This paper explores the efficacy of using oral history to document the life history narratives of individuals and communities impacted by a high degree of trauma. Oral history, I believe, poignantly captures a gamut of traumatic experiences by embodying the multiple dimensions of individual experience—including affective dynamics and social meanings—within a socio‐cultural and historical frame. This paper also articulates the ways in which an oral history project is often directed and informed by the social location(s) of the interviewer and narrator (Shuman 130).

Unsettling the Coloniality of Voice proposes that aligning voice with sound and the human has been a central component of the colonial project of modernity. While sight and seeing have been primary sites of analysis in much critical historical work, my research historicizes how voicing and listening have served as key sites for regulating the racialized, sexualized, and gendered limits between the human and the non-human. Focusing on the North American settler context, I utilize archival methods and performance studies methodologies to analyze sound technologies, performances, installation artworks, and interactive websites. I argue that modernity’s restriction of voice to the sonic and the human has obscured what I term voicing otherwise: decolonial genealogies of voicing that are vibrational, multisensorial, and not exclusively human.

Chapter One of my dissertation examines how mid-to-late nineteenth-century vocal pedagogues and scientists linked voice and knowledge about voicing to science, modernity, and hetero-patriarchy. Using technologies to observe, transmit, and reproduce the human voice alongside technologizing language such as the vocal apparatus, they universalized a biomechanical understanding of voicing as a human activity. In Chapter Two, I analyze Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s works Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother (1991) and Wave Sound (2017) to demonstrate sensorial connections between land and voicing; I also examine the digital echoes of these performances through their web presences. Chapter Three examines how schools for the deaf imposed a colonial definition of voice by teaching oral speech skills instead of sign language. In relation to this history, I analyze Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim’s works, including face opera ii (2013), in which a Deaf chorus use embodied and facial expressions to decenter sound’s importance to voicing, as testament to the endurance of voicing otherwise.

My dissertation is a study of (anti-)displacement organizing and genealogies in North East Los Angeles (NELA). It is based on my time with an anti-displacement grassroots collective known as the Northeast Los Angeles Alliance (NELAA). Started in 2014, NELAA was our response to the post-recession resurgence of the housing market, its exacerbation/ exploitation of the affordable housing crisis in Los Angeles, and its preying on low-income and immigrant tenants. Like NELAA, my project takes on the displacement-driven speculative financial formulas of the real estate industry/ private property regime (derivatives of a necro-speculative social calculus) through an engagement/ examination of the political economies of belonging and the libidinal economies of housing. All in all, my research is a study of Latinx/ Chicanx geographies through the lens of race and property, tenure and belonging. I apply a relational analysis that understands Latinx/ Chicanx geographies through its exchanges/ entanglements with Indigenous and Black geographies. In it I argue that Latinx spaces/ neighborhoods are themselves constructed and defended through de-indigenizing and anti-black logics of inhabitance, a politics of belonging that stems foundationally from the postcolonial politics of being. My methods include critical ethnography, oral history, and participatory direct-action research. I also conduct textual analyses of protest/ movement ephemera, local historiographies, murals, early 20th century booster literature, court transcripts, and legal documents. In terms of scale, my research is mainly focused on a specific neighborhood in NELA (Highland Park), but broadens out to include the area (NELA), city (Los Angeles), state (California), region (US Southwest), and nation (federal housing regulations).