Review of Communication

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(Re)sounding pedagogy: a themed issue on critical

communication pedagogies of/for/in sound

Chris McRae & Keith Nainby

To cite this article: Chris McRae & Keith Nainby (2020) (Re)sounding pedagogy: a themed issue
on critical communication pedagogies of/for/in sound, Review of Communication, 20:4, 287-297,
DOI: 10.1080/15358593.2020.1826567

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REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION
2020, VOL. 20, NO. 4, 287–297
https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2020.1826567

(Re)sounding pedagogy: a themed issue on critical

communication pedagogies of/for/in sound
a
Chris McRae and Keith Nainbyb
a
Department of Communication, University of South Florida, Tampa, U.S.A.; bDepartment of Communication
Studies, California State University, Turlock, U.S.A.

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

In this Introduction, the Guest Editors situate this themed issue on Received 11 August 2020
(Re)Sounding Pedagogy within ongoing communication research Accepted 20 August 2020
interrogating voice, argumentation, race, and power. We also
KEYWORDS
offer a description of how we work to make sense of some of the listening; critical
relationships among sound, pedagogy, and social contexts. We communication pedagogy;
encourage you to engage playfully with our work and with the sound; (re)sounding
scholarly pieces, oral/aural and written, included in this issue. We
provide an audio clip of recorded sounds that we developed for
this Introduction in the spirit of playful engagement, and we
outline the artistic constraints we adopted in developing this
clip. We also briefly frame the scholarly pieces that constitute
this issue, which, notably, is the first issue of a National
Communication Association journal to feature audio works.

Please see the online full-text version to access the audio file. Alternatively, the audio can
be accessed via the supplemental material tab: https://doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2020.
1826567

Introductory (re)sounding: playing with pedagogy and sound

Listen. Pedagogy sounds, it vibrates. Sound and critical communication pedagogy are
entangled.1 Sound shapes and is shaped by pedagogical practice.2 Sound permeates
and resounds in pedagogical contexts and interactions in ways that are cultural, material,
and relational.3 And the consideration of sound and pedagogy as relationally meaningful

CONTACT Chris McRae cjmcrae@usf.edu; Keith Nainby knainby@csustan.edu

© 2021 National Communication Association
288 C. MCRAE AND K. NAINBY

is an opportunity for considering the institutional, political, historical, and culturally

mundane implications of sound as pedagogy and pedagogy as sound.4
One implication, for us, is the perpetually partial, limited and limiting, character of
pedagogical work. The unruliness of sound keeps us, as learners and teachers, on our
toes. Sound dances around us, weaving and waving through air and water and other
media, always exceeding our efforts to grasp it—and we can feel that quality of sound
from the moment we engage it. A train that whizzes by us loudly exemplifies the shifting
shape of sound, its swelling urgency dissipating and decaying as it passes. But in more
routine sonic experiences we can feel how sound flows and frolics across time and
place—with our ears and skin and muscles and bones. As Nina Sun Eidsheim maintains
and as Heidi M. Rose’s essay in this issue, “Sounding Sight in an ASL Classroom,”
explores, sound does not only physically affect us through audition.5 The vibrations of
an old song join smell in viscerally sharpening our sensory recall of a particular
memory; voices carry through walls and across hallways even when speakers are
unseen or unknown; a “quiet” walk in the woods to escape the cacophony of human
noise reveals a chittering, buzzing, skittering profusion of sonic abundance.
In communication studies, the fulsomeness of sound in our lives has a deep historical
connection to pedagogy. Questions about how to effectively prepare people to share
ideas, orally and aurally, in a given social context extend from pedagogical writing as
least as early as Aristotle through the elocutionists’ emphasis on precise articulation
and style to contemporary critical research on communication as constitutive, and
ideally reconstitutive, of social structures that perpetuate power and privilege.6 Sound
is fulsome in the sense that it is too abundant to be exhaustively harvested through ped-
agogical labor; we can grasp some of its effects but will always have more work to do,
more movement to follow. Yet sound is also fulsome in that it offends our judgment
and exceeds our good sense. Joshua Gunn calls this a “lawless” quality in the human
voice, claiming that “[t]he uncontrollable and threatening voice of the Other … is thus
not simply a speech or voice object but also a voice abject: meaningful speech that
does not signify, glossolalia.”7 Gunn grounds attention to vocal excess in the roots of
our discipline, holding that “[w]e should lament the abandonment of speech from our
department nameplates, if only because our founders better understood the primacy of
speech and the centrality of the human voice to public culture and daily life.”8 This
themed issue invites readers to attend, in their pedagogies, to the “lawless” and
(re)bounding and, perhaps, fruitful abundance of sound.

