Listening turns out to be anything but passive. ‘Power in Listening: The Sounding Out! Reader’ explores how listening shapes, and is shaped by, power, arriving August 2026 from NYU Press. The collection investigates how sound and listening inform identity, embodiment, and social life, from the politics of “sad girl” Spotify playlists to the sonic architectures of surveillance and the gendered voices of Siri and Alexa.
Built from the groundbreaking Sounding Out! blog, the reader curates 40 revised and expanded essays from scholars, artists, DJs, and activists across more than 20 disciplines. Together they trace how auditory culture intersects with race, gender, sexuality, technology, and media, spanning the full arc from radio and tape to streaming and AI.
The essays dig into pointed questions. How does Beyoncé’s remix of her “elevator incident” expose the surveillance of Black bodies? How do deaf listeners use multiple senses to navigate sound? How are Latina voices racialized through ideas of volume and tone? Each chapter connects theory to everyday experience, offering tools to hear the world, and each other, more critically.
The book is edited by Jennifer Lynn Stoever, founding Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Out! and author of ‘The Sonic Color Line’, alongside managing editor Liana Silva and Aaron Trammell, author of ‘Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology’. Accessible yet rigorous, it reveals sound studies in motion, a field that listens as a form of inquiry, protest, and care.
It’s a thought-provoking, wide-ranging collection that reframes listening as a social practice, a political act, and a method of understanding one’s place in a contested public sphere.