sectors and at different levels, because all possible actions have uncertain effects, and because they are intertwined with other problems in complex and, to a large extent, unmanageable systems” (Shiefloe 2020, p5). Such wicked problems appeal to abandon disciplinary specialisms and to instead work trans- and inter-disciplinarily. I propose that they appeal for Sound Studies as a study of culture, society, politics, and so on, from the relational logic and connecting capacity of listening, to hear entanglements and co-dependencies and contribute to their understanding.

This talk will speculate on this suggestion. It will try to conceptualise such a Sound Studies as a discipline that does not exist, that is not-disciplined, but that interlopes with every discipline, embedding itself to work across, and developing novel methodologies to let us see the world through its interdependencies.