Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to share the call for proposals for our forthcoming edited collection, Remixing the Archive: Sonic Rhetorics and Resistance Across Time and Signal (edited by Karen Téllez-Chaires, Christopher Davidson, and Scott Wagar).
This collection invites scholarly, pedagogical, and creative contributions exploring how sound, music, and sonic rhetorics operate as forms of resistance, community-making, and archival practice across time and geography. Abstracts (250–350 words) are due Friday, November 7, 2025.
Please see the full CFP attached for themes, details, and submission instructions.
Feel free to share widely with interested colleagues, artists, and educators.
Warm regards,
Karen, Chris, and Scott
sonicrhetorics@gmail.com
Call for Participation
Remixing the Archive: Sonic Rhetorics and Resistance Across Time and Signal
Edited by Karen Tellez-Chaires, Christopher Davidson, and Scott Wagar
Across time and space, music, sound, and radio have carried the weight of resistance. From the speakeasies of the 1920s United States (Rosen, 2020), to Cuban soundscapes of the 1950s and 1990s (Moore, 2006; Perna, 2005), to Eastern European underground music scenes (Oushakine, 2001; Komaromi, 2004), to alt-rock movements in Britain (Worley, 2015), and the crossover era of U.S. industry radio in the 1980s (Coddington, 2023), countercultural sound has generated community, visibility, and the possibility of social change. Sonic practices, whether pirate broadcasts, underground spaces, punk zines, airwaves, college radio, or contemporary streaming platforms, offer ways of seeing, hearing, and knowing otherwise.
Our project emerges from a dinner conversation at CCCC 2025, where, after a day of attending sessions, we found ourselves drawn to resonances between underground radio, protest music, classroom practice, and the affective and epistemological power of sound. As we shared a meal in a Baltimore restaurant that evening, our collective response to songs playing overhead in the dining area highlighted the emotional power of music and activated our scholarly imaginations in a way that began to catalyze this project: sound creating community for a larger purpose.
Over time, rhetoricians have spent significant energy working with and through sonic rhetorics, tackling everything from affective expression (Du Bois, 1903; Kant, 1790/1914; Trinh, 1989) to sound within composition and communication studies (see, for example, Craig, 2023; Dyche, 2025; Ceraso, 2018; Stone, 2015). This project also builds upon recent work by scholars exploring the rhetorical, cultural, and affective power of sound and music (Comstock and Hocks, 2006; Dyche, 2025; McGee, 2024; Stone and Ceraso, 2013; Lowman, 2022). Such scholarship underscores the expanding field of sonic rhetorics and affirms the urgency of archiving and re-sounding resistance across genres, eras, and technologies.
For example, projects, such as Sounding Out!, a leading digital platform for critical, creative, and public scholarship on sound, listening, and the politics of sonic culture, are amplifying diverse voices through essays, interviews, and sonic storytelling that reimagine how we hear the world (Stoever et al., 2025) In this same spirit, recent scholarship in sonic rhetorics, Chicanx/Latinx studies, and cultural soundwork has deepened our understanding of music, voice, and listening as sites of resistance, identity-making, and community practice. From Dolores Inés Casillas’s analysis of Spanish-language radio as advocacy (2014) and Deborah Vargas’s exploration of Chicana music and dissonance (2012), to Alex Chávez’s ethnographies of border sound and migration (2017) and Martha González’s work on artivismo and transborder tactics (2020), these scholars remind us that sound archives are also social archives, spaces where memory, migration, and belonging reverberate.
Building on these complex foundations, Remixing the Archive seeks to amplify these resonances across geographies and generations, calling attention to the aural legacies that shape resistance work within and beyond national boundaries. This book project seeks contributions from scholars, educators, artists, listeners/consumers, DJs, and archival practitioners who are exploring sound and sonic rhetorics as resistant practices.
We are especially interested in contributions that speak to questions of ownership, class, disruption, dissemination, and the power of sonic rhetorics to shape memory, subvert dominant narratives, and foster community. Possible sites of inquiry include (but are not limited to):
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Pirate and underground radio traditions
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Punk, alt-rock, hip hop, and other resistant music scenes
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Protest music and sound in social movements
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Soundscapes of migration, displacement, and diaspora
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Latinx, Chicanx, and borderland sonic traditions, from corridos and son jarocho to reggaetón, plena, and community radio—as acts of resistance and cultural continuity
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Listening and aurality in bilingual, transborder, and diasporic communities
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Sonic feminisms and queer-of-color soundwork across the Américas
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Critiques of, or presentations from CCCC 2025
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Discussion of speakeasies, juke joints, and after-hours clubs, and how they function as sonic sites of resistance, survival, and identity-making
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Broadcast histories, from AM/FM to MTV to streaming platforms
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Archives of radio and music cultures as sites of memory and invention
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Sonic resistance pedagogies (e.g., classrooms as “college radio”)
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Multimodal scholarship and performance that re-sounds the archive
Following the spirit of Kofi J. Adisa’s CCCC 2025 Call for Proposals, we seek projects that “recontextualize” archives and histories (Mao, 2013) and explore how sound opens up new ways of being, perceiving, and resisting. We welcome work that affirms the constructive potential of shared communities, while also engaging critically with the tensions, exclusions, and appropriations that accompany sonic resistance.
