I will be presenting a conference paper at the Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 2016, taking place on December 14-17, Sydney. http://crossroads2016.org/

Title: What does injustice sound like? The dynamics of racism, acoustic violence and the booing of Adam Goodes

Abstract: At the height of public debate last year surrounding the sustained booing of Indigenous AFL footballer Adam Goodes, mainstream media attention focused on whether this was, or was not, a display of racially motivated behaviour - with predictable responses from all sides. Amongst this cacophony of voices, two stood apart in identifying what we might call the 'acoustic violence' of systemic racism. To the untrained ear, distinguishing a ‘boo’ from a ‘boo’ may be difficult, but to those systematically exposed to its injurious effects, parsing this distinction can be a necessary act of survival. Taking as its starting point responses from Waleed Aly and Stan Grant expressed at the time, and drawing on Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s notion of ‘forensic listening’, this paper develops a political framework for listening beyond speech that challenges colonial power and the uneven distribution of attention in the context of Indigenous-settler relations and ongoing struggles for justice.