Listening for Justice: Sound, Place, and Environmental Inequality

Assignment Description:

This critical and creative assignment asks you to explore how sound reveals the often-overlooked connections between environmental injustice and lived experience. You will begin by listening deeply to a space impacted by environmental harm or inequality—this could be due to noise pollution, industrialization, gentrification, racialized neglect, or lack of green space. Through this process, you will reflect on how sound and listening practices can expose, resist, or even help transform environmental injustice.

Whether it is the hum of a freeway, the silence of an over-policed neighborhood, the noise of construction displacing communities, or the resilience heard in community gathering spaces, sound can tell us what words often do not. This project invites you to listen with justice in mind.

Assignment Components

1. Sonic Observation: Environmental Soundscape

• Choose a space that reflects a form of environmental inequality or community resilience. This might be:
  • A noisy intersection with constant traffic
  • A park surrounded by industrial zones
  • A community gathering space shaped by sonic resistance
  • A silent area reflecting absence, exclusion, or neglect
• Spend at least 20 minutes listening in that space (or through a recording, if you cannot access the site directly).
• Record a 1–2 minute sound clip if possible (optional but encouraged).
• Take notes: What sounds dominate? Who or what is audible or silenced?

2. Critical Reflection: Listening, Power, and Place

• Reflect on the space through a critical lens:
  • How is sound shaped by race, class, labor, or colonial legacies?
  • What is the relationship between who lives there and what is heard there?
  • What does this space reveal about environmental inequality?

3. Sound as Evidence, Protest, or Care

• Explore sound as a tool for awareness or justice:
  • How do communities resist through sound (e.g., music, protest, storytelling)?
  • Can silence or noise act as a form of violence or resistance?
  • What stories emerge when you listen closely to injustice?

Guiding Prompts (Use if Helpful):

• What does this space sound like? What’s missing or overwhelming?
• Who is heard, who is silenced, and why?
• How does sound reflect inequality in this space?
• Can you trace connections between what you hear and systems of power?
• What might a justice-centered listening practice look like?

Evaluation Criteria:

• Depth of Listening: Attentiveness to sonic and social details
• Critical Insight: Application of environmental justice and sound theory
• Engagement with Stoever’s Ideas: Use of quotes or concepts from The Sonic Color Line
• Creative or Aesthetic Exploration: (Optional but encouraged)
• Clarity and Coherence: Strong structure and voice

 Format & Submission Guidelines:

• Length: 3–4 pages written reflection OR 5–7 minutes audio essay
• 1–2 minutes sound clip from your chosen space
• Submission: PDF or MP3/WAV + transcript (if audio)
• Due Date: Determined by your instructor

Readings for “Listening for Justice: Sound, Place, and Environmental Inequality”

Core Readings

Sound & Ecology (choose one or more)

• Bernie Krause – Voices of the Wild: Animal Songs, Human Din, and the Call to Save Natural Soundscapes (Chapter 1: The Birth of the Soundscape)
• R. Murray Schafer – The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Chapter 5: The Industrial Revolution)
• Jennifer Lynn Stoever – The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (Introduction or Chapter 1)

Optional/Theoretical Readings

• Brandon LaBelle – Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance
• Salomé Voegelin – The Political Possibility of Sound: Fragments of Listening
• Dylan Robinson – Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies
• Julie Sze – Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger
• Leah Thomas – The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet
• Karen Bakker – The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants

Multimedia & Podcasts

• To the Best of Our Knowledge – “Listening to the City”
  https://www.ttbook.org/show/listening-city