Matching Items (2)
Description
Sound is immediate and ever-present, pushing in, around, and through physical boundaries to blend together in whichever way it best sees fit, no matter the controls we seek to impose on it. It builds associations for us: physical spaces become distinctive based on the quality and familiarity of sounds which inhabit them. With this spirit, I see sound as the central arbiter of sense of place, particularly in alternative community spaces, wherein individual and collaborative expression is not only encouraged, but essential to its experience, separating it from commonly-held mainstream and/or programmed social space. By recording the sounds of three distinctive such alternative cultural spaces in central Phoenix—The Trunk Space, Lawn Gnome Publishing, and Welcome Diner, rooted in art and music, literature, and food and drink, respectively—I captured the soundscapes in which the community around theses spaces democratically builds its sense of place. Compiling them into a soundscape composition, I installed the piece in the non-place of an art gallery, immersing listeners in fleeting glances at theses soundscapes, then inviting them to use the fluctuating sonic environment to cite their own associations with art, literature, and food-based senses of place right on the gallery walls. Through this exercise, and research on the experience of sound and meanings of sense of place, I express the intersection and essentiality sound, ambient and performative, in building sense of place.
ContributorsDescheemaker, Connor Patrick (Author) / McHugh, Kevin (Thesis director) / McKay, John (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor) / School of Public Affairs (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
“Community” is a concept invoked by scholars, activists, organizers, and institutions with little reflection or understanding about how community forms. Communication scholarship, specifically rhetorical scholarship, ties community to citizenship and discourses about policy. This study develops an alternative understanding of community formation by examining KDIF, a low-power FM community radio station in South Phoenix. KDIF operates in geographic and cultural spaces that face histories and narratives of marginalization and neglect, and currently face issues of gentrification and exploitation. The station provides a platform for local artists, DJs, and residents to spread their messages and cultivate a sense of belonging between groups and people that have struggled to form common bonds or coalitions. Using the methodology of participatory critical rhetoric and informed by literatures of sonic rhetoric, sound studies, social movements, and rhetorical studies, this study examines how KDIF creates belonging through sound and sonics, how an understanding of community as “organic” limits and affords cultural expression, and how KDIF uses epideictic rather than deliberative discourses that provide an alternative to belonging as citizenship. The analysis of KDIF’s work builds an argument that KDIF forms community by connecting South Phoenix residents to narratives and affects of belonging while resisting dominant affects and narratives of “not belonging” that surround South Phoenix. In this context, “community” articulates and narrates the affective experiences that come with a loss and recovery of belonging, and the invocation of community allow for marginalized groups to declare a sense of worth by circulating affects and experiences of belonging.
ContributorsDerk, Ian Kenna (Author) / Hess, Aaron (Thesis advisor) / Hawk, Byron (Committee member) / Cheong, Pauline (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021