More-than-human methodologies in qualitative research: Listening to the Leafblower

Abstract

This paper explores the methodological possibilities of listening to more-than-human sounds as an entry point to critical analysis. Through attending to the sound of a leafblower as it resonates across a university campus, this article draws lines between the resonances of the leafblower, higher education, and white supremacy to explore how sounds become embedded in bodies and spaces. In addition, this article offers a methodology of listening as a process of attunement that provokes readings beyond what is immediately heard, seen, or felt. To listen to the sound of the leafblower and what it does, how it resonates is to attune to how that sound works, how it operates in the production and discourses of place. In other words, this article wonders how listening, as a methodological practice, provokes critical questions about place and space, and how sound (and particularly nonhuman or more than human sounds) functions in qualitative methodology.

Keywords

Posthuman theory critical spatial theory critical race theory sound resonance higher education audio recording qualitative methodologies

The sound of footsteps, the heels of my shoes clacking along concrete, becoming softer as I tramp through the grass, the echoes of voices and soft rustle of a stand of trees as a student and I step into a glade formed at the center of buildings. The sound of Denny Chimes, a monument on campus that rings each quarter hour, marking time as well as space as it resonates and echoes faintly and sometimes overwhelmingly in audio recordings. The sound of weedwhackers and chainsaws, the sounds of maintenance crews trimming and manicuring and shaping the pristine and somehow always in bloom grounds and landscaping of the campus. But especially the sound of the leafblower, a pervasive buzz that echoes across the audio collected for my dissertation research, a burr so loud that it would stop or pause the student I was interviewing, sometimes for several minutes, or in some cases, lead us in a different direction in an effort to leave the sound of the leafblower behind us.

Figure 1.

Inaudible¹.

My transcripts are marked by the leafblower in brackets denoting [inaudible], but it is not that the leafblower is inaudible. Rather, as in the visualizations (and the aural captures, which can be listened to here: http://bit.ly/QRJleafblower) of the more-than-human sounds interspersed through this article, the sounds of the leafblower are highly audible, vibrating, overwhelming, and the talk of the interview disappears beneath its ‘texture’ (Cottingham and Erickson, 2019). There are times when the vibrations of the leafblower slowly emerge, a faint buzz that slowly becomes overbearing, disrupting conversation, voices slowly rising in pitch and volume to combat the burr of the machine until we give up, pausing, waiting for it to pass. Other times, the leafblower is suddenly there, in the sense that it emerges without warning aurally (in the audio) and visually (in the moment of the interview, in the audio visualizations), as it comes around a corner, surprising us with its suddenness (when transcribing, causing me to pull the headphones from my ears, hastily adjusting the volume). The buzz of the leafblower echoed across the space of the college campus where I was conducting my dissertation research, yet as an ‘inaudible’ sound, it is brushed over, cleaned up, erased in the transcripts, and from write-ups of the data and research.

Ceraso (2014) argued that sound is experienced synesthesically, a convergence between the senses. The sensory configurations of sound indicate the ways that you can hear a sound and suddenly be pulled back to a specific and particular configuration of time and place, perhaps feeling, momentarily, the warmth of the sun on your hair, the smell of cut grass. Sound, because of its physical vibrations and synesthetic configurations, is often attributed as holding some kind of authenticity or truth (Comstock and Hocks, 2006). In qualitative inquiry, sound and audio often operate as methodological truth markers, captures on which subsequent analysis and findings are based (Shelton and Flint, 2019a, 2019b). To record a voice is to capture the truth of the moment, to transcribe it ‘verbatim’ is to translate that truth to paper, to be checked against the audio recording. Of course, as Roulston (2010) has noted, the moment of the interview is not purely reflective of reality, particularly in radical constructivist critiques of interviewing. However, even as the interview is understood as a construction, the relationship between audio and transcription frequently functions as a truth-machine, the transcriber choosing what to hear and how to represent it, and those constructions then standing in as data to be analyzed.

Others have deconstructed the neutrality of the audio recorder and transcription practices as a creative and constructive practice that is theoretically laden (Cannon, 2018; Collins et al., 2019; Hammersley, 2010; Shelton and Flint, 2019a, 2019b, 2020; Nordstrom, 2015; Poland, 1995). In this article, I am interested in the leafblower not because it exceeded transcription, that I could not transcribe it, or how it was made invisible or inaudible through the transcription process. Rather, I am interested in how the leafblower, as a more-than-human sound heard, listened to, and encountered, offers a critical entry point for analysis. I am interested in how attending to the sound of the leafblower makes possible particular questions about the indexicality of sound and place. In other words, I am interested in how sounds, and particularly more-than-human sounds, offer a way in to the analysis of place and its (re)production (Feld and Brennis, 2004). My exploration of sound and place follows moments with a leafblower encountered during my dissertation research where I embarked on walking interviews with college students to explore questions of belonging and place on a university campus. Following the leafblower around, I explore methodological questions about the function and productions of more-than-human sounds, drawing lines between the resonances of the leafblower, the history and context of higher education in the United States, and the entrenchment of white supremacy in western culture through lawn maintenance practices. In what follows, I first situate this exploration theoretically in feminist spatial theory, before turning to literature on sound and listening in qualitative research.

