Please note that Professor Hsieh's talk will be in-person only.

In this talk, Dr. Hsieh examines the political discourse and auditory experience of noise under the Kuomintang (KMT) regime in 1970s-1980s Taiwan. Drawing on news articles, KMT archives, and legislative records, she analyzes distinct transformations of noise—first as a moralizing discourse in the creation of a Chinese citizenry, then as an object in the destabilization of political power, and finally as an arena for environmental rights—-that tethered the embodied sensibilities of citizens to the KMT's aspirations for democratic reform. She concludes by arguing that through noise, hearing is made political: the ability for Taiwanese to hear noise, and what that meant at the time for the legitimacy of the KMT, positions noise at the center of Taiwan’s democratic liberalization.

Jennifer Hsieh is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor. She investigates sensory practices in institutional and technological settings, with an emphasis on urban East Asia. Her work has appeared in "American Ethnologist," "Hau," and "Sound Studies Journal," and she has contributed chapters to the edited volumes "Resounding Taiwan: Musical Reverberations Across a Vibrant Island" (2022 Routledge) and "Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality" (2020, Oxford University Press). She has held research fellowships at the Fairbank Center at Harvard, the Vossius Center at University of Amsterdam, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.