Becoming Listening Bodies: Sensing the Affective Atmospheres of the City with Young Children

This chapter explores sound walking with children as a speculative method for studying urban ecologies. We draw on a collaborative research project involving a series of experimental sound walks with children (aged 6–10) attending a community arts programme in Manchester, UK. We describe how the sound walks enabled children to attune more closely to urban atmospheres and the sonic milieus of nonhuman creatures while channelling a micropolitical desire to disrupt spaces of institutional authority and social stratification. Specifically, we attend to how children were drawn into the use of balloons as atmospheric devices to disrupt the cloistered educational spaces of a local university campus. In theorising the use of sound walks to sense and modulate affective atmospheres, our analysis smudges conventional boundaries between body and environment, listening and sounding, teaching and learning.