Place and space

The leafblower, as part of the practice of place, the sounded landscape, becomes entangled with how that place is produced. Following Massey’s (2005) critical feminist conceptualization of space, I take up the assumptions that (1) space is more than a surface or container, (2) space and time are entangled and integrally related; and (3) the production of space is significant in our knowing and becoming in the world. Following a feminist ethics of embedded and embodied epistemologies, Massey’s theorization of space further emphasizes the ethical implications of a spatial onto-epistemology. A feminist spatial perspective orients inquiry to how our manner of being-there, our navigations of the throwntogetherness of place and space makes and unmakes ontological and epistemological understandings of the world.

Therefore, a feminist spatial perspective suggests an attentiveness to ‘here’. Here, described by Massey (2005) is ‘where spatial narratives meet up or form configurations, conjunctures of trajectories which have their own temporalities. . . but the returns are always to a place that has moved on, the layers of our meeting intersecting and affecting each other; weaving a process of space-time’ (p. 140). ‘Here,’ in other words encapsulates the momentary configuration of space, place, and time. In Massey’s conceptualization, place can be defined as the instantaneous constellation of specific and local bodies, objects, symbols, histories, stories, ideas, whereas space is operational, produced through simultaneous relations, connections, and practices, ‘open, multiple, and relational, unfinished and always becoming’ (p. 59). However, even as Massey’s spatial perspective conceptualizes place as a specific configuration of materialities that are negotiated, and space as the process of those materialities coming together, places are always becoming spaces and spaces becoming places.

A feminist spatial perspective argues for the interconnectedness of space and time, where neither space nor time are reducible to each other but co-implicated in the process of becoming. Spaces and places are always-already in the process of becoming through relations, connections, and intersections. This is a fundamental disruption of the hegemonic notion of local ethics to an imaginative awareness of others, a politics of grounded connectedness and relational ethics which recognizes the multiplicity of stories so far. This means that a spatial perspective emphasizes the ethics of how we are co-implicated and entangled in the production of space, place, and time. Importantly, from a spatial perspective, time is understood not in a linear, cumulative sense (as in clock or calendar time), but as the multiplicitous, folded, layered time of duration and intensity. Time as duration—how the leafblower seems to burr without end in the audio, even as a check of the timestamp shows that it is less than thirty seconds. The interlinkage between space, place, and time is an important shift. As Massey (2005) argued, when we view space as a container for time, this not only erases the role of space as a dynamic actor in our knowing and being in the world but simultaneously makes possible understanding of spaces as neutral—that is, not produced through practices and forces. A feminist spatial perspective, then, orients to the multiplicity of resonances producing and productive of the space—resonances like the leafblower.

Thinking space, place, and time through a feminist spatial perspective offers an entry point for global action, the provocation to (re)produce different configurations and constellations of material and spatial practices. Viewing space as a dynamic simultaneity for stories thus far produces the possibility for an ethical awareness of others, of a ‘kind of interconnectedness which stresses the imaginative awareness of others, evokes the outwardlookingness of a spatial imagination’ (Massey, 2005: 189). In what follows, I turn to literature on methodologies of listening and resonance. Entangling this literature and feminist spatial theory grounds the analysis that follows, an analysis that zigzags between encounters and narratives with the leafblower and local and global histories.

Listening and resonance

In acoustic studies, sound has been explored as the physical vibration of frequencies, the modulations of pitch and tone (Hocks and Comstock, 2017). Phenomenological studies of sound have oriented to how humans make sense of the world through the experience and emotions evoked by listening (Nancy, 2002; Vallee, 2020; Voegelin, 2010; Wargo, 2020) and other interpretive studies have explored through human experience and emotion what sound does (Ash, 2013; Baker et al., 2020; Gallagher, 2019; Gershon, 2013, 2015). Sound has also been explored as a more-than-human materiality through posthuman perspectives, particularly in the field of geography (e.g. Duffy et al., 2016; Waitt et al., 2020). In this paper, I am interested in braiding together some of the concepts offered by these different approaches to offer a particular methodology of sound and listening that orients to listening as a posthuman practice that offers a critical entry point to understandings of place and space. Thus, in what follows, I practice a kind of posthuman thinking, ‘composing points of contact with a myriad of elements,’ cartographically moving across conceptions and theorizations of sound (Braidotti, 2019: 123). I move from physically oriented conceptions of resonance, to listening as a phenomenological practice, and then conclude with considerations for a posthuman practice of listening.

Resonance

Writing from acoustic studies, Hocks and Comstock (2017) described resonance as the ‘impact of one vibration on another, the ringing of sympathetic frequencies or tones in (usually) harmonious ways’ (p. 138). As an embodied encounter, resonance describes how sounds act on materialities—producing intimacy, presence, place, or movement through qualities like tonality, amplitude, or cadence (Hocks and Comstock, 2017). Resonance from an acoustic studies perspective suggests that our limited range of aural frequency means acknowledging both the limits of what we hear and the agency and power of vibrations and resonances outside our awareness (Hocks and Comstock, 2017).

