Sound, Law and Place

Legal Otologies | Hear Law Sound is a series of workshops at the Westminster Law & Theory Lab at University of Westminster, hosted by Julia Chryssostalis and Danilo Mandic. The residencies provide a platform through which to examine the ear in law – its structures, functions, practices, lexicons and locations – and more generally the legal register of the aural and the auditory in its relation to sound. This event is supported also by the Centre for Law, Society and Popular Culture at the same university.

In this workshop, we are joined by scholar Derek Baron, to discuss recent work of Derek’s and explore the theme of Sound, Law, and Place. This session centers around the way that sound and law have the potential to both make and unmake space, place, and contested senses of group belonging. A scholar of sound studies, American studies, and Indigenous studies, Derek Baron will present a work-in-progress essay that investigates three sonic artworks that all mediate the question of jurisdictional conflict in various (and often conflicting) ways: Diné composer Raven Chacon’s graphic score, American Ledger, no. 2 (2019), Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical Oklahoma! (1943), and Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), on which the musical is based. Using law as a hermeneutic framework for investigating these pieces, the session will explore the contested claims on place posed by sound and law, both in the context of U.S. colonialism and writ large.

The second half of the workshop will involve a close reading of two texts that will be circulated to the registered participants.

The workshop will take place at The Pavillion, 115 New Cavendish Street W1W 6UW.

Bio

Derek Baron is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, in New Jersey, USA. He received his PhD in Historical Musicology from New York University in 2023, with a dissertation on sound, language, science, and law in nineteenth-century U.S. settler colonialism. Derek’s book project, The Geopolitics of Voice, examines the role of sound, listening, and aurality in Indigenous and U.S. settler conceptions of law, place, and political form, from the Revolutionary period to the turn of the twentieth century. Derek is also guest editing “Music, Sound, and Law in the Americas,” a special issue of American Music, where he serves on the editorial board. Since 2016, Derek has operated Reading Group, a record label for new and archival music and sound.

*(Image: detail, Department of Interior: “Map Showing Progress of Allotment in Cherokee Nation,” 1903)

Host or Publisher College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, UoW