Educational Sound Studies: Scales and Modes, Neoliberalism as Eugenics, and Possibilities for the Sonic as Postdigital Tools for Critique

This work makes the performative case that there is an educational sound studies and is articulated in three central argumentative pivots. The first pivot provides definitional parameters for the postdigital utilized in this article then connects questions of new medias to processes of scientific curriculum-making while underscoring connections between schooling, medias, and eugenics. The second pivot documents that there is indeed an educational sound studies with an accompanying reflexive discussion about questions of ethics in sonic scholarship and potential concerns in utilizing sound metaphors in an overly literal fashion. A final pivot then performatively posits sonic rearticulations of scale and mode to demonstrate how educational sound studies can offer complex tools for critical sociocultural theorizing. In this instance, it is an argument that neoliberalism can be understood as a mode in a scale of eugenics. Along the way, this piece also suggests that such critical sound scholarship can also be understood as postdigital tools for critique towards increased justice in educational ecologies within and outside of schooling.