Gershon (2015), in his studies of sounded classroom geographies, took a more conceptual approach to resonance and defined it as ‘produced by the oscillation of vibration, the peaks and valleys of something in and out of phase with itself and its surrounding nested layers of ecology’ (p. 463). Gershon’s (2015) definition of resonance moves us beyond the physicality of waves and patterns toward thinking about resonance as a form of relationality. Similarly, the relationality of resonance is illustrated in Wood’s (2010) intersecting, complicated, and layered maps of a neighborhood, where he suggests that ‘everything sings.’ Everything has resonance—whether it be the pattern of light pooling along streets at night, the frequency of 911 calls, or assessed property values—the question is whether (or how) we are tuned to that frequency. This conception of resonance shifts sound methodologies from a practice of tracing existing patterns to mapping new relations, embracing the connections that make possible what resonates (and what does not). Simultaneously, thinking with resonance explores how auditory experiences are connected to broader social and cultural discourses (LaBelle, 2010).

Listening

Sound has also been explored phenomenologically, oriented to how humans make sense of the world through the practice of listening, or how sound is experienced or felt. For example, sound theorist Salome Voegelin (2010) explained that by listening generatively to sounds, they become more than descriptive sensory inputs, producing motion, encounters, memories. Phenomenologically, sounds become a way of making meaning of our world—a way of knowing and being. As Nancy (2002) theorized, ‘to be listening is always to be on the edge of meaning [. . .] a meaning whose sense is supposed to be found in resonance, and only in resonance’ (p. 7). To listen is to attend to un-sensed possibility, to difference and variation.

Listening as a phenomenological encounter has also been taken up in qualitative research methodology as an embodied and embedded encounter. For example, Ash (2013) described listening as an inherently somatic, or embodied act entangled with how we become attuned to our surroundings and pick up on a sense of ‘vibe’ or shared mood. What phenomenological explorations of listening suggests is that listening is not just about what resonates, but how we attune to those resonances—what we pick up and pay attention to, how particular sounds come to matter and shape how we engage with the world.

More-than-human listening

Braiding together an acoustic understanding of resonance and a phenomenological practice of listening with feminist spatial theory offers a conception of listening as a process of attuning to resonances that zigzag between materialities, times, and places. In other words, listening becomes a posthuman relational practice of connecting sounds, bodies, materialities, discourses, times, and spaces. This is a methodological shift from what sounds are toward what they do. This offers two fundamental reorientations. First, posthuman listening offers a critical entry point to questions of voice, place, ethics, and knowledge through a practice of listening and attuning to the resonances of more-than-human sounds (Duffy et al., 2016; Gallagher et al., 2017). Second, this is a shift away from an interpretivist or constructivist inquiry of what sounds are or what they mean toward questioning what sounds do, how they function and circulate, and what they produce and how they are produced as a part of our knowing and being in the world.

An example of this second shift toward what sounds do can be found in the work of Tina Campt (2017). Campt offers the practice of ‘listening to images’ as both a ‘description and a method’ that zigzags multimodally through sounds and resonances of the more-than-human modalities lingering in archival photographs of the Black diaspora (pp. 4–7). Following the infrasounds of vibration, relation, and contact in archival photographs across time and space, Campt offers how a practice of listening to images moves her toward ‘a deeper understanding of the sonic frequencies of the quotidian practices of black communities’ (p. 4). Sound and the process of listening, in Campt’s theorization moves beyond the literal emitting of and attuning to an aural tone. Rather, Campt’s analysis spirals outward to consider sounds as haptic frequencies that become embedded in bodies and spaces, frequencies that resonate long after the aural tone has faded away. Listening to more-than-human sounds is a process of attuning to the quiet frequencies, the infrasounds of the event that linger beyond what is immediately heard, seen, or felt.

The reorientation to consider more than human sounds, to ask what sounds do and how they function offers a reconsideration of crucial concepts in qualitative inquiry such as agency, voice, and knowledge. For example, as Chadwick (2020) noted, ‘new materialist reconfigurings [of voice] enable a productive reconceptualization of voice as a transindividual process that is not located in individual bodies but is fundamentally relational’ (p. 1). Attuning to the resonances of more-than-human sounds troubles our conceptualizations of voice, challenging what and who can ‘speak’ in audio captures of ecologies, environments, and encounters (Gallagher, 2019). Posthuman listening practices immanently entangle us with the production of place, an entanglement that invokes responsibilities to materialities and bodies beyond our immediate relations—the outwardlookingness described by Massey (2005). Listening to the leafblower, then, challenges assumptions about who and what can speak, what we hear, and what gets listened to, an intervention that challenges assumptions about the productions of place and space. In what follows, I map a posthuman methodology of listening to the leafblower as a process of connecting the infrasounds of place, a relational practice of resonance and listening.

A posthuman methodology of listening

Guided by a feminist spatial perspective, a shift to listening to more-than-human voices, frequencies, and patterns makes possible considering sounds and resonances that are otherwise or have historically been unheard. This is an ethical move. As Haraway (2016) has argued, ‘the need is stark to think together anew across differences of historical position and of kinds of knowledge and expertise’ (p. 7). Listening to more-than-human sounds and their resonances creates new patterns of thinking with/in place and space, ‘learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or Edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings’ (Haraway, 2016: 1). This paper takes up the practices of listening and resonance described in the previous section to expand the possibilities of posthuman sound methodologies. In doing so, this paper offers both methodological implications through its close attention to the sound of the leafblower, and empirical implications for studying the intersections of sound, race, place, and space in higher education.