Voice and power

Questions about voice and communication index core assumptions in our discipline
about mutual responsiveness and meaning-making. John Durham Peters interrogates
these assumptions, problematizing casual notions of interlocution by asking: “Does
nature speak, does God speak, does fate speak, do bureaucracies speak, or am I just
making all this up? Where do projections of my self end and where do authentic
signals from the other begin?”9 Such questions are pedagogically generative as they
call upon us to consider how we claim to know what we know, from which sources
(if any), and what we ought to do next as we follow these traces. For Eidsheim, these
are not idle pursuits; they are fraught with consequences for continued life for
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 289

particular people hailed within systems that locate bodies and ascribe meaning to them,
as she finds in her study of “race, timbre, and vocality,” and how these are linked to
teaching and listening practices. Eidsheim observes that, “within the range of responses
to the acousmatic question—the seemingly innocent Who is this?—the dynamic of
power relations is played out.”10 Michael Eisenstadt’s essay in this issue, “Spreading
the Sonic Color Line in American Policy Debate,” focuses on how the effects Eidsheim
describes may impact the forensics and debate communities that are often central to
pedagogical work in communication. Eisenstadt’s approach extends Justin Eckstein’s
efforts to complicate how we conceptualize argumentation. In the 2018 special issue
of Argumentation and Advocacy on sound and argumentation, Guest Editor Eckstein
considers the ways sound provides an opening for rethinking argumentation. He
explains:
When we recognize that the speech act is a sound that also contains ineffable parts (form),
does not need to follow sequential time (flow), and can get inside and affect others (force),
we expand the potential for argumentation to analyze argumentation as something beyond a
disembodied text, but something that is lived.11

This themed issue presents sound as an integral characteristic of speech, voice, argumen-
tation, and communication that is worthy of extended interpretation and critique. The
treatment of sound here presents an opening for further considerations of the ways
that sound textures, and is entangled with and throughout, communication.12 Our
linking of sound and pedagogy builds in this way on the strong foundation created by
Gunn, Peters, and Eckstein, scholars from within the communication research tradition.
We also hope that some ideas in this issue call out to readers who are not yet familiar with
Eidsheim, Jonathan Sterne, and other scholars from broader research traditions who are
enhancing our academic engagement with sound and pedagogy.
A thread of extant communication research that has been attuned to questions of
voice, power, and privilege for some time is performance studies. E. Patrick Johnson
explores how performances of Blackness are appropriated in distinct ways for political
ends in the U.S.A.13 Johnson also uses oral history and ethnographic/autoethnographic
writing and performance to develop geographically and culturally contextualized his-
tories of queer Black voices.14 Bryant Keith Alexander examines the pedagogical impli-
cations of racialized performances in classrooms and other educational spaces.15
Bernadette M. Calafell traces an evolving path within several voices through which a
queer woman of color in the academy might search for (and find the “fabulous”
through “failure”) models of love.16 Scholars working in communication studies adjacent
fields similarly engage the relationships among how we listen and how we learn about
race and identity. Fred Moten articulates the role of improvisational jazz in constituting
a radical Black aesthetics, while Adam J. Banks situates African American rhetoric in
artists’ and audiences’ efforts to share experiences and tell stories using digital media.17
Performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood’s reconsideration of the history of
elocution offers both a critique of the ways elocution functioned as a classed and raced
practice, and also points to the ways elocution was deployed tactically as a subversive
act by the working-class and enslaved people who were excluded by the norms of this
practice.18 Conquergood’s work gestures toward sound and the sounds of the voice as
both a regulated and citational embodiment. He also calls for listening to the ways the
290 C. MCRAE AND K. NAINBY

