Symposium on Sound and Hate Studies

This event is curated by Kathryn Agnes Huether, who received her PhD in Ethnomusicology/Musicology from the University of Minnesota in 2021 and holds a master’s degree in religious studies/Jewish studies from the University of Colorado. She is currently UCLA’s Initiative to Study Hate and the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies Postdoctoral Research Associate in Antisemitism Studies. She has held visiting appointments at Vanderbilt University and Bowdoin College and was the 2021-2022 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Research and American University’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Her primary areas of research consider how music—or more broadly sound—mediates modes of contemporary understanding regarding history, memory, discrimination, and trauma with particular emphasis on Holocaust Memory and African American Slavery. While at UCLA, Huether is researching the roles that sound plays in antisemitic virality on social media, in addition to completing her first book project, Sounding Trauma, Mediating Memory: Holocaust Economy and the Politics of Sound, about sound usage within contemporary Holocaust memory. This dynamic project draws on memory studies and trauma theory, as well as Musicology, to add a sonic dimension to our understanding of the complex political economy of the Holocaust.

Abstract: Polarization and Performative Activism: Identity Politics in Post-October 7th Discourse on Israel-Palestine on Social Media

This presentation examines the auditory dimensions of hate within identity politics on social media following October 7th, defining hate as both an explicit expression of hostility and an implicit reinforcement of exclusionary practices. Focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it explores how sound and silence—literal and metaphorical—shape polarized narratives. Analyzing chants, speeches, and multimedia posts, the study reveals how auditory markers reinforce group identity, amplify hate within echo chambers, and perpetuate social animosities, while silence—via suppression or omission—marginalizes dissenting voices. Grounded in sound studies, this paper interrogates how virtual soundscapes propagate hate and performative activism, arguing for their potential to disrupt polarization and foster nuanced, empathetic dialogue on complex geopolitical issues.

Dr Bethan Johnson is a post-doctoral fellow with UCLA’s Initiative to Study Hate, with expertise in modern political extremism. She received her doctorate in History from the University of Cambridge, wherein her thesis studied how ethno-nationalist separatists in Western countries appropriated Global South anti-colonial rhetoric and guerrilla tactics for their own purposes. Following this, Dr Johnson worked as an Ernest May Fellow in History and Policy at Harvard University. Throughout her career, Dr Johnson has published extensively on permutations of neo-Nazism and neo-fascism, with a particular interest in Siege Culture praxis. In 2019, her article on the German neo-Nazi music scene won the Terrorism Research Award. Since then, she has served as an expert witness for the UK Crown Court’s terrorisma and hate crime trials, frequently dissecting the lyrics, performances, and artistic endeavours of those on the global white power music scene.

Abstract: “Howling Wolves: The Auditory, Aesetheic, and Asset Landscapes of White Power Music”

Jenny Olivia Johnson (b. 1978 in Santa Monica, CA) is a composer, sound artist, music scholar, and Associate Professor of Musicology at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Her work ranges from essays on music, trauma, and synaesthesia to electroacoustic chamber songs, contemplative solo works, short amplified operas, and interactive, inter-media installations. Her current large-scale project, “The After Time” (forthcoming in 2025), is a hand-painted 2D video game opera about ludic experiences of trauma, loss, and the queer erotics of grief in 1990s New York City. Her recent exhibition “DIVE (Lucy’s Last Dance),” a full-scale recreation of a dive bar, is an interactive installation based on “The After Time” that was exhibited at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in early 2020. Jenny’s music has been performed by such ensembles as New York City Opera, The Industry, the International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Wild Up, Ninth Planet, and the Asko Schoenberg Ensemble, among others, and her sound art has been exhibited at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (in collaboration with artist Daniela Rivera), and at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College. Her first two albums, “Dont Look Back” and “Sylvia Songs,” were released on Innova Recordings in 2015 and 2018, and her academic work has been published in the Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness, Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, the Transcultural Music Review, and in a forthcoming colloquy on music and trauma in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. Jenny currently teaches courses at UCLA on sound art, queer popular musics, creative and scholarly practices, music and trauma, and writing about music.

Abstract: Minotaurs, Monsters, and Melodrama: Demonizing Childhood Sexual Abuse on North American TV

This talk critically examines the aesthetics of TV shows about childhood sexual abuse (CSA) in North America during the 1980s and 1990s, focusing on how these narratives mobilized cultural hate and fear to shape public perceptions of trauma and abuse. This period of time was characterized by an explosion of research on trauma—including the traumas of sexual abuse and incest—in the psychological and social sciences, catalyzed in part by the return of traumatized veterans from the Vietnam War. In the wake of these new discourses on trauma, numerous TV shows, made-for-TV movies, and Public Service Announcements about childhood sexual abuse began airing throughout the United States. These televisual offerings often relied on richly melodramatic morality tales that framed CSA perpetrators as simplistically evil monsters. Through this lens, hate and fear became central to these portrayals, displacing systemic accountability and flattening complex truths about the societal conditions enabling abuse.

I argue that television at the turn of the 21st century acted as a “labyrinth” for containing the “minotaur” figure of the child sex abuse perpetrator, controlling the dominant narrative about what causes CSA, and fervently demonizing a series of imagined, convenient reasons for its existence. Driven by hate-filled rhetoric and moral panic, public television’s framing of CSA as the result of a supernatural evil reinforced patriarchal and heteronormative ideals, and presented CSA as an anomaly that arises only when the nuclear family is destabilized.

Nina Eidsheim (she/her) is the author of Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice and The Race of Sound: Listening, Timbre, and Vocality in African American Music; co-editing Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies; Co-editor of the Refiguring American Music book series for Duke University Press. She received her bachelor of music from the voice program at the Agder Conservatory (Norway); MFA in vocal performance from the California Institute of the Arts; and Ph.D. in Musicology from the University of California, San Diego. Eidsheim is Professor of Musicology at The UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music and founder and director of the UCLA Practice-based Experimental Epistemology (PEER) Lab, an experimental research Lab dedicated to decolonializing data, methodology, and analysis, in and through multisensory creative practices. Current projects include a book collaboration with Wadada Leo Smith and a multi-model project that will map networks of metaphors that structure musical community, discourse, and practice.