Returning to listen to the resonances of the leafblower as part of a sounded landscape of cultural histories, ideologies, and practices implicates the leafblower in the (re)production of race and white supremacy in higher education (Samuels et al., 2010). An absurd assertion, perhaps. And yet, thinking with resonance, ‘if everything vibrates than no-thing is unconnected or can be successfully decoupled from another’ (Gershon, 2015: 463). To listen to the sound of the leafblower and what it does, how it resonates, is to attune to how that sound works, how it operates in the production and discourses of place. As Haraway (2016) has asserted, ‘It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with. . . It matters what stories make worlds; what worlds make stories’ (p. 12). Attuning to the leafblower is a practice of attuning differently to the way that we story our worlds as an entry point to tell new stories. In what follows, I listen to the leafblower to see how it connects, and what it produces in the audio files collected during walking interviews with college students on a university campus.

Walking inquiry is one way to be responsive to place methodologically, even as May and Lewis (2019) have noted there are many ways in which researchers can be attentive to ‘the ways in which people’s experiences are sensory’ (p. 139). Scholarship on walking inquiry explores how walking opens the space of research to place, sound, and interaction, embodying the improvisational nature of becoming in the world (Burke et al., 2017; Kuntz and Presnall, 2012; Ross et al., 2009; Springgay and Truman, 2019; Triggs et al., 2014). Walking inquiry has also been used as a tool for remaining present in the research process, an active form of curriculum or pedagogy, and as a means of slowing down the process of inquiry to practice empathy and awareness of the researcher’s entanglement with the world (Anderson, 2004; Burke et al., 2017; Evans and Jones, 2011; Lamb et al., 2019).

Figure 2.

Make sure the leaves are in their place.

The guided walks that generated the audio data for this paper took place in October and November of 2017 on the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. The nine students who participated in guided walks with me had first participated in either a focus group or individual interview, depending on their availability. The walk was guided by an open prompt: I asked students to take me on an ‘alternative tour’ of campus—echoing the language of other alternative tours, such as those led by a professor in the history department that traced places significant to the history of enslaved people on campus (Green, 2018, 2020, n.d.). As we walked, I asked students their initial perceptions of The University of Alabama, and how those perceptions changed once they arrived on campus. We discussed what they knew about the history of the campus, and how they learned about it, and often this talk pulled us to monuments, landmarks, and buildings that for those students entangled with that history.

In what follows, I follow moments where the leafblower surfaced in these guided walks, when the leafblower resonated. These include moments where the noise of the leafblower suddenly overtook the talk of the interview, moments where the leafblower was alluded to, and when it echoed quietly in the back of the landscape. Guided by feminist spatial theory I enact a methodology of listening that zigzags between the narratives shared by students about their encounters with the leafblower, literature on lawn maintenance practices, history of lawns, and statistics of lawncare practitioners, alongside practices of redlining, university recruitment, the specific histories of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, and the University of Alabama, and the national context at the time of the study.

Making the leaves more manageable

Cladius², a Black student in the first year of his Master’s program in American Studies, and I were on the western edge of campus, where the columned academic buildings and green grass of central campus transition to the expansive concrete patio of the stadium, when our conversation was suddenly paused by the leafblower:

[inaudible—very loud leafblower noise/no talking for 22 seconds]

Cladius:

I like, I find these [leafblowers] like really odd that. . . I mean yes for trash purposes, yes. But like, we’re making the leaves more manageable right now. . .

Maureen:

right

Cladius:

and like the things that fall off the trees, they have to be managed!

Maureen:

right?

Cladius:

that’s always weird to me. . .

Maureen:

and that, and I mean I think that those run like almost every day in the fall

Cladius:

yeah

Maureen:

yeah, hm

Cladius:

again, I think the trash—we don’t want trash everywhere but. . . I mean it’s like the leaves! Make sure they’re in their place, it’s weird!

In this moment, the leafblower interrupted the walk Cladius and I had taken across campus. The leafblower not only caused us to be unable to continue our conversation but intersected with and intruded on the topic of our talk. Thinking with the concept of resonance and feminist spatial theory, the leafblower is both entangled in our immediate encounter with place, the particular moment of leafblower-walking-autumn-bodies, as well as the ongoingness of place and space on local and global scales. As the sound died away, Cladius had exclaimed ‘I mean it’s like the leaves! Make sure they’re in their place, it’s weird.’ In this moment, Cladius’ remark spiraled out, resonating with other places and spaces and times. In particular, his comment resonated with the practice of lawn maintenance as an American practice of place-making. The management of leaves, like the leafblower, is an often unremarked upon but integral component to the American landscape. More specifically, the management of leaves as one piece of maintaining the ‘green velvety carpet’ of turfgrass that typifies the American front lawn is a practice that reflects and reproduces systems of culture, settler colonialism, and capitalism (Jenkins, 1994a, 1994b; Robbins, 2007). As Jenkins (1994a) noted,

Americans have been taught to desire and to care for lawns. Lawns are achieved at great expense and by continual labor. Chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides have been developed to help homeowners achieve an ideal lawn. Millions of dollars are invested in lawn mowing machinery and irrigation equipment every year. Scarce water resources are allocated to domestic and municipal lawns in the Southwest. A multimillion-dollar lawn care industry has developed in the United States, unlike any other country in the world. To most Americans, grassy yards are so familiar, so common and so ubiquitous that it is difficult to imagine an alternative landscape without them and to realize that most people in other countries do not have American-style front lawns (p. 43).

