Anja Kanngieser

POSITION: Vice Chancellors Postdoctoral Fellow EMAIL: anjak@uow.edu.au TWITTER: @geotransversals WEB: anjakanngieser.com

Research Interests and Expertise

My research investigates how shifts in economic and political landscapes are registered in, and through, sound. I am particularly interested in the political ontology of sound: what sounds are perceptible on what human, inhuman and more-than human registers; what it means to translate sound; how bodies and matter are affected by sound – how bodies are subjectivated, racialised, gendered and classed through sound; and how listening to environments can invite political intervention and self-determination. My work is concerned with the ways that sound and communication are shaped by, and shape, human and more-than human relations to architectures and infrastructures, to larger atmospheres and ecologies, and to forces of power and governance that can are experienced and antagonised. Through this lens I have written on themes of voice and space, labour and surveillance, and experimental politics and world making. I am also developing sound based methods and practices through which to pose broader political, ecological and economic questions.

Current Research Projects

Listening to climate and community | Sound-mapping sea-level rise

This project explores the effects of large-scale, rapid environmental transformations on regions and lives in the Pacific. Bringing together sound technologies, site based ethnographies with community organisations and collectives, and field recordings it discovers and maps how individuals and groups, plants, animal species and infrastructures, pre-empt and adapt to ecological, cultural and political changes in urban coastal areas significantly endangered by rising sea-levels. Listening to climate and community | Sound-mapping sea-level rise charts effects in three Pacific Island nations – Papua New Guinea, Kiribati and Fiji – made vulnerable due to geography, migration and resource extraction/ depletion. Working with interactive sound mapping techniques linking geographical sites to audio – the project will build an online platform featuring community, third sector, scientific and policy voices, alongside environmental and climate data sonifications (a sound equivalent of data visualisation) and soundscapes to evidence the multiple lived effects of rising sea-levels. As such, it creates a new way of understanding, and engaging with, the everyday stories of climate change.