Former SONCITIES research fellow Dr Christabel Stirling presented a research seminar entitled Sound, Urban Multicultural, and the “Metropolitan Paradox” at the University of Birmingham drawing on her work in the project in 2021-2022.

What is the significance of conducting urban ethnography in a musical or sonic register? What understanding of the city unfolds when music and sound are taken as central to urban assemblages—as the orientation point for making sense of urban complexity? This talk offers some reflections on these questions, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London between 2021-22 as part of the ERC-funded project SONCITIES. I first explore how music and sound are often the primary realms through which differences of all kinds jostle, negotiate, and transform one another on the urban public stage, sometimes antagonistically. Particularly in densely multicultural cities like London, different and even incommensurable cultural-historical understandings of what public space is, and what ‘should’ be permitted to sound there, come into frequent confrontation with each other. At the same time, sound—in its relational ontology—is a potentially powerful medium and method for understanding how, qualitatively, such differences often manage to co-exist and function together in relations of paradox and ‘agonistic cooperation’ (Stengers, 2010: 156). It is this I turn to in the second half of the talk, probing how sound-based methods such as audio journaling, listening, and field recording can deepen understanding of the nuanced and contradictory relationships that form between differences in cities, even as such methods present new ethical and epistemological challenges.