Product details
- ISBN 9781032047348
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 29 Jun 2026
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Bringing together contributors with backgrounds in ethnography, theatre, design, music, and sound, Polisonics: Collective Listening and the Politics of Sound demonstrates the importance of sound in design and how the sonic offers alternatives to dominant, singular, and technologically determined narratives.
From sonic street interventions to rural field recording, water fountains to community listening sessions, and Palestinian Hip-Hop to sound for VR, this book foregrounds participatory modes of making and collective engagement, particularly those rooted in musical cultures. It examines how relational approaches to sound can help reshape paradigms and challenge systemic inequalities, build communities, and resist structural injustice.
With chapters on areas including audio description, sound systems, and the use of machine listening as a tool for immigration control, Polisonics will be of interest to activists, academics, and musicians as well as those studying and working in sound design, ethnography, social justice, and theatre.
Matt Lewis is an artist and researcher based in Margate and London. Informed by a background in music, he is passionate about the importance of coming together in groups to make things happen. He has a PhD from Goldsmiths and works at the Royal College of Art in London, where he teaches sound and is part of the Voicing Sound research group.
Manal Massalha is a London-based sociologist, urban ethnographer, and social documentary photographer/videographer. Manal holds a PhD from the London School of Economics, and her practice explores the everyday and the mundane, the human and the urban, the cultural and the social, and the political and the economic.