Listening to the leafblower resonates further. Leafblowing, maintaining the ‘green velvety carpet’ is not just a practice of ‘Americana,’ but of a particular kind of Americana. Specifically, it evokes an Americana of white, middle-class, heteronormative nuclear-families. Listening with Claudius’s to think of how ‘even the leaves are managed’ resonates with the ways that lawns are produced not only as an American cultural artifact, but as an artifact of white America, a practice that reproduces and reaffirms systems of white supremacy.

Lawn histories

Tracing back in time from the present-day maintenance of lawns mapped above by Jenkins (1994a) we become further entangled in neoliberal logics and settler colonial histories. Jenkins (1994a) noted that lawns first appeared in the early eighteenth-century as a landscape feature of upper-class European estates. By the time lawns found their way to the colonies of North America in the eighteenth century, they already ‘symbolized class status, civic virtue, and a sense of moral order’ (Harris et al., 2013: 346). Jumping forward in time to the postwar era, the lawn became even more ubiquitous, appearing as a small patch of carefully manicured green in front of cookie cutter suburban houses. This ubiquity was not accidental. Rather, it was produced and maintained through housing covenants and homeowners associations. For example, the housing deeds of Levittown, one of the first suburban housing developments built for returning veterans after World War II, included a covenant ‘establishing fines for homeowners who failed to mow their lawns once a week in spring and summer’ (Steinberg, 2005a, para 8). This requirement, Steinberg (2005a) noted, was one that Mr. Levitt felt necessary to ‘project a neat, clean life that mirrored the racial and architectural uniformity of the development’ (para 8). The lawn, then, became not just about aesthetic order, but about maintaining the moral order of whiteness through uniformity and homogeneity.

The maintenance of white supremacy through lawn practices becomes more explicit when one moves to power geometries on broader scales, exploring the restrictive racial covenants and practices of suburban housing developments. For example, Sugrue (1996) mapped the connections between residence, work, and race in postwar Detroit, and noted that,

white neighborhoods, especially those enclaves of working-class homeowners, interpreted the influx of blacks as a threat and began to defend themselves against the newcomers, first by refusing to sell to blacks, then by using force and threats of violence against those who attempted to escape the black sections of the city, and finally by establishing restrictive covenants to assure the homogeneity of neighborhoods. (p. 24)

Likewise, Seligman (2005) described how racism ‘latch[ed] onto relatively benign visions for the city’s future improvement’ (p. 10) through deeds, housing codes, and ‘urban renewal projects’ on the west side of Chicago. Sugrue (1996) further noted that the concept of the ‘ghetto’ was an ideological as well as physical construct and through policing of racial/spatial boundaries and that through limiting Black homeownership to small sections of the city, ‘urban space became a metaphor for perceived racial difference’ (p. 229).

Spatial segregation as a codified practice of restricting neighborhoods to white homeowners has not only been enforced by community members through violence and restrictive covenants but has also been upheld through legal processes and documents at local, state, and federal levels. For example, Hernandez (2009) noted how restrictive covenants and segregation were simultaneously produced by local real estate boards and the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB). The NAREB specifically ‘mandated real estate agents to honor restrictive covenants and provided local real estate boards with templates for drafting covenants that created and maintained segregated neighborhoods’ (p. 298). Similarly, the practice of redlining, or discriminatory decisions made by lending agencies about creditworthiness based on race and place were upheld by local and national agencies (Hillier, 2003). The practices of redlining, racially restrictive covenants, and white violence against Black families entangle to produce the velvety green front yards of suburban neighborhoods as white. This entanglement occurs in both a literal sense (Black families were historically not able to receive loans or purchase homes from these neighborhoods), as well as figuratively, in that these communities, and the imagery associated with them (white picket fence, green lawn, etc.) has become a symbol of whiteness, produced through the practices of white supremacy.

Figure 3.

Footsteps across a wooden bridge.

Critical Race theorists contend that the practices of redlining and restrictive covenants are tied to the founding principles of the United States through white supremacist ideologies. Specifically, the emphasis on property rights for white men in the founding documents of the country shape the way that property rights continue to inform structures of power and privilege in contemporary society (Ladson-Billings, 1998; Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995). Property rights and practices, like the practices of lawn care, tie back to colonization and white supremacy. Specifically, property rights reflect the British notion that ‘only people who owned the country, not merely those who lived in it, [are] eligible to make decisions about it’ (Ladson-Billings, 1998: 15). Through the foundation of the United States on property rights, whiteness is constructed as the ultimate property (Ladson-Billings and Tate, 1995). This then has implications for the continued production of place and space. As Kobayashi and Peake (2000) have noted, ‘geographically, human beings reciprocally shape and are shaped by their surrounding environments to produce landscapes that conform similarly to ideals of beauty, utility, or harmony, values not immediately associated with ‘race’ but predicated upon whitened cultural practices’ (p. 394). In other words, following Critical Race theory, racism is both a normal and common aspect of society embedded in social, political, and cultural structures, and conformity to white norms (speech patterns, dress, behavior, lawn care) are rewarded and benchmarked as the ‘norm’ (Kobayashi and Peake, 2000; Patton et al., 2007). Listening to the resonances between the leafblower, lawncare, lawn maintenance, and property rights begins to unfold the ways in which current lawncare practices – what is produced, encountered, and benchmarked as ‘the norm’ in lawns and lawncare today, is both tied to the present-day use of the leafblower, and the embeddedness of white supremacy in American society.

