Anja Kanngieser

A sonic geography of voice Towards an affective politics

This paper seeks to extend disciplinary investigation by calling for a geography of voice and a politics of speaking and of listening. It explores the different characteristics of voices, their affective and ethico-political forces, and how they make public spaces. Through its polyphonic method of text, audio illustrations and recorded interviews with participants in radical political organization, the experience of the paper itself is a political gesture, one that invites the listener-reader to consider the histories, narratives and assumptions that underpin her own reception of them.

Tracking and Tracing: geographies of logistical governance and labouring bodies

Shifts in the production of national and global territories have coincided with new forms of biopolitical governance and surveillance, producing a simultaneous expansion and contraction of spatial and temporal mobility. In the logistics industries the mainstreaming of Radio Frequency Identification, the extended monitoring networks of GPS telematics, and the implementation of voice picking in warehouses have all had significant impacts on the mobilities of labour. Given the increasing scholarly interest in logistical geographies, this paper investigates these three advancements put to use for the regulation of bodies in the market environments of global capital from a technohistorical perspective, to provide a frame for further discourse on global supply chains, labour struggles, and security cultures.

Listening geographies: Landscape, affect and geotechnologies

This paper argues for expanded listening in geography. Expanded listening addresses how bodies of all kinds, human and more-than-human, respond to sound. We show how listening can contribute to research on a wide range of topics, beyond enquiry where sound itself is the primary substantive interest. This is demonstrated through close discussion of what an amplified sonic sensibility can bring to three areas of contemporary geographical interest: geographies of landscape, of affect, and of geotechnologies.

Geopolitics and the anthropocene: Five propositions for sound

This appeal calls for sound to be considered as a geophilosophical provocation to, and a method for, political thought. It arises from experiments in ways of knowing and inhabiting the world, gesturing toward disciplines concerned with sound, the politics of language, and the physical and philosophical environment. Anchoring sound as an inherently political medium, it outlines five propositions on inequality, imperceptibility, translation, commons, and the future; it argues that these are critical arenas into which the particularities of sound afford inquiry. Developing this specific reading of sound positions the sonic as a means for opening spaces that challenge hegemonic and violent forms of subjectivation, which are productive of contemporary states of ecological and economic crisis.

For a politics of atmospheric governance

A rise in social science scholarship on atmospheres has raised questions on how to articulate complex material and imperceptible events and encounters. Responding to Peter Adey’s Air Affinities, this review proposes the need to traverse geopolitics and geopoetics to more fully engage these. Going further, it argues that such traversals are key to approaching specific situations and devices of what we call ‘atmospheric policing’. Exploring recent examples of tear gas and sound warfare deployment in occupied Palestine, the review shows how discourses on atmospheres may be used to bring accountability into ecologies of violence.

What is a research platform? Mapping methods, mobilities and subjectivities

This article provides an account of the question of method as it relates to collective modes of research organised, conceived and produced through the interplay between digital technologies of communication and offline strategies of investigation. It does so by exploring the orchestration of research platforms, which are mediating devices that constitute the production of knowledge across a range of geocultural settings. In the context of a project entitled Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders, the article maintains that research methods must contend with the ideological, technological and economic instruments that condition knowledge production at the current conjuncture. The platform, we argue, operates as a medium through which research, labour, subjectivity and knowledge are shaped in ways specific to hardware settings, software dynamics and the materialities of labour and life.

Refusing the World: Silence, Commoning, and the Anthropocene

This essay establishes silence as an ethical-political response to the Anthropocene. Silence is key to the making of commons, which frames the reinvention of ways of living and relating as a necessary response to the Anthropocene moment. Drawing from and intervening in autonomist Marxist debates on communicative labor, recent interdisciplinary work on Anthropocene ecologies, and writing on the violences of ongoing colonialism, the essay shows how silence in its diverse forms can be used to expand what commons might mean and what they might come to do in the present era. Mindful of the ambivalences of silence, it contends that the tensions inherent to its politics foster the suspension of assertions on how the world is, or how it should be. In this way, silence is argued as crucial to making spaces in which the proliferation of different ways of being can occur and from within which resistance against forms of cognitive capitalism, neo/colonialism, and the ecological destruction of the earth can take place.

A Micro-History of ‘Convivial’ Radio in Japan. A conversation with Tetsuo Kogawa with an introduction by Anja Kanngieser

This special issue is about affective and micro-political practices within creative forms ofmaking political worlds. By looking toward the less visiblemoments and processes, by focusing on the relations and social reproductions within our organizational activities, we hope to open up spaces for asking not only how we understand ourselves, but also how we address each other. Oftentimes, when speaking of politics, there is a tendency toward encompassing stories and experiences that come to infer a coherent and smooth narrative. Such narratives obfuscate the mess and uncertainty of political labour. To recognise these more messy and uncertain terrains does not mean to dismiss the role of broaderdiscourse; rather, itmeans to lookat these alongside them, to try andfindpoints of communication that show how more marginal practices can speak to wider conditions and vice versa.