embodiment and sounding of voice might work to resist, challenge, and transform exclu-
sionary practices and functions of institutions and pedagogies.
Marcy R. Chvasta’s audio essay in this issue, “The Person in the Voice,” resonates with
Conquergood’s recognition of the ways voices, and the sounds of voices, are made to
sound through pedagogical practices.19 For Chvasta, the informal and formal evaluations
of the sounds of voices work to enact and maintain exclusionary structures and hierar-
chies of gender. Marquese L. McFerguson’s essay, “Between DJs, Turntables, and (Re)im-
agining Ivory Tower Experiences,” resonates with Conquergood’s call for a consideration
of the ways those who may be excluded by disciplinary practices and histories challenge,
resist, and subvert these pedagogical modes and methods. McFerguson spins and samples
a beat that sounds and stories a path and pedagogy of Black masculinity in communi-
cation studies. One aim of this themed issue is to share research that complicates the
role of sound in constituting the voices we hear and the communities we create and
sustain. We consider this especially urgent given the immediate need for work that
strives to end anti-Black violence and to dismantle systemic racist structures both
within the academy and in society as a whole.

An invitation to listen
Sound is a critical and generative site of inquiry, but sound is also playful. Sound enfolds
us like its most common medium, air, does—pressing on our bodies through vibration
and compression, shaped by motion and buffeting us in waves. It presents an opening
for play, for disruption, and for possibility. This themed issue takes up the playful pos-
sibilities of sound for generating an Introduction to (re)sounding pedagogy that is dia-
logic and invitational. We are playing, here in our writing, with how we sound as
Guest Editors in order to convey our own conversation about the essays in this
themed issue, and in order to invite your own conversation as readers/listeners with
these essays.
These introductory remarks are accompanied by an audio recording of found sound
that attempts to both honor the robust scholarly and artistic inquiry generated by
sound, and to begin playing with the relationship between sound and critical com-
munication pedagogy. This recording is less about the recorded sounds and more
about our process of recording these sounds as a pedagogical act, an act that engages
the world and responds to it through (re)selecting and (re)working and (re)imagining.
This recording is also less about what you hear as you play back these sounds in the
service of making accurate interpretations and evaluations of the recording, and
more about your process of witnessing these sounds as an indicator of your situated-
ness as a listener.20 We suggest that one generative way to make sense of sound and
of hearing and listening is to attend to the playful, artistic impulses we use every day
to respond to all we encounter.
In his keyword entry on hearing, sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne demonstrates
the ideological and historical construction of hearing as passive and as preceding the act
of listening to invite a more nuanced understanding of hearing as subjective and insepar-
able from the act of listening.21 Questions of how to measure hearing (or that hearing has
happened) result in the construction of hearing as a fixed and measurable action,
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 291

resulting in an understanding of hearing as a passive act that is separate from a more sub-
jective and active practice of listening. Sterne explains:
Our modern measures of sound, like the decibel and normal frequency response of human
hearing, arose from a body of research created by scientists who were intent on dividing
hearing from listening, and who used listening to give access to hearing.22

Although the separation of hearing from listening is a constructed and artificial distinc-
tion that works to address particular modes of inquiry, it persists beyond these specific
research contexts, including communication studies—wherein we often frame listening,
especially for pedagogical purposes in our introductory courses and textbooks, as a voli-
tional act dependent upon an underlying sensory experience of hearing.
Regarding this artificial distinction, Sterne offers a caution and critique to sound
studies scholars that resonates with the ways communication scholars discuss and
define hearing as separate from the act of listening:
When writers in sound studies ascribe to hearing the quality of pure physical capability and
to listening subjective intention, they mobilize the same epistemic history. When we talk
about hearing in the state of nature, separate from any particular person or cultural scene,
we animate this contradiction.23

