Sonic Abundance

Crystal VanKooten and Harley Ferris, editors
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Sonic Abundance is a limited podcast series that celebrates soundwriting in Rhetoric and Composition, as well as Cynthia Selfe's 2009 article "The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composition" published in College Composition and Communication. Through these eight episodes, we turn our attention (and our voices) back to Selfe's article on its fifteen-year anniversary, as well as forward to its legacy and the future of sound scholarship in rhetoric and writing, demonstrating and sharing various soundwriting projects that speak with and in response to Selfe. Our episodes draw from the abundance of sound studies work to celebrate ways the subfield of soundwriting has increased the bandwidth of possibility for students, faculty, and researchers in composition.

  1. Episode 1

    The Air Still Moves

    Crystal VanKooten summarizes Selfe’s 2009 article “The Movement of Air,” where writing is a multimodal rhetorical activity involving words and images, but also sounds. VanKooten demonstrates different ways that the field responded to Selfe through sharing one classroom example and a sound collage that functions as a sonic literature review.

  2. Episode 2

    Listen All Around

    Abigail Lambke points to the necessity of expansive and reflective listening, an ability that must first be cultivated in scholars and then taught to students. Such listening builds from a feminist understanding of sound and voices, and this episode draws from the scholarship of Lisbeth Lipari, bell hooks, and Cheryl Glenn to hope for an academic future steeped in listening that values diversity in voices and types of scholarship.

  3. Episode 3

    Ear Training

    Steven R. Hammer explores the politics and desires of aural writing interfaces such as microphones, sharing and reflecting on his own aural approach to studying public transit. Drawing on methods of sound artists and field recordists, as well as Ojibwe approaches toward personhood and relationality, Hammer illustrates some ways that we might learn to more skillfully and carefully curate and engage with the materials and bodies of composition.

  4. Episode 4

    Japanese American Voices in the Jim Crow South

    Content warning: this episode contains racial epithets and discusses racial violence. Steph D.C. Parker uses voice and sound to showcase the experiences of Japanese Americans who were forced to navigate rural Arkansas during WWII in a Jim Crow South. As a southern person of Japanese descent, Parker draws from Mira Shimabukuro’s rhetorical attendance and argues for the importance of vocal rhetoric to the history of WWII Japanese American incarceration.

  5. Episode 5

    The Stakes Are High: Reflections on the Class Podcast Underserved and Underwater

    Content warning: this episode discusses racial violence, including lynching. Earl H. Brooks points out the high stakes of paying attention to sonic contributions from cultures on the margins of the mainstream, situating this argument within work from Black scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Toni Morrison. Brooks and his podcasting students at UMBC share excerpts from their podcast “Underserved, Underwater,” which tells the story of flooding in Ellicott City, Maryland in 2018 and the working class communities of color affected by the flooding.

  6. Episode 6

    “I’d Like to Be There with You to Enjoy Them”: Voices from the Past

    Kyle D. Stedman shares recordings of various actors performing letters and diaries written by his ancestors more than 100 years ago. Through these performances, he argues for the power of experiencing voices from the past by hearing actual voices reenact the experiences of others.

  7. Episode 7

    Tracking Heteroglossia

    Jennifer J. Buckner examines ways that soundwriting has gained significance through pedagogical moves that invite remix, tracking, and layering of disparate contexts together in evolving artifacts of sonic literacy. Specifically, Buckner considers how Bakhtin’s work is complicated by sonic compositions that provide unique, material sites of heteroglossia, and expansions of self that are tracked alongside worlds beyond institutional guardrails.

  8. Episode 8

    A Soundwriting Conversation

    Crystal VanKooten and Harley Ferris explore soundwriting techniques and approaches in each of the previous Sonic Abundance episodes. VanKooten and Ferris replay, analyze, and discuss an excerpt from each episode, exploring together the rhetorical decisions that the author made when composing and analyzing how each author’s use of sound takes up Selfe’s call to attend to and celebrate sound in Rhetoric and Writing studies.

  9. Season 1 Trailer

    Foreword

    Harley Ferris asks Sonic Abundance listeners to listen with their whole selves and to pay attention to how they listen, situating the podcast as a response to Cynthia Selfe’s 2009 article “The Movement of Air.” Sonic Abundance represents a range of approaches to sound studies within Rhetoric and Composition, organized into three parts: how to do the work of soundwriting (episodes 1-3); case studies showing the work in action (episodes 4-7), and reflecting back on the work (episode 8).

See All Season 1 (9)

Trailer

About

Sonic Abundance is a limited podcast series that celebrates soundwriting in Rhetoric and Composition, as well as Cynthia Selfe's 2009 article "The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composition" published in College Composition and Communication. Through these eight episodes, we turn our attention (and our voices) back to Selfe's article on its fifteen-year anniversary, as well as forward to its legacy and the future of sound scholarship in rhetoric and writing, demonstrating and sharing various soundwriting projects that speak with and in response to Selfe. Our episodes draw from the abundance of sound studies work to celebrate ways the subfield of soundwriting has increased the bandwidth of possibility for students, faculty, and researchers in composition.

Information

  • Creator
    Crystal VanKooten and Harley Ferris, editors
  • Episodes
    9
  • Seasons
    1
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Computers and Composition Digital Press
  • Show Website
    Sonic Abundance