In collaboration with LA Listens and the Design Studio for Social Intervention, we’re hosting a conference, Listening to the City: Engagement, Exploration + Intervention through Sound on May 25 & 26th, 2017. This 2-day convening is intended for activists, artists, residents, researchers, students, teachers, and community practitioners with an interest in sound as a creative mode of inquiry, a tool for democratic engagement, and a means for social change.
The conference program will offer a mix of hands-on workshops, performances, presentations, panel discussions, installations, field trips, listening parties, and other types of sessions that demonstrate how sound can can better prepare us to understand, empathize, and engage with the complexities of our urban environments. Here’s a list of confirmed conference sessions:
- Listen Up! Democracy + the Environment
- Listening to Community Needs: Asset Based Community Development through a Historical Soundwalk Project
- Weaving Our Voices, Uniting Our Identities
- Remixing the City
- Muff the Police: Tactics for Protecting Communities from Police Sound
- Nomadic Civic Sculpture: Sound Bites of Egelston
- Sister Outsider: Say Her Name
- The Overheard: An Ecological Approach to Public Sounding Art
- We’re at home in East Boston: Field Trip + Listening Tour with ZUMIX’s Radio Street Team
- Secret Languages (a poetry reading)
- Phonos: A Live Audio Escape into Another World
- Neighborhood Storytelling through Podcasts
- Talking the City: Unpacking the Intimate Interview
Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the conference will begin at MIT on Thursday morning, and will then invite participants to journey to several other locations throughout Greater Boston and Cambridge over the course of the two days.
The conference is free but space is limited and registration by May 20th is required. Sign up to reserve your spot today!
Please contact Allegra Williams at allegraw@mit.edu with any questions.