What is "heard" at a pipeline hearing

The gerrymandering of aurality in British Columbia, Canada

Bibliographic Data

ID2260182
AuthorsLee Veeraraghavan (Department of Music Tulane University New Orleans USA, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume126
Issue2
Pages248-259
Publication date2024-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Anthropologist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7294 • E-ISSN: 1548-1433
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/aman.13965
OpenAlexW4392350949
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited36

This article explores how sound technologies are deployed by government agencies to produce legitimacy in the struggle over oil pipelines in British Columbia, Canada. Activists seeking to stop the Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain pipelines have mobilized noise and silence as tactics of protest and refusal. For example, one thousand demonstrators make a cacophony outside a Vancouver hotel in protest of the Northern Gateway pipeline. Communications technology, though, is deployed here by the state to compress and control. In one of the hotel's small, impregnable conference rooms, public hearings over the pipeline are taking place-only the public is not allowed inside: the proceedings are being livestreamed to a hotel two kilometers away. On unceded Coast Salish territory, the legitimacy of pipeline hearings is also contested because the continued existence of Indigenous legal orders represents a challenge to the pipelines in question. Technological mediation makes it possible to satisfy one requirement of legitimacy: democratically granted representative power. The challenge to the legal system highlighted by the continued existence of the Indigenous, though, is managed through audile techniques deployed as anthropotechnologies. The implications for a politics of sound must be considered in light of sound's mediation, which is never politically neutral

Criminology · Democracy · Gerrymandering · Media studies · Pipeline (software · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Diverse Musicological Studies · Engineering · History · Law

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