What We Envision
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Chapters blending archival research, rhetorical analysis, and cultural critique
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Pedagogical essays connecting sonic rhetorics to writing studies and teaching practices
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Creative/critical multimodal projects (audio, visual, and written)
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Artist and DJ reflections on practice as cultural resistance
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Archival case studies that bring underground sound into new contexts
How to Participate
Please submit an abstract (250–350 words) describing your proposed contribution by Friday, November 7, 2025. Include a brief bio and indicate whether your work will be scholarly, pedagogical, creative, or multimodal in nature.
Send questions and/or statements of interest to: sonicrhetorics. Contributors will receive a timeline and further submission details after initial responses are collected.
Let’s remix the archive together.
Karen, Chris, and Scott
Important Dates
General Call – Abstracts due November 7, 2025. Contributors submit their abstracts in response to the call.
Decisions – due December 20, 2025. Editors will notify contributors of acceptance and provide detailed guidelines.
Full Articles Due – due February 27, 2026. Contributors submit their completed drafts for editorial and peer review.
Potential Inspirational (Re)Mix
(This list was compiled through and with the hard work of many of the scholars cited above. It is not intended to be exhaustive or prohibitive.)
Adisa, K.J. (2025). “Computer love”: Extended play, b-sides, remix, collaboration, and creativity. Conference on College Composition and Communication.
Alarcon, W. (2016). Sounding Aztlán: Music, Literature, and the Chicana/o Sonic Imaginary. University of California, Berkeley.
Anderson, E. (2014). Toward a resonant material vocality for digital composition. Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture.
Anderson, T. H. (1996). The movement and the sixties. Oxford University Press.
Brooks, E.H. (2024). On rhetoric and Black music. Wayne State University Press.
Brooks, K., & Martin, K. (Eds.). (2019). Beyoncé, Black feminism, and spirituality: The Lemonade reader. Routledge.
Bull, M., & Back, L. (Eds.). (2003). The auditory culture reader. Berg Publishers.
Casillas, D. I. (2014). Sounds of belonging: US Spanish-language radio and public advocacy (Vol. 33). NYU Press.
Ceraso, S. (2014). (Re)Educating the senses: Multimodal listening, bodily learning, and the composition of sonic experiences. College English.
Ceraso, S. (2018). Sounding composition: Multimodal pedagogies for embodied listening. University of Pittsburgh Press.
Chávez, Alex E. (2017). Sounds of crossing: music, migration, and the aural poetics of Huapango Arribeño. Duke University Press.
Coddington, A. (2023). How hip hop became hit pop: Radio, rap, and race. University of California Press.
Cohen, R. D. (2002). Rainbow quest: The folk music revival and American society, 1940–1970. University of Massachusetts Press.
Comstock, M., & Hocks, M. E. (2006). Voice in the cultural soundscape: Sonic literacy in composition studies. Computers and Composition Online.
Craig, T. (2023). K for the Way: DJ Rhetoric and Literacy for 21st Century Writing Studies. Utah State University Press. University Press of Colorado
Craig, T. (2017). “Keep it 360”: (Re)envisioning the cultural and racial roots of hip hop through DJ rhetoric and ethnography. Hip Hop at Europe’s Edge: Music, Agency, and Social Change, edited by Milosz Miszczynski & Adriana Helbig, Indiana University Press
Craig, T. (2024). “The Breaks, Authentic Archives and the OG Algorithm”: The DJ as The Connective Healer and Curatorial Cornerstone. Bloomsbury Handbook of Hip Hop Pedagogy, edited by Lauren L. Kelly & Daren Graves, Bloomsbury.
Craig, T. (2018). The idea of reciprocity: Hip-Hop feminism, fatherhood and the golden rule–A thought in motion. Looking for the Enemy: The Eternal Internal Gender Wars of Our Sisters, 2nd ed.
Danforth, C. et al. (2018). Soundwriting pedagogies. Computers & Composition Digital Press / Utah State University Press.
De La Torre, M. (2013). Chicana radio activists and the sounds of Chicana feminisms. Sounding Out!
