Justin Armstrong

Working With Sound

How Do We Sound? is a collaborative project that proposes a mode of experiencing and understanding sound not simply as a backdrop, but as a central component of identity and belonging in an era of saturation, excess, and noise in all of its forms. Here, my student ethnographers and I are interested in documenting and analyzing sound as a direct connection to place-based identity, asking how and why we can (and should) engage with sound as a means of better understanding who we are as inhabitants of late-stage capitalism.

The resulting work forms a unique audio-ethnographic account of our aural being through collecting, analyzing and assembling endemic sounds into interactive anthropological encounters. Earlier examples of this work can be found here.

A picture of a man resting his head on his hand, sitting at a desk

About Justin Armstrong

Justin Armstrong is a Senior Lecturer in Writing and Anthropology at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. His main research interests are experimental ethnography, ethnographic writing, audio ethnography, economic anthropology, and the anthropology of islands. He conducts research in Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Newfoundland, and Micronesia. He is the author of a novel, Wyomings (2018) and Anthropology, Islands and the Search for Meaning in the Anthropocene (2023), along with a number of scholarly articles and book chapters. He was born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, and lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

Back to skip to quick links