North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership

Dylan Bradbury, Language Based Area Studies, Manchester (2020 Cohort)

Now well into the third year of my studentship, I’m starting to think about life outside the PhD and ways to continue on with my area of research. That sometimes-vague demand for a tangible ‘impact factor’ has also begun to nag at me a bit more with each passing week. My PhD thesis looks at the ways in which different practices of listening, recording and otherwise dealing with sound have shaped the politics of Indigenous identity in central and southern Argentina. Part of this has meant engaging with the fields of Cultural and Sound Studies in order to work out how to approach the links between sound, politics and identity. Having all this time to study ‘theory’ has been a real pleasure, but the question for me is how do I now start to bring these quite abstract concerns outside of my own convoluted university project?