Anja Kanngieser

My research investigates how shifts in economic and social geographies are registered in, and through, sound. I am particularly interested in the politics of sound: the potential and power of silence; what sounds are heard and what sounds are inaudible; what it means to translate sound into language; how sound reiterates race, class, and gender; and how listening can invite intervention.

Through this lens I have written on themes of voice and space, labour and surveillance, and experimental politics and world making. I am also developing sound based methods and practices through which to pose broader political, ecological and economic questions.

My current projects use testimony, field recording (recordings of environments) and data sonification (turning scientific data into sound) to document and amplify responses to the effects of climate change and ongoing environmental violence in the Pacific.

Climates of Listening is orientated towards the ways in which communities fight to determine their own conditions of living, organizing and moving in the face of global environmental change, emphasizing the work of Pacific climate movements and movements for self-determination that go beyond narratives of climate resilience or vulnerability. Climates of Listening takes place over Fiji, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

An interrelated project, Contested Environments, unravels the intersections of climate and geopolitics in the region, specifically focused on how communities respond to climate change in the face of ongoing colonial and imperial violence: the legacies of nuclear testing and storage in the Marshall Islands, climate migration and the detention industry in Kiribati and Nauru, and propositions for deep sea mining in Papua New Guinea.