The Black Sound Symposium at Indexical is a 4-day event full of concerts, talks, workshops, screenings, and interdisciplinary dialogue rooted in Black sound and Black sonic space. The symposium aims to create and sustain community; to celebrate curiosity, wonder, disobedience, collaboration, and play in artistic work; to expand anti-racist and activist pedagogy and methodologies in and outside of our institutions; and to honor the long and rich lineages of Black virtuosity that have been diminished and erased from artistic canons and social consciousness.

“Black studies and anticolonial thought offer methodological practices wherein we read, live, hear, groove, create, and write across a range of temporalities, places, texts, and ideas that build on existing liberatory practices and pursue ways of living in the world that are uncomfortably generous and provisional and practical and, as well, imprecise and unrealized. The method is rigorous, too. Wonder is study. Curiosity is attentive.”
-Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories

The Black Sound Symposium is partially sponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz & the Visualizing Abolition public scholarship initiative at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, UC Santa Cruz. Please visit the Black Sound Symposium website for the full symposium schedule and details.