Sounding Graduate Student Work

How do tensions between refuge and its refusals shape the nature of university labor, especially in light of recent upheavals? From the protest encampments on UC campuses to memory landscapes of Iran and trans activists in South America, UC PhD students in UCHRI’s 2023-24 professionalization program map the search for refuge from local to global.

Visual metaphors permeate humanistic and sociological research on labor. The hidden labor of a woman caring for her aging parents. The invisibility of faculty of color in university hierarchies. The invisible work of small talk with a customer. Yet Sound Studies scholars have argued that visual metaphors may limit the way we understand our social world. What would it mean to imagine undervalued labor not as unseen—but as unheard?

Ocularcentrism—the privileging of visual senses in the interpretation of the world and the production of knowledge—has been a mainstay in the Western philosophical tradition, from Plato’s allegory of the cave to Enlightenment philosophy’s conflation of knowledge with light and vision. We can even see it in the motto of the University of California: Fiat Lux (“Let There Be Light”). Yet Sound Studies scholars suggest that ocularcentrism can lend itself to binaristic and essentialist thinking. Comparing vision to sound, Rey Chow and James A. Steintrager explain: “As a visual phenomenon, objects are generally discrete; they have a (sur)face and exteriority… Sound, on the other hand, does not appear to stand before us but rather to come to or at us… Objects as sonic phenomena are points of diffusion that in listening we attempt to gather.” Additionally, as Donncha Kavanagh points out, visual objects have a static, simultaneous temporal dimension, whereas sound, through processes of reverb and echo, intertwines the “past, present, and future into a meaningful whole.” Thus, the nature of visual perception, which foregrounds hard borders and immediacy, means that when we use visual paradigms to describe social phenomena, we are more likely to see binaries where there may be multiplicities, and to see static, essential truths where there may be nuanced and changing ones.

Not only does this limit thinking, but as feminist, postcolonial, and Black scholars have long argued, it may push us towards social prejudice. For example, feminists argue that the gender binary, which assumes men and women are inherently distinct and essentializes women as “female,” has been used to justify their oppression. In this vein, some Sound Studies scholars argue that the ocularcentric framework of Enlightenment thought bore a connection to broader imperialist, racist, and sexist projects at that time. Such scholars advocate for thinking sonically, not only as a tool for analyzing old problems in new ways, but also as a political project. That’s not to say that scholarship on labor falls into the trap of binaristic and essentialist thinking simply because it uses visual paradigms. Rather, it is to point out how thinking sonically could benefit research on labor by offering new perspectives or making political statements.

While few Sound Studies scholars have analyzed labor (with notable exceptions), recent works by musicians and sound artists demonstrate how sound can be a productive medium for doing so. In Music for Church Cleaners, Áine O’Dwyer centers the undervalued labor of custodian workers who clean the spaces in which musicians practice and perform. In the recording, released in 2012 on Fort Evil Fruit, we hear O’Dwyer playing her instrument in a church, against the background noise of custodians cleaning the workspace. As Marie Thompson suggests, the choice to keep the sounds of the cleaners in the recording signals that, by maintaining workable spaces, these cleaners are part of the musical process, even as they are pushed to the background. Additionally, in The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin, the artist Doruntina Kastrati uses sound to explore the undervalued labor of women workers in Turkish delight factories in Kosovo. Premiered at the 2024 Venice Biennale, the installation consists of metal sculptures shaped to look like the shells of nuts used in Turkish delights. The sculptures make metallic rhythms, which viewers hear as they move through the exhibit. The metallic rhythms reflect the conditions of these female laborers by emulating the industrial “clanging” of factory work. They also bring into audible focus a distinct form of suffering that many of the workers face: Due to the backbreaking nature of the work, a third of them must get metal knee implants. Both of these pieces productively engage sound to start a conversation about undervalued labor.

