academic freedom

Nat Nesvaderani

2025 / 11 minutes
Canada
Arabic, English, French, Hebrew, Persian with English subtitles

This sound work is about experiences of academic freedom on college campuses. Using my smartphone in winter 2023, I grappled with feelings of dislocation, anger, sadness, and deep dissonance amid the relative quietness, tranquility, and even beauty of Quebec, Canada, while student solidarity encampments unfolded across North America, eventually extending into Europe. In winter 2023, I recorded the sound of rocks falling on ice in snowy Quebec with the intent of drawing attention to the length of the genocide, stretching from fall into winter. But then winter became spring, and spring became summer. The ice breaking from these rocks melted away. When editing, returning to this sound produced a feeling of repetition—a concept prominent in writing about the ongoing Nakba and genocide (Alareer 2022; Allan 2014; Azoulay 2019; Bishara 2022). While editing the sounds of rocks falling on ice, it stopped being specific to winter 2023 and instead became a reflection on the dissonance and disillusion of repetition. This project is part of a collection of sound projects and essays on autoethnographic and feminist sound work, currently under review as a special issue.