Reengaging Sound Praxis in the Real World

This chapter questions the politico-epistemological potentials of and challenges notions of dialogue and collaboration in current scholarship on sound praxis. It addresses variable meanings of both dialogue and collaboration as general signifiers central both to social processes and the ethnographic experience. What motivates dialogue and collaboration, and how do variable motivations play (or not) in contexts of struggle for political recognition and valuing of forms of knowledge and practices under pressure from exploitation, inequality, and criminalization of the oppressed? The argument proceeds through three basic steps: (a) a synthetic examination of recent reviews of collaborative/dialogic/advocacy/applied/engaged work in both soundscape and music scholarship vis-à-vis the increasing and generalized self-awareness of local-global political struggles and tensions; (b) highlighting the role often ascribed to the so-called arts in mediating the negotiation of human coexistence in conflictive and post-conflict contexts; and (c) opening a debate on political-epistemological alternatives to research on sound praxis drawing on the theorists Paulo Freire, Orlando Fals Borda, and Luis Guillermo Vasco Uribe.