The epistemic history Sterne references here, which involves a contradiction, is the idea
that hearing is measurable (independent of the tools of measurement) and ever separable
from the act of listening. By making this distinction, communication scholars are also
engaged in the maintenance of a particular discursive construction of hearing that, as
Sterne notes, is partial and specific to a particular mode of inquiry that treats the
sounds we hear, a priori, as whole, unitary elements of sensory experience that help to
constitute human communication.
As one autoethnographic–phenomenological point of complication of this implicit
framing of sounds as mere “inputs” in communication, one of the Guest Editors of
this themed issue (Keith) reflects on his significant changes in hearing, resulting in
deaf gain, over the past decade.
I, Keith, first began to notice hearing changes in my left ear around 2011, primarily
through two sets of evolving experiences: (1) listening to others’ speech in crowded
environments such as sports stadiums and bars, and (2) listening on headphones to
music recorded and played back across a wide stereo spectrum. I worked with audiolo-
gical medical professionals, with some frustration, over several years between 2013 and
2015 to attempt to determine the cause of these changes in hearing and, I hoped, “cure”
them.24 Audiologists expressed puzzlement because the physiological elements associ-
ated with my ear suggested neither damage nor degradation. Eventually, an MRI result
—achievable only because a second, more “open” MRI tube used by some astonishingly
kind young technical staff members nurtured me past the claustrophobic terror of the
first, very brief and unsuccessful, MRI effort—revealed that a cluster of blood vessels
in my brain is pressing on the aural nerve leading from my left ear and diminishing
my ability to process sounds with that nerve system. The audiologist with whom I
worked then prescribed a hearing aid but indicated doubt that it would help much,
given the source of the problem. Interestingly, the hearing aid has helped some
(especially with differentiation of natural, conversational human speech in crowded
292 C. MCRAE AND K. NAINBY

environments such as classrooms), suggesting the benefit of learning through practice—

in effect teaching myself to listen all over again, differently, in my language of origin.
However, my changing hearing affects my listening with headphones in more diver-
gent ways that raise questions for me, questions this audiologist has not been able to
answer medically so far. When I listen on expensive, noise-canceling headphones to
some music that I know well and that has a wide stereo spectral range, I recognize
that some sounds are inaudible, even if I listen closely for them. I miss them, and the lis-
tening experience is hindered; I cannot find the same joy and I am caught up with despair
in some sounds’ absence. Yet other sounds on other recordings are audible; I am joyful
(even more so because I “find sounds” when I worry that I won’t), and I am caught up
with delight in all sounds’ presence. I have tried to do self-tests with a series of recordings
to discern patterns of the sounds that are audible vs. inaudible—across distinct frequency
ranges, across dynamic ranges in the recording levels, across instrument timbral profiles,
and so on—using my home stereo speaker system without headphones as a kind of nor-
mative control for these ranges in each case. I have compared across different times of the
day and night, to consider the role of fatigue and mood. I have compared across albums
that are enormous favorites and those that I have simply heard often but love less, to con-
sider the role of expectation. I cannot discern any pattern. Perhaps someday I will
identify a pattern; perhaps someday an audiologist will present a medical explanation.
I offer this example to suggest that physiology, neurology, memory, and sensibility inter-
twine and shape our hearing (and not only our listening) as we engage with sound. When
I teach and study communication, I want to take what I learn from my own hearing and
listening as an invitation to approach sounds as the differentiated, complex, joyful, and
frustrating phenomena they are.

***
So, we invite you to listen to our audio clip. The recording is amateur at best, probably not
very clear, certainly not coherent (at least not by design). Although, at first listen, the
recorded audio might privilege an “ear-centric” approach to sound and listening, it does
not imagine or intend to create an exclusionary model of sound and listening.25 Instead,
the recording on one level is our effort to increasingly attune ourselves, and listeners, to
the richness of sonic phenomena that might be taken for granted in much of our listening
lives as “noise” or “background” or even “silence.” This is consonant with the ideas Michael
LeVan offers in his recorded piece in this themed issue, “Listening Below.” In creating this
recording, we were partly inspired by the profusion of sound we found in the spaces with
which we interact daily. Outdoors, especially, we find that a “quiet” walk in the woods is
none too quiet. Birdsong is perhaps the loudest element of the sonic landscape, and we
endeavored to capture a bit of it (among other ambient sounds) on this recording.
Charles Hartshorne contends that these sounds deserve to be characterized as song and,
indeed, as beautiful—not only from the perspective of a human subjective aesthetic judg-
ment but, given Hartshorne’s definitions of “complexity” and “avoidance of monotony and
chaos,” from the perspective of birds themselves.26 While we are not bold enough to assess
the validity of this assertion ourselves, we do find birdsong and the other sounds in our
everyday soundscapes worthy of more focused listening. Narrowed listening practices
that distinguish “real” sounds purportedly meriting attention from those we habitually
ignore have even been tactically used to thwart oppressors, as when Harriet Tubman
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 293

