ISSTA Keynote Lecture

Dr Salomé Voegelin & Prof Anna Barney delivered their keynote lecture Accessing Disciplinary Hinterlands through Listening for the Irish Sound, Science & Technology annual conference (ISSTA), 2018.

Abstract: In the context of this presentation the Hinterland is the place beyond the agreed methodologies, vocabularies and processes that stand as certainties of a particular discipline. Accessing this Hinterland is a stepping into the unknown, the unagreed, what we might not be able to talk about or grasp within disciplinary frameworks; what might not yield value or acceptance within its community of researchers and knowledge stakeholders. However, it is potentially also a place of opportunity, of new insights and cross-disciplinary production, which might yield much innovative thinking and doing, augmenting the conventional disciplinary knowledge process.

The discipline, in this context, is understood as the walled cities of knowledge. And we believe that sounding and listening as a form of activism and interference, can break through these partitions to hear possibilities, and resistance to them, and to make propositions about how else we could work together, how else knowledge could be produced. In this sense this presentation, jointly staged by Prof. Anna Barney and Dr. Salomé Voegelin proposes that listening to these disciplinary Hinterlands provides access to an unknown sphere that hovers behind and between disciplines and that offers opportunities for new thinking, cross-disciplinary collaborations and another way to see the frames given to us by academic infrastructure and expectation.

About ISSTA 2018: contemporary urban society is a contested space. Commerce generates a flurry of signage and advertising jingles. Industry excavates and accumulates, building uniform structures of concrete and steel, and throughout all is the traffic of daily ritual, the friction of tires on tarmacadam. Commercial interests and planners often distill this heterogeneous field down to simplified brands, cultural signifiers designed to encourage investors. What room is left in this complex of power and policy for community? Where is public space and what role can it play in contemporary life? How can sound, in particular, interrogate the urban matrix?

In 2018, ISSTA returns to Derry to explore these issues, relationships and tensions. With the spatial definition provided by its historic walled city and cross–border hinterland, the resonances of its civil rights movement (of which 2018 marks the fiftieth anniversary), its historic conflicts and diverse musical and sonic cultures, from traditional music sessions to marches, we hope that Derry will provide a thought–provoking setting which will support fruitful discussion, debate and listening! http://issta.ie/