Insisting on the (long-ignored) importance of the acoustic in fields such as film & media studies, architecture, literature, art history, and cultural theory, this seminar will interrogate sound as a testing ground for key socio-political shifts such as globalism, digitization, etc. Exploring the role of sound within histories of (post-)modernity, it will examine technologies of production, transmission and reception; the geo-political roles and uses of sonic materials; the dynamics of social and individual modalities of acoustic experience, and the challenges posed by sound to the theoretical hegemony of certain models of "representation."