This book tunes in to some of the many ways in which sound-and its absence-can function as a source of connection, isolation, harm, restoration, power, control and resistance.

Sound and Detention uses close attention to soundscapes in places and processes of confinement as a source of sensemaking. Privileging the aurality of incarceration, the authors foreground critical listening as a mode through which to explore sonic citizenship and social justice. In doing so the volume evokes the auditory imagination to reconsider the shifting position of detention at a crucial point of intersection between social, political, economic and cultural life. Through its breadth of contributions, the book tunes in to some of the complex ways in which the presence and absence of sound and music can mediate isolation, harm, connection, restoration, power, control, and resistance.

Sound and Detention presents research, projects and reflections on carceral soundscapes in a variety of times and settings. Drawing from a range of practitioners, those with lived experience, artists, activists and academics the contributors ask important questions about the role of sound and music in transformative justice and how attention to the sonic can form part of the work to imagine alternatives to the prison and immigration industrial complexes.

Through deep engagement with sound, music and listening, the contributors seek to collectively unsettle western, androcentric epistemologies and knowledge hierarchies, specifically with respect to places of detention. Tuning in to the particularities of sound holds the capacity to listen nearby – making space to hold distinct perspectives and positionalities in respectful simultaneity - while also cementing connections to broader questions of social justice and solidarity.