I think about labor through the lens of sound with the pieces below, the culmination of my studies with the UCHRI Work and Refuge research group. The labor of graduate students, much like the workers addressed in the pieces above, is in many ways undervalued. As highly-educated professionals, we don’t face all the challenges of domestic workers, but like them, we earn low wages, struggle to survive in high-cost housing markets, and face precarity and grim job prospects. Our labor is necessary to power the university, but many institutions consider us primarily students or trainees, not employees. Often, we ourselves think about our work researching and writing as somehow distinct from “real labor.” This is due to an academic culture that suggests when we research, or write, or present at conferences, we aren’t working but furthering knowledge—engaging the so-called myth of the “life of the mind.” It is this notion—the undervaluing of graduate student labor—that I seek to explore through the medium of sound.

My sound pieces pose the question: What might we learn from thinking about graduate student labor through sound? I leave the answer to my listener. I hope my work will encourage more thinkers and artists to investigate labor through the medium of sound, a medium with potential to reverberate across the academy and beyond.

Piece #1: Sounding teaching

Students talk, a phone rings, chatter echoes across an open space. A fork clatters, a chair creaks, voices resound against the walls of a meeting room. But something is off: The sounds are dispatched through high, tinny frequencies, as if transmitted via a poorly connected telephone line. Suddenly, deep bass rises: a low tone and a rumbling of multiple voices engaged in intense discussion. The low sounds deepen and clarify until they are centered in our audible frame, and simultaneously, the tinny, institutional sounds fade away.

The piece uses low and high frequencies to undo the silencing of labor at the university and recenter it in our audible frame. As scholars have argued, graduate student teaching powers the university, even as this is often dismissed in everyday life on campus. The opening of the piece represents this everyday life, with the sounds filtered so that only the high frequencies can come through. We hear the noises of the campus, but something is missing. The ear senses relief as the low tones come through: a classroom discussion, delivered through low frequencies. This metaphorically describes the way in which graduate student teaching is the base and foundation of the university.

Slowly, the sound of the classroom discussion moves from only low frequencies to a mid-range one, filling up the center of the frequency spectrum, to signify a reparative act of re-centering the work of teaching. The institutional sounds we heard at the beginning come back into audible range. But this time, they are quieter, and sit behind the newly-centered sound of teaching. Thus, the piece ends on the readjusted scene of the university. It imagines a university in which the labor of teaching is not silenced but rather heard.

Piece #2: Sounding the academic conference

Heart pounding. Deep breath. The sounds of a cocktail party come into audible range. Energetic music, muted conversation. A comment overheard: a person you need to get in touch with… a happy hour networking event at an academic conference.

The piece begins by shaking up your expectations, presenting radically different sounds than you might expect from the title. If you were asked to consider the sounds of an academic conference, you might think: loud conversations, glasses clinking, people greeting each other. The piece refuses that expectation, instead centering our attention on the sounds of the body in a state of stress.

By focusing on the work of emotional regulation, the piece sounds the affective labor that is required at such professional development opportunities, but is not often framed as labor. This piece thus follows a key insight of theorists working on affective labor in the Post-Fordism era: Affective capacities like appearing happy or seeming confident are a form of work in the intellectual workplace. A graduate student’s ability to successfully perform confidently and talk with clarity, whether at a networking event or at job interviews, is work that determines whether they get a job.

The contradiction between the happy cocktail music and the beating heart reflects the contradiction between the ideal of the life of the mind and the material reality of the university at large. The idea of the academy as a bastion of pure intellect and meritocracy is always threatened by the reality of a competitive job market with scarce resources. The pleasant cocktail music, the sounds of chatting, are threatened by the labor of the beating heart. This pleasant conversation is not merely an intellectual exercise; as the heart reveals, it is a tense one, just as much about getting a job in a highly-competitive environment as it is about engaging in intellectual exchange.

What from another sonic vantage point might sound like a casual, friendly conversation or genuine intellectual exchange is revealed to be something else, as well: work.

This publication was supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of California Office of the President MRPI funding M22PS5863. UCHRI thanks editor and writer Michelle Chihara for her developmental work with the series contributors.