Redo everything

A few days before my conversation with Cladius, Clark, a Black student in her junior year of Communication Studies and I were concluding a walk that had zigzagged to the far edges of campus. We were turning to walk down the main street that passed the president’s mansion and central green space of the campus when again, a leafblower, this time in the form of a large street cleaner pulling leaves off the street, paused our talk:

[very loud leafblower noise next to us (can hear move from right headphone to left)]

Clark:

oh wow, I haven’t seen a street cleaner in like ever

Maureen:

yeah, I know they have them running all the time in the fall to keep the leaves up off the street

Clark:

ooh

Maureen:

all about those aesthetics

Clark:

Yes of course, especially during touring season. Oh man, I remember like freshman year, the LSU³ game the quad just got torn up it was raining that night and then all of the tailgating this whole [gestures to green space of the quad on our right], just everything was just dirt no more grass. It was so sad because the quad is so beautiful! When it’s just grass, and green and so nice but yeah it was just for the rest of the year just torn up. But then it always makes me excited for spring when they like redo everything it looks really pretty again.

As with Cladius, listening to the leafblower with Clark unfolded to a conversation about control and management and image. Lebowitz and Trudeau (2017) explained that ‘yard care offers meaningful opportunity for subjects to create and perform scripts about who they are, what they value, and how they relate to others’ (p. 717). Listening to the leafblower as a practice of yard care becomes tied to the performance and practice of the place of the university. As Clark illustrated through her memories of past football games and touring season, the maintenance of the ‘grass, so green and nice’ points to what the University values through the type of student they hope to attract and recruit. Indeed, as noted by Pappano (2016), tracing the explosive growth of the University of Alabama between 2010 and 2015, the management of the campus is a key component in recruitment, ‘where pristine brick Greek Revival buildings seem like toy models slipped from boxes and set on green plots amid curvilinear streets of fresh black asphalt’ (para. 14).

The connections between the lawn, image, and recruitment are immanent in my conversation with Clark. For example, the leafblower and my notation of aesthetics leads Clark to note ‘yes of course especially during touring season,’ referring to the period between late summer and early fall when the campus is swarmed with small bands of prospective students and their parents led around campus by red-suited men and women. Touring season then leads Clark to note the quad, the expansive green space at the center of campus. The quad, which often, despite the best efforts of the university, becomes a muddy mess by the middle of the fall, trampled under the feet of a hundred thousand tailgaters each Saturday. Clark noted this in her recollection of a game against a rival university her freshman year. ‘It always makes me excited for spring when they like redo everything’ she had reminisced. Redone, managed, the sound of the leafblower as a tool of management and control becomes entangled with the presentation of the university. As Rose (2002) argued, the ‘engine for the landscape’s being is practice: everyday agents calling the landscape into being as they make it relevant for their own lives, strategies, and projects’ (p. 457). Listening to the leafblower resonates with the constant movement of groundskeepers and landscapers. Constant movement to maintain the pristine grounds of the campus. Flowerbeds uprooted every six weeks so that it is always spring, leaves swept and managed and stored away.

This constant maintenance and movement to maintain pristine grounds is also tied to systemic inequities, settler colonialism, white supremacy, the maintenance of property rights, and the stratification of jobs and low-paid (or unpaid) labor. Picking up the mapping of the aesthetic history of lawns from their colonial past in the European countryside to the suburbs in the United States also entangles with the convoluted and complicated history of lawn management. Jenkins (1994b) noted that the high level of physical labor required to produce the smooth, even bed of lush green typified in the American imagination has always been classed and racialized. For example, in her archival research of the history of enslavement at the University of Alabama, Green (2020, n.d.) documented the university’s practice of hiring enslaved men from faculty members to maintain the campus grounds. Specifically, Green (n.d.) notes on her Hallowed Grounds tour script that ‘large teams (and rarely named men and teens) maintained the manicured appearance of the lawn. Their labor represents the majority of the “unknown” enslaved laborers’ who maintaned the central green space of the Quad (p. 4). The maintenance of the lush, evenly trimmed fields in front of the white-columned mansion of the president and academic buildings was dependent on the unpaid labor of enslaved Black people.

The exploitation of labor in lawn management has continued to the present day. Simply consider Silk’s (2008) autoethnographic poetic account of supporters of the USA men’s football team chanting (toward the Latinx supporters of the Panama team) ‘mow my lawn, mow my lawn’ (p. 477). Lawncare remains racialized. Specifically, the industrialization of lawncare in the 1950s and the invention of the leafblower in the 1970s shifted lawncare to an industrial, mechanized industry characterized by low-wage labor (Steinberg, 2005b). Today, Latin x workers make up the bulk of this industry. In 2018, the median hourly earnings for grounds maintenance workers were reported at $14.50 per hour, with a yearly average wage of just under $30,000 (U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, 2018). This average, however, is significantly lower for day laborers, who often make significantly under minimum wage (Steinberg, 2005b). Listening to the entangling histories across places and times unfolds the ways that lawns become racialized through multiple practices and histories of maintaining property rights, reinforced through redlining, restrictive covenants, white violence, and lawn maintenance.

