Sounding Knowledge Network Grant

LxDII are excited to announce that Salomé Voegelin (PI) will be continuing her research into sonic pedagogy with a new AHRC Network Grant: Sounding Knowledge Network, with Co-I Werner Friedrichs, Academic Director in Civic Education, University of Bamberg, Germany. The core research team also includes Dr Kevin Logan (Sound Artist and Associate Lecturer at UAL), Dr Kerstin Meißner (Postdoctoral Researcher in Education Science, Chemnitz University of Technology), Dr Michael Gallagher (Reader in Education, Manchester Metropolitan University), Abigail Hirsch (multidisciplinary artist, educator and curator specialised in accessibility and diversity, Israel/UK).

The grant will bring together an international network of specialists from the fields of Sound Art and Sound Theory, Education Studies and Pedagogy, especially Civic Education, to conduct a multidisciplinary investigation of auditory teaching and learning. It aims to conceptualise and establish Sonic Pedagogy to address the underrepresentation of sound within education and to contribute to teaching and learning through sensory and embodied experiences.

The principal objective of this network project is to establish a sustainable connection and collaboration that finds application within the educational sector, curriculum development, policy-making and the arts. It aims to build the foundation for a longer-term, farther-reaching research project that has the investigative scope and provides the shared infrastructure and platform to establish Sonic Pedagogy as a legitimate, widely applicable teaching and learning method capable to address and contribute to the social, civic and diversity problems of current educational approaches.

Current educational patterns conceptualise knowledge as predominantly visual and text-based, and exclude many learning participants and their experiences which find no representation or cannot be grasped within this hegemonic scheme. The educational consequences, such as disinterest and disenfranchisement, become societal consequences: disengagement and lack of active citizenship.

Via meetings, conferences and workshops, the project’s network of specialists will design plural, embodied and sensory learning and teaching methods that promote participation and inclusive learning methods with and from sound. This will benefit the fields of education, social integration, decoloniality and diversity, providing novel questions and offering innovative methodologies for research. These will empower the scholarship of life-long learning as a participatory, embodied and sensory practice that enables a ‘response-able’ citizenship.