Gothic acoustemology: Listening for presences in pandemic arts education

This dissertation employs a Gothic lens to identify the fundamental disruptions and alterations to arts educator acoustemologies (Feld 1996, 2003, 2006, 2015) during the COVID-19 pandemic. I ask two central questions: How did the COVID-19 pandemic impact arts-based acoustemologies for participating educators? How can the application of a Gothic lens to pandemic-impacted arts acoustemologies help educators respond to the new realities of pandemic-emergent education? I here forge a new connection between public school teaching and acoustemology (Feld 1996, etc.), or knowledge through sound. Acoustemology, as Feld (2020) intended it, is about “thinking about ordinary, everyday practices of listening and hearing and … how they are connected to meaning making” (p. 129) which is highly relevant to classroom teaching. I identify education as a largely un/sounded phenomenon that has been utterly transformed since March 2020. Even prior to this time, sound has been a neglected aspect of education (Wargo, 2018a) with significant implications for learning spaces and student experiences (Gallagher et al., 2017). This is evidenced throughout this dissertation in sound’s presence – and, most noticeably, its absence. Through field trip methodology, I examine sound-based media ‘artefacts’ shared by seven high school arts teachers – drama, dance, and visual art, with a focus on music – which serve to highlight the dramatic changes in education during the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years in the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), one of the largest public school boards in North America. The Gothic presents a vital critical framework for revealing these pandemic-impacted acoustemologies, as it validates the barely-there, the barely-seen, the barely-heard. It legitimizes silences, un/soundings, the imagined, and the audiated as knowledges; and honours the sonic surreal, and the sonic surreality, of pandemic teaching in a way that resonates with participant experiences. Through the application of eight key Gothic tropes – architecture, the uncanny, transmogrification, spectrality, melancholy, nostalgia, resilience, and existential dread – I argue that the pandemic was a truly Gothic experience. This understanding provides a helpful tool for revealing the odd and eerie ways in which education and its sounds have been utterly transformed. Some – but not all – of the radical pandemic sonic alterations to ‘classroom life’ were ephemeral; and so this dissertation also serves, importantly, as both earwitnessing (Schafer, 1994; Foreman, 2011; Hemsworth et al., 2017; Wargo, 2018b), and testimony.

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