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Racialised misrepresentation circulated en masse can be understood as a form of symbolic and cultural violence. Such misrepresentations create a dominant cultural narrative that positions people of African background as violent and troubled and therefore incompatible with Australian society. Young people from various groups have been using arts-for-social-change to challenge and dismantle these imposed misrepresentation and reconstruct narratives that reflect their lived experiences. The purpose of this paper is to explore sound portraits, both the process and product, by tracing the journey of New Change, arts collective comprised of young women of African heritage, who have been pushing for social change.

This collaborative research mobilises arts methodologies, bringing together sound arts, audio documentary and narrative research methods. Data gathering included arts artefacts and interviews with the young women and sound recordings from news media to craft a sound portrait entitled “Battle for truth”.

Battle for Truth is a sound portrait that serve as the findings for this paper. Sound portraits privilege participants’ voices and convey the complexity of their stories through the layering of voices and other soundscapes. This sound portrait also includes a media montage of racialised misrepresentation.

Through their restorying, sound portraits are a way to counter passive and active forgetting and wilful mishearing, creating a space in the public memory for polyphonic voices and stories that have been shutout. Sound portraits necessitate reflexivity and dialogue through deep listening, becoming important sites for reimagining possibilities for social change and developing new activist avenues.

This paper brings together sonic methods, liberation arts and social justice perspectives to attend to power, race, gender and voice.

This paper aims to explore sonic play in close proximity to a music, literacy and songwriting for social change community-based initiative. The authors leverage ideas about time, space and narrative under the concept of sonic flux to understand youth’s sonic and aural play on digital beatmaking technologies. In doing so, the authors break from a fixation on the written and spoken word and address sound, aurality and Blacktronika creative technologies that are often present but muted in literacies and songwriting scholarship.

The authors’ team consisted of three community-based teaching artists who situated this inquiry around their own practice with youth. The authors conducted this inquiry through a qualitative, participatory and community-engaged research approach. As such, the authors codeveloped and carried out research questions and sense-making protocols that balance the power of interpretation and epistemologies among us.

The findings address how the joy, laughter and play of one young musician, Malik, moved across different conceptions of time while learning to make beats in proximity to peers writing lyrics for songs. Specifically, the authors unpack how Malik’s play with mobile sound-making technologies moved across linear and nonlinear time that characterize sonic space and sound art, not music and lyric writing. In doing so, the loops and durations of his sonic play were sometimes unbound by narrative structures that often code literacy and songwriting initiatives.

The authors’ inquiry speaks into literacy and songwriting initiatives that privilege spoken, written and performed word over sound. The authors ask what kind of participating structures, collaborations, ontologies and youth epistemologies open up if we think of youth in these spaces not only as performers but as programmers tinkering with time in the machine. In addition, the authors ask what literacy and songwriting spaces might look like when the duration, loops and drones of sonic space and not music are the structuring codes over narratives and linearity.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how contemporary artists construct and position their “person brands” and reflects on the extent to which artist brand building results from strategic brand management.

A conceptual framework proposes a spatial perspective on artist brand building to reach an analytical insight into the case of visual artists in London. The empirical analysis is qualitative, based on serial and in-depth interviews, complemented by participant observations.

Artist brand building relies on the creation and continuous redefinition of “in-between spaces” that exist at the blurred boundaries separating an individual and isolated art studio, and the social and visible art scene. Artist brand building is a bundle of mechanisms that, mainly occurring without strategic thinking, are “nested” within the art production process throughout which learning, producing and performing are heavily intertwined.

This study was undertaken with a focus on visual artists and specific operations and spatialities of their individual art projects. Further empirical research is required in order to fully explore the manifold of practices and spatialities that constitute contemporary artistic practice.

This study fosters artists’ awareness of branding effects that spillover from artistic production, and thus potentially opens the way to a more strategic capitalization on these.

The adopted spatial perspective on the process of artist brand building helps to uncover “relatively visible” and “relatively invisible” spatialities that, usually overlooked in branding debate, play a significant role in artist brand building.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the initial stages of a year to 18 month project to design and produce a peer designed video game for teenagers for use across Derbyshire Libraries.

The context is set with an overview of educational games focusing on the UK experience before examining both commercial off the shelf and bespoke games in schools, universities and libraries in the USA and UK.

The paper posits a specification it is believed will result in a game which is both educational and fun.

Describes the initial development of a peer designed game for young people.

This paper investigates the meaning of sound in social life through participant observation of Experimental Improv and Noise (EIN) collectives in Virginia, United States. Employing a blend of interactionism and musical sociology, this paper is attentive to the sonic practices of EIN, examining how participants construct shared meanings about abstract, or even antimusical, sounds. The ability to construct shared meanings with nonpractitioners shapes the art world of EIN and has relevance for the resources available to EIN. In this way, I show how sonic practices are involved in the formation of the collaborative networks that undergird art worlds. I argue that the creation of shared meanings in interaction can generate new organizational forms as musicians build their own scenes and audiences in the digital age.

As an artist working with sound and the moving image, an in-between space is revealed, a flux between two distinct mediums that intersect as temporal experience and sensory synchronisation. The audio–visual relationship is a pattern of constantly shifting moments of connection and discordance, an ephemeral dance of timing and rhythm that binds together to create a cinematic expression of time and event. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In this paper, the author will consider the audio-visual event and the space that exists between the visual and the sonic via the frame of my own art practice. Through this context, the author will examine audio–visual relations from practice through to presentation, challenging the belief that sound is merely a support for the moving image and propose that it is an equal if not driving force in the audio-visual contract. The author will also investigate sound-based disciplines that the author utilize in my own work, all of which highlight the materiality of sound and how it can be engaged to directly affect the production and installation of moving image works in a gallery context.

Utilizing listening in this way has revealed surprising or overlooked connections that visually the author would otherwise have not acknowledged. It has helped link together interests across geography and cartography by expanding on what is not seen and can only be heard, and therefore revealing a new space of information. And it has emboldened the author to investigate the geographies of sound by supplying a way to follow associative connections across a range of environments.

This paper is an original work that is related to the author’s current doctoral research that considers how listening expands visual comprehension.