In Poetics of Listening, renowned sound studies scholar Brandon LaBelle brings critical attention to listening as a practice, one that can wield significant impact onto individual, interpersonal and community wellbeing.From self-determination to social participation, somatic healing to collective repair, political recognition to ecological engagement, listening is vitally influential in negotiating our most fundamental challenges. Through thoughtful examin...

Acoustic Justice engages issues of recognition and misrecognition by mobilizing an acoustic framework. From the vibrational intensities of common life to the rhythm of bodies in movement, and drawing from his ongoing work on sound and agency, Brandon LaBelle positions acoustics, and the broader experience of listening, as a dynamic means for fostering responsiveness, understanding, dispute, and the work of reorientation. As such, acoustic justice emerges as a compelling platform f...

Background Noise follows the development of sound as an artistic medium and illustrates how sound is put to use within modes of composition, installation, and performance. While chronological in its structure, Brandon LaBelle's book is informed by spatial thinking - weaving architecture, environments, and the specifics of location into the work of sound, with the aim of formulating an expansive history and understanding of sound art.At its center the book presupposes an in...

The revised edition of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life offers an expansive reading of auditory life. It provides a careful consideration of the performative dynamics inherent to sounding and listening, and discusses how sound studies may illuminate understandings of contemporary society. Combining research on urbanism, popular culture, street life and sonic technologies, Acoustic Territories opens up a range of critical perspectives--it challenges de...

Lexicon of the Mouth surveys the oral cavity as the central channel by which self and surrounding are brought into relation. Questions of embodiment and agency, attachment and loss, incorporation and hunger, locution and the non-sensical are critically examined. In doing so, LaBelle emphasizes the mouth as a vital conduit for negotiating "the foundational narrative of proper speech." Lexicon of the Mouth aims for a viscous, poetic and resonant discourse of subjectivity, d...

Sophie Young tells her shocking true story in Please Will Someone Help Me?Sophie Young was born into a dysfunctional family, with a violent mother and father. Sophie was routinely neglected and harmed, starved and left to fend for herself. Social workers were often involved but, despite numerous visits and extensive reports, nothing was ever done.When Sophie was six, her life took another horrible turn: her adored grandfather began to sexually abuse her....

Easy-to-follow mindfulness exercises you can do every day to fundamentally transform your relationship with time.We’re all struggling to find time in our lives, but somehow there’s never enough to go around. We’re too tired to think, too wired to focus, less efficient than we want to be, and guilty about not getting enough time with our loved ones.We all know that we feel starved for time, but what are we actually doing about it? Precious little. In The...

This book presents the major philosophical doctrines of phenomenology in a clear, lively style with an abundance of examples. The book examines such phenomena as perception, pictures, imagination, memory, language, and reference, and shows how human thinking arises from experience. It also studies personal identity as established through time and discusses the nature of philosophy. In addition to providing a new interpretation of the correspondence theory of truth, the author also explains...

A new theory is taking hold in neuroscience. It is the theory that the brain is essentially a hypothesis-testing mechanism, one that attempts to minimise the error of its predictions about the sensory input it receives from the world. It is an attractive theory because powerful theoretical arguments support it, and yet it is at heart stunningly simple. Jakob Hohwy explains and explores this theory from the perspective of cognitive science and philosophy. The key argument throughout The...

The senses can be powerful triggers for memories of our past, eliciting a range of both positive and negative emotions. The smell or taste of a long forgotten sweet can stimulate a rich emotional response connected to our childhood, or a piece of music transport us back to our adolescence. Sense memories can be linked to all the senses - sound, vision, and even touch can also trigger intense and emotional memories of our past. In The Proust Effect, we learn about why sense memori...

From the bestselling author of Assholes: A Theory, a book that—in the tradition of Shopclass as Soulcraft, Barbarian Days and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—uses the experience and the ethos of surfing to explore key concepts in philosophy.The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once declared "the ideal limit of aquatic sports . . . is waterskiing." The avid surfer and lavishly credentialed academic philosopher...

Modern philosophy finds it difficult to give a satisfactory picture of the place of minds in the world. In Mind and World, based on the 1991 John Locke Lectures, one of the most distinguished philosophers writing today offers his diagnosis of this difficulty and points to a cure. In doing so, he delivers the most complete and ambitious statement to date of his own views, a statement that no one concerned with the future of philosophy can afford to ignore.John McDowell ampl...