This course explores the dynamic relationship between identity, difference, and sound. We examine how sonic phenomena and performance are entangled with social processes of meaning-making, and how music and sound mediate our understandings of self, otherness, and belonging. Beginning with the premise that identity is a social practice - continuously constructed, performed, and negotiated - we analyze how categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, and culture are encoded in and through sound. Through critical theory, Black feminist thought, post-colonial perspectives, and decolonial frameworks, we interrogate the structures and systems (e.g., coloniality/modernity, capitalism, nationalism) that shape processes of subject formation and difference. This course invites students to consider how alternate epistemologies emerge through sound and performance, opening up possibilities for imagining and enacting lives and worlds beyond dominant regimes of knowledge and recognition. WIM at 4 units only.
3-5 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit · GER: WAY-A-II, WAY-EDP
This course explores the dynamic relationship between identity, difference, and sound. We examine how sonic phenomena and performance are entangled with social processes of meaning-making, and how music and sound mediate our understandings of self, otherness, and belonging. Beginning with the premise that identity is a social practice - continuously constructed, performed, and negotiated - we analyze how categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, and culture are encoded in and through sound. Through critical theory, Black feminist thought, post-colonial perspectives, and decolonial frameworks, we interrogate the structures and systems (e.g., coloniality/modernity, capitalism, nationalism) that shape processes of subject formation and difference. This course invites students to consider how alternate epistemologies emerge through sound and performance, opening up possibilities for imagining and enacting lives and worlds beyond dominant regimes of knowledge and recognition. WIM at 4 units only.
Offered in Winter 2026 at Stanford University.