Listening to the leafblower, in other words, makes visible the ways in which the management of leaves and lawns become actions that, far from being neutral, are entangled in the maintenance of white supremacy. Importantly, as noted by Lebowitz and Trudeau (2017) in their study of lawn dissidents, or individuals who cultivate sustainable, eco-friendly yards, the reproduction of hegemony inherent in lawn maintenance is not simply about the maintenance of the ‘green velvety carpet’ (Jenkins, 1994a), but about the practices of control and claiming of land and property. For example, citing hooks (1999) and Moore (2006), Lebowitz and Trudeau (2017) noted that ‘framing the cultivation of lawn alternatives as a recent environmentalist practice belies the complicated and fraught histories of such practices as survival strategies used by people—often people of color—facing precarious conditions during times of economic crisis’ (p. 719). This again ties back to the founding premises of Critical Race theory regarding white space and property rights (Ladson-Billings, 1998). The sound of the leafblower becomes an aural marker not just about the control of a particular type of space, but about marking who can belong and where.

Figure 4.

Leafblower (fade in. . . . fade out. . .).

Listening closely to the sounds of the leafblower entangles with other sounds of the management of the natural landscape, and particularly the almost constant echo of construction as bulldozers and cranes beep and whir, renovating and creating new buildings on campus. Earlier on our walk, Clark had remarked that she had heard rumors that the funding of the university was tied to keeping construction constant as the sound of a jackhammer vibrated in the background. Like the leafblower, the sounds of construction (beeping, backing up, jackhammers, pounding) echo through the soundscape of the audio. Listening to the sounds of construction and the leafblower pull the listener to consider how place is produced through the aural landscape, how not just leaves are managed, but how buildings and landscape are produced on larger temporal and spatial scales. Returning to the article by Pappano (2016), ‘In the past decade, the university has added 64 buildings [. . .] Around Tuscaloosa are cranes, fenced-off construction zones and new apartments (8,270 additional beds since 2012)’ (para 14–15). The sounds of construction may fade away, but the marks remain.

Marks remain

Sound is resonant in the interactive video created by Andrew Beck Grace (2015) in the wake of the category four tornado that passed through Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 2011, a natural disaster that leveled large portions of town, and left 64 people dead. In After the Storm, the howling of the winds is followed by silence, silence that is at once ominous and omnipresent. What lingers is not just the violence of the tornado, but the small sounds that were once there and suddenly are not. The rustling of trees, the chirping of birds, the creak of houses that were there one day and gone the next. Listening to the leafblower attunes the hearer to not only to the management of leaves, but what is masked, covered, what is not heard because of the blower. Turning to another walk, this time with Bruce, a white student from Alabama in his junior year, listening to the sounds of maintenance and construction lead him to refute the idea that there is a connection between the campus presentation and the history of racism and enslavement on campus:

Bruce:

I think it’s important for people to be conscious of the way like racism and stuff was so prevalent on this campus, but I don’t think that the way that we build buildings in a classical style and kind of maintain the way that things have been done for 150 years, [. . .] means that we should change how we do everything.

Walking with Bruce illustrates how the leafblowers as arms of management and control become part of the production of the seeming neutrality of space and place. Through maintenance practices such as the leafblower the grounds are not only cleared of trash or debris, but the marks of what has happened before. A history controlled, managed by the constant movement of replanting, sweeping, constructing, a smoothing of the marks and grooves of history, ‘maintaining the way that things have been done for 150 years.’ The ahistoricity of place produced by the leafblower is itself a feature of white supremacy and settler colonialism, a practice of forgetting, of substituting one memory for another, a practice of domination (Bonds and Inwood, 2016; Hoelscher, 2003). The leafblower, then, in relation to the white columns and sweeping staircases and red brick of the academic buildings, produce a sense of always-already-been-there-ness, a sterility. Another way of thinking this might be to think of how the leafblowers act as static-makers, producing white noise across the sonic landscape of the university, granulating listenings to a vibrating static. The buzz of the leafblower produces a sense of place that is timeless and immanent—in the sense that it has always been this way (the flowers are always blooming, the leaves are never falling), and simultaneously is brand new. This is white noise not only in a symbolic sense, but, entangled with Critical Race theory and feminist spatial theory, is an intentional enactment of white supremacy. The leafblowers as static makers belie the history of place, producing a veneer that is unmarked, perfect, free of conflict, neutral, unquestioned. Thus, in the following section, through listening to the leafblower with the students in the study, I imagine how listening to the leafblower, to more-than-human materialities, might provoke different engagements with place and space.

Figure 5.

Rustling trees.

