Sound, power and participation: A conversation on the aurality of the House of Commons

This article, structured as a conversation with Nirmal Puwar, reflects on my practice research into the aurality of the House of Commons. The research explores how the sounding cultures of the House of Commons affect whose voices are heard, with particular attention to performative, non-lexical and collective sound-making, such as jeering and ‘braying’. It asks how the aurality of the House of Commons shapes participation in debate, reproducing ‘a theatricalised public sphere scripted for male performances’. Building on Puwar’s concept of ‘space invaders’, which examines the racialised and gendered politics of presence in institutional spaces, this conversation considers how the sounding cultures of the House of Commons might similarly reveal patterns of exclusion. I propose a concept of aurality as a model for understanding acoustic communication – one that accounts for sound-making practices, the rules and customs surrounding them, their material and affective workings, and the position of the embodied listener. In doing so, I highlight how collective sound-making practices in the House of Commons remain underexamined in existing studies of political communication. The conversation also addresses the limitations of the parliamentary archives – Hansard and parliamentlive.tv – which flatten the spatial and affective dimensions of debate. Through both ideological omissions and technical constraints, these archives often obscure intimidatory practices such as jeering, barracking and sledging. I reflect on the challenges this poses for research and on the potential of spatial sound practice to recover these occluded dimensions for critical analysis.