Sound, heritage and homelessness in the age of noise

Straddling the fields of critical heritage studies, auditory culture studies, and homelessness studies, this thesis follows a dual trajectory. First, it examines the critical implications of a recent embrace of ‘soundmapping’ in heritage institutions. A series of crowdsourced archives of ‘everyday’ sounds are analysed as case studies emblematic of three intersecting trends in heritage practice: 1) the rehabilitation as ‘heritage’ of hitherto neglected everyday and sensory cultural forms; 2) a notional ‘democratisation’ of collecting practices; and 3) an accelerating fragmentation of heritage practice that appears paradoxically both to enable and undermine work to resist hegemonic expressions of heritage. Building upon this analysis, the second strand of the research documents my own attempts to formalize a critical sonic heritage practice responding to the issue of homelessness; in effect a ‘counter-mapping’ of my case study soundmaps. I present two listening projects undertaken respectively with guests at a London homeless shelter and in partnership with the Museum of Homelessness. Aligned with an emerging body of sensory homelessness scholarship, the projects question how sound and listening shape experiences of homelessness and underline the potential of an expanded engagement with the auditory as heritage. A core concern of the thesis is to problematize the varied logics of participation and inclusion operational in heritage practice. Informed by critiques of the management of homeless populations within neoliberalism (strategies that prioritise individual over structural reform), I question how peripheral heritage projects like my own might be structured so as to address social issues at multiple scales; both challenging social inequality and mitigating its effects