Tackling issues of recognition and resistance, place and displacement, this book moves across a range of pertinent references and topics, from social practices and sound art to the performativity of skin and the poetics of Deaf voice.
From the vibrational intensities of common life to the rhythm of bodies in movement, and drawing from his ongoing work on sound and agency, Brandon LaBelle positions acoustics, and the broader experience of listening, as a dynamic means for fostering responsiveness, understanding, dispute, and the work of reorientation. He tries to create a platform for engaging struggles over the right to speak and to be heard that extends toward a broader materialist and planetary view. This entails critically addressing questions of space, borders, community, and the acoustic norms defining capacities of listening, leading to what LaBelle terms “poetic ecologies of resonance.” Through such transversality, LaBelle captures acoustics as the basis for strategies of refusal and repair.

Table of Contents
1. Holding, Healing, Attending: Towards Collaborative Living
2. Acoustic Performativity: Practices of Composition
3. Poetic Ecologies: Resonance, Imagination, Repair
4. Skin-Work: Queer Acoustics, Borderspaces, Economies of Desire
5. Deaf Attention: Peripheral Visions, Spatial Meanings, Sensory Politics
6. Acoustic Support

Paperback, 264 pages, published in 2021.