Aural Reorientations, or Sound Studies as Listening Otherwise

MLA Sound Forum, 2027 Guaranteed Session

MLA annual conference, Los Angeles, California, January 7-10, 2027. 

Aural Reorientations, or Sound Studies as Listening Otherwise

A chorus of voices from interdisciplinary sound studies has invited critical reorientations of the field. At the intersection of phenomenology and disability studies, Jonathan Sterne proposes an impairment phenomenology that insists on the contingency of the perceiving subject, a provocation born from his own embodied experience of vocal and hearing impairment. Meanwhile, putting philosophy in contact with evolutionary biology, Naomi Waltham-Smith revisits the adaptive process through which humans lost ear mobility once shared with other mammals to question how decentering the human in contemporary theories of aurality might propitiate a powerful posthuman sonic turn. Through an Indigenous sound studies framework, Dylan Robinson invites us to reckon with settler colonial modes of perception, in particular, by attuning to our own listening positionality as a means of recognizing and confronting inherited and ingrained “hungry listening” practices. Finally, Ashon T. Crawley's examination of Blackpentacostal aesthetics charges us to listen and make space for "otherwise" modes of existence: with "plurality as its core operation, otherwise bespeaks the ongoingness of possibility, of things existing other than what is given, what is known, what is grasped" (Crawley24). 

Inspired by these thinkers, we invite proposals sounding out reorientations in and through the field of interdisciplinary sound studies. We welcome work auscultating otherwise forms of relationality, care, and being in literary and cultural expression, distinct forms of media, and other sociocultural forms through a sound studies framework.

Please submit your 200-word abstract and 50-word bio by March 18, 2026, 5pm US Eastern 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, 2026 to participate in the conference. We look forward to receiving your proposals. 

Works Cited:

Crawley, Ashon T. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, Fordham UP, 2017

Robinson, Dylan. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. U of Minnesota P, 2020.

Sterne, Jonathan. Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment. Duke UP, 2021.

Waltham-Smith, Naomi. “Turning Ears; Or, Ec (h) otechnics.” Diacritics, vol. 47, no. 4, 2019, pp. 110-129.