used owl calls as navigational aids to support travel on the Underground Railroad helping
formerly enslaved people to freedom.27
On another level, the process of creating this recording, not of the performances of
listening to the recording, includes the repertoire of knowledges that is intended for
documentation and archiving.28 And it is the process of creating, curating, and perform-
ing this audio file that provides a heuristic for introducing this themed issue. A guiding
premise for both this themed issue and the audio portion of this Introduction is that
sound asks us to think about pedagogy in ways that we do not think about first as peda-
gogy. In order to create and curate this experimental recording, we generated a series of
guiding parameters or rules.29 Over the course of a week, we each created audio record-
ings of found sound that emphasized for us our phenomenological and relational experi-
ences of sound. Our guiding parameters included things like:

1) Use only a simple preinstalled recorder on our phones

2) Include recordings of touch, smell, sight, and taste
3) Recordings should be made in at least five different locations
4) Include at least 14 seconds of water
5) Include at least 10 seconds of something burning or that uses fire
6) Record from at least four distinct vertical levels

Some of these guidelines were closely followed. Others were not. And additional con-
straints, in the spirit of playful engagement, were added throughout our week of
recording.
We move through our scholarly work with sound by linking the playful to the hopeful.
We hear the cries for immediate, concrete transformation of anti-Black social structures
in our communities. We hear the urgent demands to (re)create cultures that lead us away
from white supremacy. We hear the calls for reconstituting communication of genders,
and of sexualities. We hope that by attending to what is playful in how sounds greet us,
and how we playfully take up opportunities to reply, we might become more open to new
ways of relating to one another. We adopt this in response to Augusto Boal’s idea that
play, especially structured play that encourages a variety of acts followed by critical reflec-
tion, is vital to humanely reimagining our social worlds.30

Resonances
We understand the act of curating a themed issue on sound and pedagogy, and the
process of creating and sharing an audio recording that emerges from our curiosity
about sound, as united in an act of care for sound and for learning in dialogue with
others. Curation and curiosity share a common etymology in the Latin cura, meaning
to care for.31 Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren hold that an ethic of care for
others and commitment to dialogue are vital within critical communication pedagogy,
describing this pedagogy as “an act of love” involving “sensitive and thorough inquiry,
inquiry we undertake together.”32 Aubrey A. Huber and Chris McRae show how curation
within the “cabinet of curiosities” aesthetic can “invite audience interaction and the
opportunity for the emergence of multiple points of connection” in ways that might gen-
erate a “multiplicity of possible meanings.”33 The process of creating an introductory
294 C. MCRAE AND K. NAINBY

audio recording yielded four points of contact that resonate for us with the theme of this
issue.
The first resonance is that to create a themed issue on (re)sounding pedagogy is to
acknowledge that pedagogy always already sounds. Or as LeVan explains in the Intro-
duction to a special issue in Liminalities on performance and sound: “Performance is
of sound, in sound, in spite of sound, for sound, by sound, through sound, around
sound, after sound, and until sound.”34 Attempting an audio recording as accompa-
niment to our Introduction makes this point vivid: sound is ubiquitous in perform-
ance, in pedagogy, and in everyday life. A sustained practice of attending to sound
also demonstrates the wide range of pedagogical possibilities and openings created
by sound and sounding. For example, in this issue, Jacqueline Jean Barrios and
Kenny H. Wong’s “City Analog” amplifies a pedagogical practice of scavenging for
sounds as a new way of understanding, inhabiting, and engaging the city. Michael
LeVan’s “Listening Below” finds a pedagogy of sound as a mode of engaging
silence, elemental spaces, and dispossession.
The second resonance is an emphasis on the embodied and cultural experience of sound
as a site of pedagogy. We each created recordings that are necessarily limited by our cultural
locations and embodied positions in the world, during a particular moment in time (each of
us located on opposite coasts of the U.S.A., during a global pandemic, at a time of increasing
calls for racial justice, with differing domestic and work configurations and obligations). Our
recording is layered with these material and cultural realities.35 Similarly, the embodied and
cultural implications of sound and pedagogy are themes that resonate throughout the essays
in this themed issue. Heidi M. Rose’s “Sounding Sight in an ASL Classroom” listens for the
body in the American Sign Language classroom as a critical site of sound, sounding, and ped-
agogical practice. Zornitsa D. Keremidchieva’s “The Labor of Speech” provides a critical
analysis of the ways the bodies and sounds of early-20th-century immigrants to the U.S.A.
were educated, institutionalized, and commodified. Michael Eisenstadt’s “Spreading the
Sonic Color Line in American Policy Debate” listens to and for the ways sounded pedago-
gical practices of competitive debate are racialized and unequally distributed.
A third resonance is the relational and experiential dynamic of recording an audio
Introduction and the relational and experiential pedagogical function of sound. Our
approach to sound is informed in part by the work of Eidsheim, who underscores the
importance of conceptualizing sound not as a static object or figure, but instead as a
“dynamic and multisensory phenomenon.”36 For Eidsheim, this expansive orientation
to sound is a matter of the relational function of sound. That is, sound is experienced
and produced relationally.37 By working from an understanding of sound as a relationally
experienced and fully embodied phenomenon, new possibilities for thinking about the
functions and implications of sound emerge. Deanna Shoemaker and Karen Werner’s
“Listening and Becoming through Sound” presents sound as a site of creative practice,
relational connection, and collaborative pedagogical practice. Marquese
L. McFerguson’s “Between DJs, Turntables, and (Re)imagining Ivory Tower Experi-
ences” engages in a performative play with the sounded practice of the DJ by mixing
and sampling to demonstrate the cultural constraints of racialized academic spaces on
his lived experience as a Black man finding and making a homeplace in academia.
Marcy R. Chvasta’s “The Person in the Voice” listens to and for the relationships
between sound, voices, bodies, and practices of listening that engage with others.
 REVIEW OF COMMUNICATION 295

