Listening for Otherwise Aliveness

Join us as Yun Emily Wang, Assistant Professor of Music, takes us through an "ethnography of listening" drawing from her fieldwork at a care home for Chinese immigrants in one of Toronto's ethnoburbs. In the care home, culturally appropriate music-Karaoke Wednesdays and Opera Fridays-comes to signal life, against the hums and beeps of breathing machines foretelling death. Dr. Wang explores how members of the care home community aurally engaged with (or refused) this biopolitical regime of sound-as-life. Instead, she traces how an alternative conception of life grounded in vitality and enjoyment emerged in the social cultivation and circulation of these praxes of otherwise listening.