Dougherty, T. R. (2016). Knowing (y)our story: Practicing decolonial rhetorical history. Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903). The souls of Black folk. A. C. McClurg and Co.
Dyche, J. (2025). The Sound of Young America / The Soul of Young America: A sonic rhetoric inquiry into 1965 and the music defining a generation in crisis (Doctoral dissertation). Clemson University.
Eckstein, J. (2025). Sound tactics: Auditory power in political protests. Rhetoric Society of America/Penn State University Press.
Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks. Penguin Books.
Forman, J. (1972). The making of Black revolutionaries. University of Washington Press.
Gallagher, V., et al. (2022). Of sound, bodies, and immersive experience: Sonic rhetoric and its affordances in the Virtual Martin Luther King Project. Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture.
Gitlin, T. (1987). The sixties: Years of hope, days of rage. Bantam.
Gonzalez, M. (2020). Chican@ Artivistas: Music, Community, and Transborder Tactics in East Los Angeles. University of Texas Press.
Halbritter, B. (2006). Musical rhetoric in integrated media composition. Computers and Composition.
Hawk, B. (2018). Sound: Resonance as rhetorical. Rhetoric Society Quarterly.
Heter, T. S. (2022). The sonic gaze: Jazz, whiteness, and racialized listening. Rowman & Littlefield.
Hicks, M. (2000). Sixties rock: Garage, psychedelic, and other satisfactions. University of Illinois Press.
Hocks, M. & Comstock, M. (2016). “Composing for sound: Sonic rhetoric as resonance.” Computers and Composition.
Hubbs, N. (2017). The promised land: Springsteen’s epic heterosexuality, late capitalism, and prospects for queer life. In W.I. Wolff, Bruce Springsteen and popular music: Rhetoric, social consciousness, and contemporary culture, pp. 90-107. Routledge.
Hughes, C. L. (2017). Country soul: Making music and making race in the American South.
Kahn-Egan, S. (1998). Pedagogy of the pissed: Punk pedagogy in the first-year writing classroom. College Composition and Communication.
Kannan, V. (2016). The Mahamantra, kirtan performance, and the embodied circulation of cultural rhetoric. Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, 21.
Kant, I. (1790/1914). Critique of Judgment. (J. H. Bernard, Trans.). Macmillan.
Katz, S. B. (2020). Sonic rhetorics as ethics in action: Hidden temporalities of sound in language(s). Humanities.
Komaromi, A. (2004). The Material Existence of Soviet Samizdat. Slavic Review.
Lesh, P. (2007). Searching for the sound. Back Bay Books.
Lloyd, B. (2014). The form is the message: Bob Dylan and the 1960s. Rock Music Studies.
Lowman, N. (2022). The political efficacy of Kendrick Lamar’s performance rhetoric. Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric.
Lynd, S., & Grubacic, A. (2008). Wobblies & Zapatistas: Conversations on anarchism, Marxism and radical history. PM Press.
Madrid, A. L. (2025). The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening.
Maíllo-Pozo, S. (2025). Bridging Sonic Borders: Popular Music in Contemporary Dominican/Dominicanyork Literature. University of Texas Press.
Malvinni, D. (2016). Experiencing the Rolling Stones. Rowman & Littlefield.
McAdam, D. (1990). Freedom Summer. Oxford University Press.
McGee, A. (2024). From Blues to Beyoncé: A century of Black women’s generational sonic rhetorics. SUNY Press.
McGee, A. & Cisneros, D.J. (2018). Looking Forward, Looking Back: A Dialogue on “The Imperative of Racial Rhetorical Criticism.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.
McKee, H. (2006). Sound matters: Notes toward the analysis and design of sound in multimodal webtexts. Computers and Composition.
Measel, M. D. (2021). Musical listening: Addressing the rhetoric of music in sonic and multimodal composition. Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics.
Miller, P. D., aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid. (2004). Rhythm science. Cambridge, MA: Mediawork/MIT Press.
Minks, A., & Ochoa Gautier, A. M. (2021). Music, language, aurality: Latin American and Caribbean resoundings. Annual Review of Anthropology, 50(1), 23-39.
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Stoever, J.L. (2016). The sonic color line: Race and the cultural politics of listening. New York University Press.
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Stone, J. (2015). Listening to the sonic archive: Rhetoric, representation, and race in the Lomax prison recordings. Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture.
Stone, J., & Ceraso, S. (2013). Sonic rhetorics: A mashed-up introduction in sound. Harlot: A Review of Art and Communication.
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[CFP] Remixing the Archive- Sonic Rhetorics and Resistance Across Time and Signal.pdf