The MS Sound Forum invites papers for a guaranteed session at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference in Toronto in January 2026. The session responds in part to the MLA Executive Council’s refusal to allow debate or a vote on Resolution 2025-1, which supported the international “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” (BDS) Movement for Palestinian rights against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In light of the Council’s suppression of debate, at MLA 2026, the Sound Forum seeks to provide a space for dialogue and meditation on silencing, censorship, and the role of organizations like the MLA in the face of systemic violence and threats to academic freedom.

Sound studies scholars have long articulated listening as a practice for critical interventions in the face of oppression. Jennifer Stoever’s The Sonic Color Line historicizes the state and police violence that Black Americans were subjected to in the 2010s by positioning these instances of brutality—often triggered by disputes over the public soundscape—within a larger history of the racialized listening practices. Meanwhile, Sonali Chakravarti’s Sing the Rage—written in the wake of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission—posits listening as the ground of recognition and a key path for attaining justice in the aftermath of colonial and institutional violence like apartheid and genocide (123). Finally, drawing on Chakravarti and Black feminist thinkers like Audre Lorde and bell hooks, Naomi Waltham-Smith’s Free Listening reminds us that “Rage—and especially Black rage—is figured as an excrescence to the European rational logos. It’s too loud or too dissonant for the ears to parse” (55-56). As chronicled by our colleagues Anthony Alessandrini, Raj Chetty, Cynthia Franklin, Hannah Manshel, David Palumbo-Liu, Neelofer Qadir, S. Shankar, Rebecca Colesworthy, Christopher Newfield, and others, the MLA Executive Council’s justification for their pre-emptive silencing of debate on Resolution 2501-1 remits to this noise-logos dichotomy by appealing to legalistic and fiduciary logic as a rationale for denying debate.

It is within this context of the MLA’s refusal to listen that we organize this panel. Beyond the immediate confines of the MLA, we also bear witness to contemporary practices of silencing, such as CEO Elon Musk tweaking X/Twitter’s algorithm to penalize posts he deems to be “negative”; the Trump administration’s defunding of research on marginalized communities on the basis of flagged terms like “historically” and “female” (Palmer); and anthropocentric disregard for the more-than-human in enacting environmental policies, among others. At this juncture, resisting the erosion of democratic decision-making procedures and the freedom of expression is imperative. While the panel theme is motivated by our collective desire to hold the MLA to account for its undemocratic procedures and to improve the Association’s processes from below, we also invite proposals thinking capaciously about questions of silencing, censorship, or free expression—as well as the role of listening and sound in these dynamics— through a sound studies framework. Topics might include: silencing of the more-than-human; AI and social media censorship (algorithmic black boxes); scholasticide and epistemological imperialism; ableism as silencing; authoritarianism and political censorship, etc.

Please submit your 200-word abstract and 50-word bio by March 20, 2025, to:

• John Melillo, johnmelillo@arizona.edu

• Setsuko Yokoyama, setsuko_yokoyama@sutd.edu.sg

• Tamara Mitchell, tamara.mitchell@ubc.ca

Please note that all speakers must update their MLA membership by April 7th, 2025, to participate in the conference. We look forward to receiving your proposals. 

While the MS Sound Forum has decided to hold this guaranteed session at MLA 2026, we acknowledge and respect the decision of many of our colleagues to resign from their MLA-affiliated positions and withhold their membership, financial contributions, and labor in protest. 

February 24th, 2025