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Moments from Syncopated Resonances

Session One:

Session Two:

Thank you to those who joined our “Syncopated Resonances” event for Session One and/or Session Two, featuring Deborah Kapchan and Cassandra Hartblay. This time, we hosted two sessions for working across different time zones. In Session One, each speaker spoke briefly to their experiences of working through the body/bodies, and we moved onto discussing questions that were raised by the fellows. In Session Two, we watched the recording of Session One for an hour while sharing our real-time reactions in the chat.

Deborah Kapchan has been working on religious practice of Sufi women for a long time, thinking about aesthetics, sublimity, and affect by asking what happens when bodies are aligned through sonic practices of chanting. She discusses in a series of her work, including her chapters in Theorizing Sound Writing, the transformative potential of sound knowledge in what she calls transduction, in forms of listening in particular.

Cassandra Hartblay has been engaging the body from the perspective of disability studies. In her article theorizing “disability expertise,” which the fellows read before the workshop, she discusses how embodied experience of different abilities may be engaged to think critically about the normalizing forces of the designed world and the socialities of bodies in general. She has also produced a documentary play based on her ethnographic interviews, “I Was Never Alone.” In an experimental space, she noted, the difference in bodily capacities may become an opportunity for aesthetic translation.

In Session Two, many people shared their thoughts to the chat as a way to perform syncopated resonances in a virtual setting. The chat can be accessed here as well.

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