Listening to the Sounds of Healing

This work attends to sounds that are sounded by human actors and the echoes of human actors in the lifeworlds and places where sounds are composed and consumed. The multidirectional vibrations of sounds are examined through the stories of three youth, Miriam, Sheldon, and Nellie, to understand how false communities found within schooling and familial spaces reduce listening to passive assimilation into hierarchical relationships that reify capitalistic purposes for listening, bodies, and (un)responses to sound. Within affective relationships, we explore how the youth restoried their engagements with sounds and the producers of sounds to explore and resist compliance, make agentive decisions to heal from coercive linguistic power relations, and create an otherwise sonic place of belonging.