Voice

Catalog description

What does it mean to find one's voice; and how expansive is the voice beyond its use for everyday communication? How do we recognize our own voice amongst other voices that move around and through us? Both a tool for self-expression and a form of social activism, the voice is a multidimensional material that has an expansive meaning across different cultures, genres, social and political movements as well as within religious practices. Drawing on voice studies and practice-based research, this course will explore the voice as both a vehicle for individual self-expression and a vehicle for entities who might speak "through" us, such as supernatural beings, ancestors, collective movements, and others. We will consider discourses that seek to expand notions of the experience of 'finding' and surrendering one's voice; look at glossolalia ("speaking in tongues") and translation, and the ethics of speaking on another’s behalf and the ideologies of using one's voice as a form of activism. Students will draw upon their own cultural heritage to produce autoethnographic reflections on the voice, examining theories on trance, babbling and non-verbal communication within interspecies relations