Errant sensing: an investigation into sound-based inquiry as a form of affective resistance

Abstract

This thesis aims to explore bodily knowledge as a form of resistance within institutions of higher education. This is examined through norm-critical perspectives on teaching, learning, and spaces for learning within the university. More specifically, this is looked at in the context of art education, and the ways in which norms shape the learning, movement, behavior, and socialities available to learners.

The work utilises artistic research as an overarching methodology through which sound-based inquiry emerges. This methodology uses sound work and listening as tools to address sensate and bodily knowledge and its role within institutions of learning, while also seeking to highlight the affective relationship between body and space. Several sound-based research experiments were carried out in which I recorded and composed spatial and bodily soundscapes in order to understand if and how sound can allow access to an embodied and sensory experience of a particular space, a sort of situated sensing. Through these experiments, a processual method and practice of inquiry emerged which I am calling affective resistance. Affective resistance utilises sound, listening, and movement to access an engaged state of attention and awareness in order to connect more deeply with one’s own body, surroundings, and the bodies of others. This method aims to consider the ways in which bodies become situated and oriented within institutional environments, specifically the university, and how sensate knowledge can possibly act as a form of resistance against institutional norms, power, and control.