Auditory Cultures of World Socialism

Auditory Cultures of World Socialism Symposium

February 6–7, 2026
208 Cathedral of Learning

Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies
University of Pittsburgh
This two-day symposium will forge new lines of inquiry and dialogue in the study of sound and society under state socialism. Scholars from history, music, literature, film, and media studies will share recent work on regions of the globe from the Caribbean to East Asia where the revolutionary reshaping of political and social relations has had far-reaching effects on the way people hear the world around them. In the course of the conference, we will ask: how are political ideologies made audible? What are the material conditions, media networks, and sensory attunements that underpin state control of the means of sound production? And what might a “socialist sound studies” look or sound like?

Recent decades have witnessed a “sonic turn” across the humanities and social sciences, as sound is increasingly recognized as a generative resource for historical, aesthetic, and ethnographic research. In keeping with sound’s unruly capacity for bleeding through walls and bridging distances between people and places, this gathering will encourage conversations across regional and disciplinary boundaries. While the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China continue to play outsize roles in our understanding of state-socialist political formations, there is much to be heard in the transnational, peripheral, and intermedial spaces in which socialist ideas have flourished.

The symposium will include panels featuring eight invited speakers, commentary from University of Pittsburgh faculty, and a keynote address by Andrea Bohlman, Associate Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

Please see a digital symposium program here.

Co-Sponsors:
Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences | University Center for International Studies | Center for African Studies | Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies | European Studies Center | Department of English | Department of History | Department of History of Art & Architecture | Department of Music | Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures | Global Studies Center | World History Center
 

Symposium Schedule

Friday, February 6, 2026

3:30 PM Opening Remarks

  • Nancy Condee, Director, REEES
  • Brian Fairley, REEES Postdoctoral Fellow

4:00 PM Session 1

  • Matthew Kendall (University of Illinois, Chicago), "Revolutions per Minute: Sound Recording and the Soviet Creative Imagination"

  • Tsitsi Ella Jaji (Duke University), "Listening for the Voices of African Revolution: On the Risks and Rewards of Song in Guinea, South Africa, and Zimbabwe"

    Adriana Helbig (University of Pittsburgh), Discussant

Saturday, February 7, 2026

9:00 AM Session 2

  • Paulina Hartono (University of Texas at Arlington), "On Both Sides: Radio's Sonic Culture in Taiwan and Mainland China During the Cold War"

  • Mejgan Massoumi (Carnegie Mellon University), "Echoes Across the Border: Radio, Refuge, and the Cold War Soundscape in the Afghan-Soviet Borderlands"

    Peng Hai (University of Pittsburgh), Discussant

11:00 AM Session 3

  • Tom McEnaney (University of California, Berkeley), "Sonic Frontiers: Locating Revolutionary Sound in Cuban Cinema"

  • Sven Spieker (University of California, Santa Barbara), "Acousmatic Poetics of the Avantgarde: Malevich and Beyond"

    Anna Kovalova (University of Pittsburgh), Discussant

2:00 PM Session 4

  • Alejandra Bronfman (University of Albany), "Socialist Echosystems: the Politics of Recording in the Cold War Caribbean"

  • Gabrielle Cornish (University of Wisconsin—Madison), "Atomic Listening: Echoes from Big to Small"

    Shannon Garland (University of Pittsburgh), Discussant

4:00 PM Keynote Address

  • Andrea Bohlman (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), "Socialisms' Audible Glitches: Worlding Broken Records, Erased Tapes, and Archival Quiet"
Keynote Address

Socialisms' Audible Glitches: Worlding Broken Records, Erased Tapes, and Archival Quiet

Andrea Bohlman, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

4:00 PM on Saturday, February 7, 2026

208 Cathedral of Learning

Festivals of international friendship with the eroticized and racialized soundscapes, bootleg recordings of music from abroad, oral histories and testimonies—these are canonic sites for socialist worldmaking through sound, familiar vehicles for articulating or contesting visions of global collectivity. Yet they all cast listening and sound as vectors of thinking big. In this talk, I turn to the sound archives of world socialism with an ear for the intimate, small-scale, and particular. How can we attune ourselves to the global inequalities, insurgencies of class politics, and moments of transnational (im)mobility that complicate the media narratives inherited from the Cold War? Drawing on anthropologist Marina Peterson's "glitch methodology" for the study of audio recording, I suggest modes of thinking of literal broken records, erased tapes, and quiet in the archive as constitutive elements of world socialisms' sonic commons.

An associate professor of music at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Andrea Bohlman studies the political stakes of music making and sound in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Much of Bohlman's work builds on her expertise in music in East Central Europe, cultures of protest, and everyday histories of sound recording. Her 2020 monograph, Musical Solidarities: Political Action and Music in Late Twentieth-Century Poland, grows out of a decade of research on the work of sound and music for the opposition to state socialism in Poland. Bohlman is currently writing a book, provisionally titled Rewind: Tape Recording, Sound Knowledge, and the Threads of History, 2020–1936, that is in many senses a backwards history of tape recording. The book unspools a constellation of tape archives to query histories of unstable listening.