Academic Freedom

Nat Nesvaderani

2025 / 12 minutes
Canada
English

This sound work is about experiences of academic freedom on college campuses. From my smartphone in Winter 2023, I grappled with feelings of dislocation, anger and sadness and deep dissonance in the relative quietness, tranquility, and even beauty in Quebec, Canada, while student solidarity encampments unfold across North America, eventually extending into Europe. In winter 2023 I recorded the sound of rock falling on ice in snowy winter 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, coming back to this sound produced a feeling of repetition—a concept prominent in writing about the Nakba ongoing genocide (Alareer 2022; Allan 2014; Azoulay 2019; Bishara 2022). When editing the sounds of rock falling on ice, it stopped being specific to Winter 2023 but instead a reflection of the dissonance and disillusion of repetition. This project is part of a collection of sound projects and essays about auto-ethnographic and feminist sound work under review as a special issue.