Sonic atmospheres in and beyond urban alternative schools: the affective politics of sound, neurodiversity, and the ‘beautiful paradox’ of music

This paper provides insights into sonic atmospheres of two inner-city alternative schools in gentrifying urban neighbourhoods of a major Australian city. Disenfranchised by mainstream schooling, neurodivergent young people travel from across this city to such schools, attracted to artistic cultures of acceptance and the provisions for creative expression. Yet these students can also experience hyper-sensitivity and pain in these schooling spaces; the ability of sound to simultaneously enable and constrain neurodivergent young people in alternative schools was described by one young person as a ‘beautiful paradox’. Drawing on the researchers’ and participating students’ sonic encounters from affect-led ethographic and research-creation studies in two schools, we explore the affective politics of sound. Working with affect and feminist new materialist, and atmospheric theories, we illuminate how affective, spatial, and material dimensions of schooling were experientially sensed by these neurodivergent young people. Sometimes sound enacted sonic violence, sometimes it mobilised bonds and creative connections. We argue sound is potent, and often not critically considered, in contributing to climates of exclusion and belonging at school. We encourage greater attention to the fluxing materialities of schools through such everyday processes as sound.