Reading: Multi-issue Multi-sited Movements and Performance

In the lecture and videos this week the focus is on how activists have used music/sounds, costuming and space to articulate their political standpoints. The protesters use carnival strategies which are said to “turn the world upside down.” If we think about it, then, for these strategies to work there has to be a sense of ‘the world right side up.’ We might often feel that ‘the world right side up’ is just normal and natural. However, read this week’s reading by Jonathan Sterne entitled Sounds Like the Mall of America. In it he descries in which the space of malls is not simply made by bricks and mortar – it is also made by the use of sound. In your three page response: Summarize Sterne’s argument and the evidence he provides for that argument Identify two ways in which he says that different genres of music define different spaces within the mall and suggest different ways of behaving Ask yourself how a protest group might turn the sonic world of a mall upside down. Describe the sound choices they might make. (uhh… this is only a thought experiment. This is not an invitation to disrupt malls in Seattle)