A final resonance deals with the process of curating sounds as a compositional and
pedagogical practice. Finding and recording sounds over the course of the week was
an exercise in engaging constraints, making choices, performing with, and relationally
engaging and learning from sound. Similarly, ordering the contributions to this
themed issue was an exercise of curating sounds inspired and informed by the theme:
(re)sounding pedagogy. As we crafted our playlist (and the order of the essays) we con-
sidered the sound of the issue: the rhythms, resonances, dissonances, and vibrations
among each of the pieces. We considered themes, approaches, styles, arguments,
methods, and modes in our placement of these sounds and essays.
Like a remix of a song, this themed issue, (Re)sounding Pedagogy, playfully rearranges
configurations already in place to emphasize something that was already there. Or
perhaps we are adding something (back) into the mix that offers a new perspective.
Each author in this themed issue finds ways to feature the implications and functions
of sound as centrally important to the formation, practice, and future study of the
relationships between sound and critical communication pedagogy.

ORCID
Chris McRae http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5268-3240

Notes
1. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of
Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
2. As David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny argue, sound is the “substance of the world as well as a
basic part of how people frame their knowledge about the world.” (“Introduction,” in Key-
words in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny [Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2015], 2).
3. Joshua Gunn, Greg Gooddale, Mirko M. Hall, and Rosa E. Eberly, “Auscultating Again:
Rhetoric and Sound Studies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43, no. 5 (2013): 475–89.
4. Jonathan Sterne identifies the attention to sound, the context of sound, and the history of
sound a central focus of the interdisciplinary field of sound studies (“Sonic Imaginations,”
in Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne [London: Routledge, 2012], 1–17).
5. Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 56.
6. Keith Nainby, “The Philosophical and Methodological Foundations of Communication
Education,” in The Sage Handbook of Communication and Instruction, ed. Deanna
L. Fassett and John T. Warren (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2010), 18–20.
7. Joshua Gunn, “Give Me Some Tongue (On Recovering Speech),” Quarterly Journal of Speech
93, no. 3 (2007): 362 original emphasis.
8. Ibid., 363.
9. John Durham Peters, “The Telephonic Uncanny and the Problem of Communication,” in
The Sound Studies Reader, ed. Jonathan Sterne (London: Routledge, 2012), 370.
10. Nina Sun Eidsheim, The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre & Vocality in African American
Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 42.
11. Justin Eckstein, “The Acoustics of Argumentation and Advocacy,” Argumentation and
Advocacy 54, no. 4 (2018): 7.
12. Elsewhere, Justin Eckstein makes an important reminder regarding the consideration of
sound, not as a discrete attribute or indicator of some singular external source, but
296 C. MCRAE AND K. NAINBY

