Dr Tom Western, ‘Covered Mouths Still Have Voices’

The colloquium series continues with a talk by Dr Tom Western, ‘Covered Mouths Still Have Voices’. 

The title of this talk is a political slogan. It borrows from the chant of medical workers in Greece, who have been asserting that covered mouths still have a voice (“Καιτα καλυμμένα στόματα βγάζουν φωνή”) since long before the Covid-19 pandemic began at the start of 2020. The slogan has become politically useful on wider scales since then, and I take it as a jumping off point – a means of understanding political techniques of vocality that have been retuned in pandemic contexts.

His focus is on forms of vocal-spatial resistance, hearing how people contest political hierarchies of vocality that have been tightened during Covid, and create new spatialities of voice through pandemic activisms. The talk listens to how voices signal and sound out multiple forms of mobilisation, and it outlines a global sense of voice that develops as a result. From this, ways of hearing mouths and voices emerge not just in terms of speaking and sounding, or only as forms of identity and agency, but as a gathering, a refusal, a resource, a navigational tool, a transformation.

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