Public seminar: Nomi Dave (University of Oxford)

Abstract

The law often seeks to keep sound contained and fixed, but sound has a way of leaking out. From the acoustic design of courtrooms to rules of evidence and norms of decorum in trial, the law determines what should be heard and what should not, in legal process as well as in everyday life. Sound can be an evanescent and unruly object, however, evading or penetrating our ears in unexpected ways. As a result, the law applies what I refer to as fictions of hearing - assumptions, ideas, and rules about sound that aim to manage it, but don't always succeed. 

While law purports to be a truth-finding practice, its operation routinely relies on fictions. Legal fictions are counterfactual assumptions that the law uses to facilitate process and create normative standards. These technologies of the law are widespread yet remain widely unspoken. As the legal scholar Cornelia Vismann notes, however, such practices and technologies may "bear witness to the essence of the law - and yet, at times, also testify against the law's self-image." (2011) I outline here three examples, of un-hearing, refusals to listen, and institutional mishearing, that testify about hierarchies of power and authority in the courtroom. These examples reveal how courts construct a Reasonable Listener: a person who hears in ways that are impossible, or at least only possible through the legal imagination.

Biography

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Professor Nomi Dave

Nomi Dave is an interdisciplinary researcher working across music / sound studies, legal studies, and anthropology. Her research examines sound, voice, violence, and the law.

Nomi is currently working on two projects. The first is a collaborative project on sound, listening, and sexual justice. She is completing a book manuscript, Amplified Feminism, based on six years of ethnographic research in Conakry, Guinea. The book follows a series of legal cases to ask how testimony on sexual violence is voiced, silenced, heard, and amplified in the production of evidence, in the courtroom and beyond. Connected to this research is a documentary film, Big Mouth (dir. Bremen Donovan), which Nomi is producing with the filmmaker Bremen Donovan and the journalist Moussa Yéro Bah. 

Her second project involves research on audio remote access to courtroom trials. The project analyses vocal practices, sound technologies, and ways of listening in and out of court, in relation to the principle of open justice.

Nomi is the author of The Revolution's Echoes: Music, Politics, and Pleasure in Guinea (2019, Chicago). The book explores music and the aesthetics of authoritarianism, considering how musicians and audiences navigate between pleasure and state violence. The book was awarded a Special Commendation from the Royal Anthropological Institute, and the Ruth Stone Prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Before entering academia, Nomi trained as a lawyer and worked for the United Nations, including as a refugee protection officer for the UN refugee agency in Guinea. Born in London and raised between the UK and the US, she earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Florida, and holds an MPhil in Social Anthropology and DPhil in Music from Oxford. She previously taught at the University of Virginia, where she founded and co-directed the Sound Justice Lab.