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Paper short abstract

This talk draws on sonic witnessing research, combining mixed ethnographic methods with sound studies, to explore how experiences of sonic violence generate knowledges of and responses to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine.

Paper long abstract

This talk draws on sonic witnessing research, combining mixed ethnographic methods with sound studies, to explore how experiences of sonic violence generate knowledges of and responses to Russia’s ongoing invasion in its multidimensionality, encompassing acoustic terror and acoustic territoriality as modes of violence and instruments of control over space and populations. I study ways of knowing the war through the invisibility of its sonic and sensory traces, which inscribe sites of harm and environments of terror. War is defined both as an experience of human and nonhuman destruction and as an assault on the sensing body in which the body (not just its life) is taken hostage to operations of power. The right to kill and the right to assault are exercised together as characteristics of an organized war, extending itself to colonial passions of control, discipline, and punishment, which instrumentalize sound as a tool of violence and/or exploit it as a medium through which violence is transmitted, felt, and enacted.

As a researcher and ethnographer or sonic violence in Ukraine, I ask how to navigate spaces of terror and experiences of sonic violence that Ukrainians are living and how to perform the work of knowing, and “labour of witnessing” (Bazdyrieva & Matviyenko) it entails, as an act of ethical engagement. I also ask what it means to know the war as a sensory condition and what Ukrainians do to register, document, and share it as a justice-seeking practice that transforms embodied knowledge into evidence, testimony and political (activist) demand.