Listening otherwise: From “silent tourism” soundscapes to privileged sonic ways of knowing

Abstract

This paper explores quests for silence in tourism in English-language online media. We offer a reading of media forms all articulating a soundscape of silence: a preferred sonic environment for tourists’ health and well-being. A relational and reflexive approach allows us to interrogate these taken-for-granted desired silences, and to emplace ourselves in the analysis. Using critical discourse analysis, we try to listen to the sounds produced in the texts, and to write with, and about, the sounds that resonate with us, to disrupt the naturalization implicit to the silent tourism soundscapes. Such calls for silent tourism use vocabularies that reproduce a universalistic aurality and binaries of wanted/unwanted, silence/noise, nonhuman/human, good/bad that moralize and objectify. Relational ontology and feminist critiques of “soundscape” help us to rethink silent tourism as ways of knowing. Ultimately, in the media we reflect on and are not separate from sonic ways of knowing seem very much entangled with wealth, privilege, individualism, and settler positionalities.