This course is designed to explore the relationship between sound, music, and place, as well as various aspects of how we experience and engage with our sonic environment. The course is first and foremost experiential. Students will learn through making field recordings in multiple locations, creating sound art from their soundscape documentation, collaborating on site-specific group performances, mapping sounds, engaging in soundwalks, and deep listening. This work will be informed by an interdisciplinary discussion of the intersections between sound and the environment, as well as the role of listening within the context of environmental change. Dr. Tyler Cornelius from CC’s Environmental Program will visit the class multiple times to engage and support this interdisciplinary discussion. In addition, students will critically explore and discuss musical works that interact with sonic landscapes and the environment. No previous experience, musical or otherwise, required.

In this course we will strive to learn from the perspectives of our hosts, the Maasai people at the Dopoi Center, adjacent to the Maasai Mara Natural Preserve in Southwest Kenya.Some of the themes the course will address are the complex relationship between Indigenous communities and the State under colonial and postcolonial conditions, the way in which the bases for global capitalism that were laid down during the European colonization of the Americas and of Africa endure and continue to produce effects in the age of present-day globalization, the role of Indigenous communities in preserving the natural environment in a world where the natural environment is conceived and treated as a tourist commodity, and the non-neutral concepts of “progress” and “development” and the ways in which the Maasai people conceive and implement alternatives.

This course questions anthropocentrism and human/nonhuman animal relations through a specialized, ecocritical and ecofeminist analysis of theoretical, visual and literary texts. In many European and Judeo-Christian representations, the nonhuman animal is subjected to the human, and represented as the carrier of a 'value' or 'message' applicable to the human world. In such cultural texts and artifacts, nonhuman animals tend to not be seen, represented, understood as equals, and/or as members of a completely difference species holding value per se, having abilities and skills not directly exploitable in the anthropocentric world. Recent theory has instead voiced the importance of including analyses of the nonhuman to existing analyses questioning colonialism and exploitations based on religion, gender, race, political ideas. Based on these theoretical reading, we will ask: Which discriminatory mechanisms, which power structures apply, similarly or even identically, to nonhumans and to minority, colonized, discriminated groups? How in turn have some minority groups (such as indigenous people) have fought to include land and animal rights in their own battle for full recognition as equal political subjects? We will work actively as a group and individually to identify the cultural discourses enabling domination and exploitation of nonhuman animals, along other subtler instances of anthropocentrism and speciesism. We will then try to leave behind our anthropocentrism and to come up with creative solutions for a more just interspecies world.