Introducing the Special Series

Abstract

How do sound, militarism, and ecologies relate to each other? Mindful of Jim Sykes’s criticism of a tendency in sound studies scholarship to attend to the most spectacular aspects of “wartime sound and listening,” we are particularly invested in contributions decentering “war” or, rather, showing how it is already dispersed through militarized ecologies. We seek to remain mindful of the profoundly uneven asymmetries that mark the workings, experience, spatializations, and life-and-death gradations and permutations of militarized ecologies. We do not conceive of “militarized ecologies” as a thing, as an already constituted field of inquiry or current topic, or as a discrete set of sites and sounds that can be archived, but as an invitation to consider how these auralities and terrains have come to distinguish themselves and in turn prompt proliferating interpretive gestures. How is sound central to these processes? The keywords auralities, incorporations, and terrains are not postulates but prompts, each of them registering a degree of irresolution while opening, in their juxtaposition, what we hope is room for critical vacillation.