Sonically Speaking: Soundwriting inasthrough Qualitative Research

This piece considers what it might mean to do something called soundwriting, doing qualitative research in ways that further articulate the sonic rather than reproducing ocularcentric framings that often recreate false binaries or enunciates privileging taxonomies of knowledge and care. To these ends, this article is divided into two overarching sections. The first section attends to questions of what it might mean to theorize processes of qualitative writing in general, what qualitative writing can do and the ethical commitments such writing should likely engage as matters of course. The second section presents the kinds of possibilities and challenges soundwriting can engender. This section underscores connections to fields of sonic study, how sounds can interrupt qualitative research’s often ocularcentric understandings while maintaining continuing discussions of ethical commitments to ecologies and the things that comprise them, including (more than) human animals. Rather than a polemic, this piece seeks to address what soundwriting can do as well as what might be gained for qualitative researchers and our audiences through such intentions, attentions, and expressions.