Joining up, listening

Earlier on our walk, Clark and I had walked through the engineering quad, a part of campus developed in the past fifteen years during the explosive growth of the university described by Pappano (2016). As we walked, Clark imagined walking the same path years later, how the trees would grow up around the buildings, creating shady spots, how the light would filter through the trees on to the white columns of the buildings. Together, Clark and I paused in a grove in that space and listened to the rustle of the recently planted trees. The trees, surrounded by fresh mulch are dwarfed by the immensity of the architecture and give away the newness of the space. Otherwise, the buildings on this side of campus mirror the columns and redbrick and staircases of the main quad. On another walk, as we passed the pure white columns and wrought iron staircases of the president’s mansion, Leo had remarked ‘this campus is really beautiful but conscious or not, the style of buildings, that it is reminiscent of the old south, that is a draw to our campus, you know?’ The smoothing and sterilizing of campus through landscaping and state of the art facilities is a veneer on the ungrappled with histories of place. The new buildings may not bear the names of grand viziers of the KKK, eugenicists, or slaveowners as the old ones do, but in their architecture, they are indistinguishable, a mirror. They resonate. de Certeau (1984) wrote of places as ‘fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body’ (p. 108). Listening to the leafblower as it resonates along with the other sounds of place: the rustle of trees, construction, the soft click of heels over a wooden bridge, invites an unfolding of place that moves past the closure of sterility brought on by the management and production of white supremacy.

This exploration adds to ongoing conversations in qualitative inquiry regarding questions of ethics, voice, and representation. Specifically, the history of qualitative inquiry is marked by legacies of settler colonialism and white supremacy, desires to capture and represent the other for academic and hegemonic appetites (Patel, 2014; Tuck and Yang, 2014; Tuhiwai Smith, 2005). Through listening to the leafblower, zigzagging through space, place, and time, following the resonances, this article offers a methodological example of how a practice of listening to more-than-human sounds might offer a critical entry point to unfolding histories of place. How through listening, we might trouble questions of voice and representation. Listening challenges humanist conceptions of who (and what) can speak, as well as how attending not only to what is heard, but what resonates, complicates, and troubles what can be known. More specifically, this article has explored how attending to the resonances of non-human and more-than-human sounds can unfold the slippery and pervasive everyday practices of white supremacy.

The need for methodological practices which critically engage and challenge the logics of white supremacy has become increasingly urgent in the months since the initial writing of this article. Specifically, the spring of 2020 saw a historical upheaval in the United States that has rippled worldwide. Within this resurgence there has been a broad societal engagement with white supremacy and the ways in which whiteness is embedded in our society, in the very fabric of our country. The sounds of this moment: voices chanting together, the low hum of military vehicles on the perimeter of protests, the scratch of a marker across a piece of torn cardboard: Breonna Taylor: #SayHerName, the tapping of keypads typing away tweets and Facebook posts, the turn of pages of a book, the click of donations compiling for bail funds, the shuffling of feet waiting for hours in line to vote, pings of emails to organize and volunteer. These sounds are particular to this moment, but they are not new. They vibrate across space and time, resonating with a history of quotidian violence against Black people, resonating with a long history of protest and resistance that spans centuries. As Bim Adewunmi (2020) noted on an episode of the NPR show This American Life aired in the week following the June 2020 protests, suddenly, ‘all these white people [are] newly attuned to this frequency the rest of us know so well’ (9:50–9:52). Attuning, listening to the more-than-human (and all-too-human) sounds of white supremacy that hum as an infrasound in the soundtrack of our society, is, as this paper has argued, an important step in grappling with the ways in which white supremacy is reproduced in our society. And yet, as Adewunmi prefaced,

A part of me wants white people at large to feel deeply ashamed. This is entry level. Stop killing us. This is basic. If the killing of George Floyd could unleash this tidal wave of demonstration, what was stopping you before? He’s as meaningful as any other victim of police violence, named or unnamed here today. You could have harnessed all this energy 15, 20, 200, 500, 1,000 deaths ago. But that didn’t happen (9:12–9:41).

Listening, as this paper has demonstrated through unfolding the frequencies of a leafblower, is an entry point. An entry point for critical inquiry and practice, a way to attune, a way to unfold the layered and complicated ways oppression becomes baked into the very fabric of our society. Listening as a more-than-human practice of relationality and attunement might be one way to begin to shift the ways spaces and places are produced, a tactic to navigate the throwntogetherness of the here and now, an entry point to spur action and concrete change. As Kuntz and Presnall (2012) theorized in their conceptualization of the ‘intra-view’—listening, the process of attuning to another, becomes a way of actively making meaning, intervening in daily practices, an embodied process of becoming together. Listening and attunement are not simply a one-way vector of reception but are a dialogic process of becoming together. What we attune to, the resonances we listen to, how we listen, not only shapes our perception of places and spaces, but shapes our engagements with those places and spaces, shaping them in the process. What we attune to matters because it shapes how we are responsible to places and spaces, our relations of becoming together. To attend to the leafblower methodologically, how it resonates and is part of the sounded, and therefore social and cultural, landscape of place is to ask critical questions of what we pay attention to, what we have been taught, how processes become entrenched and normalized, how the marks of white supremacy are deepened and grooved in higher education, as well as in qualitative research methodology.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the anonymous reviewers who provided thoughtful and generous feedback, expanding my thinking, and reading around listening and sound. Also, many thanks go to Laura Smithers, Kathy Roulston, Paul Eaton, and Susan Cannon, all who read and provided feedback on early drafts of this manuscript.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Maureen A. Flint

Notes

Author biography

Maureen A. Flint is Assistant Professor in Qualitative Research at the University of Georgia, where she teaches courses on qualitative research design and theory. Her scholarship draws from her experience as a college student affairs professional, her work facilitating intergroup dialogues, and her background in fashion design and patternmaking. Maureen’s research centers methodological and pedagogical questions of social (in)justice, ethics, and representation through the intersections of theory and artful approaches to inquiry.

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