Marina Peterson, "Noise Pollution and the Physicality of the Ephemeral"

“Noise pollution” is a term in which culturally and historically specific experiences and formulations of noise and of pollution coalesce. Drawing together existing mobilizations around airport noise, noise and health, occupational noise, noise engineering, and municipal noise, the North American environmental movement of the 1960s shifted the categorization of noise from “nuisance” to “pollution.” This shift was significant for registering a then nascent conceptualization of “the environment” grounded equally in an emergent planetary consciousness and a notion of a permeable body. Focusing on sensorial politics of noise around LAX, I consider how formulations of sound across domains of sensation, technology, and law shape the interplay between atmosphere and ground, energy and objects. 

 

Marina Peterson is Associate Professor of Performance Studies in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University. An anthropologist, her research explores multi-scalar dimensions of urban space through the study of sensory, sonic, and embodied processes ranging from musical performance to planning and labor. She is the author of Sound, Space, and the City: Civic Performance in Downtown Los Angeles (UPenn Press 2010) and co-editor of Global Downtowns (UPenn Press 2012) and Anthropology of the Arts: A Reader (forthcoming, Bloomsbury). Her work has appeared in Anthropological Quarterly, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies, Space and Culture, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and Urban Anthropology.

 

Sponsored by the Music and Sound Working Group and the Department of Comparative Studies.