instead as always emerging as part of a broader acoustic ecology (“Response to Groarke: Fig-
uring Sound,” Informal Logic 38, no. 3 [2018]: 343).
13. E. Patrick Johnson, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
14. E. Patrick Johnson, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2008); Black. Queer. Southern. Women: An Oral History (Chapel Hill: Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, 2018).
15. Bryant Keith Alexander, The Performative Sustainability of Race: Reflections on Black
Culture and the Politics of Identity (New York: Peter Lang, 2012).
16. Bernadette M. Calafell, “‘Even Your Failures Can Be Fabulous’: Reflections on Stories,
Movement, and Aging,” Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 7, no. 4 (2018): 49–53.
17. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2003); Adam J. Banks, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric
in a Multimedia Age (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011); Race, Rhetoric,
and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2006).
18. Dwight Conquergood, “Rethinking Elocution: The Trope of the Talking Book and Other
Figures of Speech,” Text and Performance Quarterly 20, no. 4 (2000): 326.
19. As Conquergood states, “Elocution seized the spoken word, the common currency to which
the illiterate poor had open access, and made it uncommon, fencing it off with studied rules,
regulations, and refinements” (“Rethinking Elocution,” 327).
20. For an extended discussion of listening as a situated and performative act, see Chris McRae,
“Performative Listening,” in The Handbook of Listening, ed. Debra L. Worthington and
Graham D. Bodie (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2020), 399–408.
21. Jonathan Sterne, “Hearing,” in Keywords in Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 65–77. Sterne points to the implications
and formation of hearing as a measurable act stating, “Modern physiology, acoustics, medi-
cine, engineering, and psycho-acoustics animate a construct of the hearing ear as something
operational, quantifiable, and separable from subjective experience” (68).
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid., 68–69 original emphasis.
24. I, Keith, am trying in part through this autoethnography to challenge myself to differently
appreciate my evolving experience of hearing. I am learning to grasp my experience not as
“hearing loss” that might be “cured” medically—a conception that implicitly recreates a
deficit model of hearing as normal and deaf as abnormal—but instead as “deaf gain” that
acknowledges the myriad, diverse ways we engage the world through our bodies, our
minds, our learning, and our cultures. See Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich,
“Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies,” The Senses and Society 7, no. 1 (2012): 72–86.
25. Steph Ceraso, Sounding Composition: Multimodal Pedagogies for Embodied Listening
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 6.
26. Charles Hartshorne, Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1973), 9.
27. Allison Keyes, “Harriet Tubman, an Unsung Naturalist, Used Owl Calls as a Signal on the
Underground Railroad,” Audubon, February 25, 2020, https://www.audubon.org/news/
harriet-tubman-unsung-naturalist-used-owl-calls-signal-underground-railroad.
28. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).
29. Anne Bogart and Tina Landau, The Viewpoints Book: A Practical Guide to Viewpoints and
Composition (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005).
30. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, trans. Charles A. McBride and Maria-Odilia Leal
McBride (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1979).
31. Merriam-Webster, s.v., “curation,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/curation;
“curious,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/curious#etymology.
32. Deanna L. Fassett and John T. Warren, Critical Communication Pedagogy (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage, 2007), 55.
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33. Aubrey A. Huber and Chris McRae, “Wunderkammer: The Performance Showcase as Criti-
cal performative Pedagogy,” Text and Performance Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2019): 289.
34. Michael LeVan, “Sounding Off on Sound,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 3,
no. 3 (2007): 1, http://liminalities.net/3-3/soundintro.htm.
35. Steven Feld’s description of acoustemology emphasizes this point: “Acoustemology joins
acoustics to epistemology to investigate sounding and listening as a knowing-in-action: a
knowing-with and knowing-through the audible” (“Acoustemology,” in Keywords in
Sound, ed. David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny [Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2015], 12).
36. Eidsheim, Sensing Sound, 3.
37. Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich’s efforts at placing work in Sound studies and Deaf
studies in conversation similarly emphasizes the relational and multisensory experience of
sound: “In Deaf studies, a focus on the visual may erase deaf experiences of sound. Scholars
in Sound studies, meanwhile, may miss deaf and Deaf experiences of sound because of
audist assumptions” (“Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies,” The Senses and Society 7, no. 1
[2012]: 81).