Epistemology of War as a Sonicbound: Knowledge-making and Knowledge-sharing
Olya Zikrata
School of Communication, Simon Fraser University25.11.2025, 16:00
Library of the Center for Urban History
War operates across its material, sensory, and affective dimensions, producing an ecology of bodily, perceptual, and spatial experiences. Within this operationality, it manifests not only as a military confrontation but as a front of encounters, both shaped by environments of terror and shaping the ways these environments are inhabited in listening and collective knowing. It generates a particular epistemology: sonic knowledges produced in the being with war and affording to rethink the war in and through its relational logics.
During the Urban Seminar, the researcher will turn to such notions as sonic epistemology, acoustemology, acoustic territory and territoriality, relational ecology, and ecology of fear to explore the war as a sonicbound and lived contingency of violence integral to the Ukrainian experience of Russian aggression.
The talk will focus on what it means to know, document, and communicate sonic experience as an experience of violence, highlighting how these practices can operate as forms of ethico-political engagement and justice-seeking. It will also address the role of institutions as sites of knowledge-making, drawing on the researcher’s experience collaborating with Ukrainian curator Natalka Revko on the collective audio stream project supported by Home of Sound LME "Lviv Radio."
The Urban Seminar will be moderated by Andrii Linik, curator, artist, director of LME "Lviv Radio" (Culture and Technology Network).
She is an artist-researcher working at the interstices of sound studies, communication and media technologies, and listening activism. She is a Fonds de recherche du Québec Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, where she leads the project Sonic Knowledges of the Invasion: An Inquiry into the Ukrainian War Experience. During her short-term residency at the Center for Urban History, Olya will use every opportunity to connect with Ukrainian colleagues and institutions involved in studying and documenting Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Olya Zikrata
School of Communication, Simon Fraser University
Urban Seminar will be held in a workshop format. Researchers are invited to discuss scholarly projects, research at various stages of development, and completed research that is being prepared for publication.
Participation in the Urban Seminar requires preliminary reading and discussion of the researcher's text. If you would like to join the Seminar, please email Maryana Mazurak (m.mazurak@lvivcenter.org), and we will send you the materials in advance.
The Urban Seminar will be held in cooperation with LME "Lviv Radio" (Merezha for Cultures and Technology).
Credits
Cover Image: illustration by Sam Smith for the Land to Return, Land to Care project