Michelle Pfeiffer - The Sonic Border Regime
Lecture abstract
In this talk I will conceptualize an analytic for thinking about the politics of listening, voices, and sound in the context of global displacement, ubiquitous computing and capitalist experimentation that I call The Sonic Border Regime.
To probe how sonic media infrastructures have been employed for migration control, border policing, and asylum administration I direct to practices of linguistic analysis and algorithmic dialect recognition, sound archives from the early 20th century, smartphone data extraction, and sound cannons. These sites provide insight into different aspects, temporalities and practices of the state’s desire for listening, sounding, and abstracting mobility, race, and difference. At the same time, they also pay attention to different instances of refusal, resistant speech, and technological failures that challenge understandings of technological control. By examining how technologized borders encode and enact nested forms of inequality and violence through sonic media I explicate the voice as a central sensory and embodied register through which body, data, and borders are policed and a central site of engagement for anthropological research.
About the lecturer
Michelle Pfeifer is a postdoctoral research associate at the Chair for Digital Cultures at Dresden University of Technology. Their research examines the intersections of (digital) media technologies, borders, migration, queer and Trans studies, and asks how digital media inform the politics of recognition, belonging, and personhood. Michelle’s first book, The Sonic Border Regime: Race, Voice, and Technology in Digital Borderlands, is under contract with Duke University Press and demonstrates the centrality of auditory technologies and listening in the policing of borders, migration, and asylum. They are currently working on a project about how demographic imaginaries are articulated at the intersections of migration, climate, sex, and AI.