Organizing the sensory: Ear-work, panauralism and sonic agency on a forensic psychiatric unit

Abstract

How are relations of care and security between hospital staff and patients organized through sound? This article argues that a shifting distinction between meaningful sound and noise is fundamental to the lived experience of immersion in an organizational acoustic environment. Based around a qualitative study of listening practices and ‘ear-work’ at a medium-secure forensic psychiatric hospital, using interview and photo-production methods, the article positions the organizing of the sensory as central to formal organization. Analysis of empirical material demonstrates how the refinement of key listening practices is critical to the ways in which staff and patients orient to the hospital setting. It also details how the design process for the unit has undermined the capacity to manage and control through sound, or ‘panauralism’, rendering it as a reversible and contested struggle to make sense of the acoustic environment, and describes the attempts by patients to create alternative acoustic spaces and exercise ‘sonic agency’. We contend that ‘acoustic organizational research’ offers an experience-near means of mapping organizational space and power relations and invites a renewed questioning of the role of the sensory as form of organizing in itself.

Feeling your way as an occupational minority: The gendered sensilisation of women electronic music artists

“…Intuitively, autoethnography is a good methodology for sensory research because no matter how hard we empathise with others, all we can ever actually experience are our own sensations. Studies such as Hockey’s (2009) analysis of sensory work in the military, Lyon and Back’s (2012) multi-sensory, evocative study of work at Billingsgate Fish Market in London and Brown et al’s (2019) study of sonic regimes in a secure psychiatric hospital are all developed from auto and/or sensory-ethnographic methodologies. In the sociology of pain, illness and disability studies too, authors also often write from their own experiences to convey the deeply embodied ruptures in their lives in ways that draw in the political ordering of those experiences (e.g.…”

Stuck in separation: Liminality, graffiti arts and the forensic institution as a failed rite of passage

“…Despite the drive to order in forensic institutions, these are not calm and collected places. Whilst patients often describe secure facilitates as ‘boring’, devoid of activity and interaction (Farnworth et al, 2004), they are also places which are often turbulent and tense, in which staff grow accustomed to monitoring minor changes in the atmosphere of the wards to try and pre‐empt and manage disruption and conflict (Brown et al, 2019). This combination, of boredom and tension, of nothingness and turbulence lends many secure settings a peculiar intensity, rather than an ordered calmness.…”

“…The in‐between, the ambiguous, the composite (p. 4)’. Distress, violence and emotion can all be seen to be abject within the forensic system, dismissed and disavowed but still ever present (Brown et al, 2019).…”

The privatisation of remembering practices in contemporary inpatient mental healthcare: going beyond Agnes's Jacket

“…While patients may have limited ability to access the music they want to hear during their time in detention, merely invoking musical reference points can enable reflections on the past that might otherwise be absent, as in the following extract from a patient: I've got Basshunter ‘Now You're Gone’, me and my ex used to listen to that a lot … Oasis, Chasing Cars, all that type of stuff reminds me of home, Nickelback reminds me of my mum's erm husband … Linkin Park, everyone like, Evanescence, everyone likes, Marshall Mathers … I got my mum into that when I was young … certain tracks remind me of stuff I've once done, it depends on the emotions I'm having at that time, it depends on what it's affected.We clearly do not know much about the complexity of this patient's relationships to either ‘home’ or ‘mum’, but music here weaves a relationship that is every bit as powerful as the stitching on the jacket. Patients who can programme the soundscape of their bedroom with music are able to create a kind of temporary ‘world within a world’ where, in a relational sense, something of the past is brought to life within the present (see Brown et al 2020b).…”

“…We clearly do not know much about the complexity of this patient's relationships to either 'home' or 'mum', but music here weaves a relationship that is every bit as powerful as the stitching on the jacket. Patients who can programme the soundscape of their bedroom with music are able to create a kind of temporary 'world within a world' where, in a relational sense, something of the past is brought to life within the present (see Brown et al 2020b).…”