The Sonic Operative: Sound, Activism, and the Politics of Response to Post-Soviet Crises
Olya Zikrata
Concordia University, Montreal
Doctoral Dissertation submitted 2023
The sonic operative is a propositional formulation of what the dissertation outlines
as a situated, implicated, and contextually grounded work of sound by which to craft
activist response. I come up with this formulation to think with possibilities emerging in
practices invested in a sonic format of justice seeking action. Using the post-Soviet
contexts of dictatorship, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and ecocide, I examine the
ways in which labours of change extend to a field of sonically working efforts.
Specifically, I study sites of activist involvement through which sounded actions perform
the force of revolt against what is broadly defined as the Russian regime in its predatory
formations and ecologies of harm.
The argument is laid out through a set of four operational modalities differentiated
as the offender, the carer, the magician, and the prophet to approach sounds in their ways
of performing political participation. I gather evidence from a range of case studies that
share an activist stance and space of ethics, and that reveal an existing arena of
insurrectionary activity. Each case gives expression to the experience of crises directly
linked to Russia’s authoritarian, imperial, and capitalist politics and to the potency of the
contingent moment of sounded resistances committed to causes and consequences of
these politics. Spanning the spaces of activist presence across Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and
Russia, the dissertation makes a claim to an ecology of sonic deeds, a politics of
participation by which to collaborate and craft a form of caring relation.
