Alternative school climates and the affective politics of sound: Sonic violence, neurodiversity, and the ‘beautiful paradox’ of music

This paper provides new insights into the affective politics of sound and its relations with school climate. Working with affect and feminist new materialist theories, we take school climate to be indeterminate, processual, and inescapably political. Here, we lift into view how sound can be differentially sensed and experienced by neurodivergent young people and consider the potential relations of sound in the affective ecologies of school climate within alternative schools—spaces which, for a range of reasons, can be especially attractive to neurodivergent students. The capacity for sound to potentially both increase and decrease autistic people’s capacities to act in such schools was described by one autistic participant as a ‘beautiful paradox’.



Drawing on material from affect-led studies in two alternative government secondary schools in Melbourne, Australia, we draw attention to affective, spatial, and material dimensions of alternative schooling, and how these were experientially sensed by some of the neurodivergent young people with whom we worked at these schools. We explore the affective politics of sound in how school climate can become. Sound can work as sonic and acoustic violence, for example, by curtailing capacities to act, a situation we examine after participants refused to participate in our planned soundwalk, to make recordings of the soundscapes of everyday school life. We learnt the potential for sensory overload can mean that everyday school spaces which may be unproblematic for neurotypical people can become off limits for neurodivergent people, such as the school’s echoey cafeteria, or a classroom filled with the raucous shouting of boisterous younger students. Yet sound can also be enabling, as we observed when participants headed to the studios for an impromptu jam session, choosing to make music together rather than recording school soundscapes. We noticed how participants played background music during our creative workshops, connecting with each other, and with us, to share in a range of musical tastes and interests.



We argue that sound is potent, and perhaps overlooked, in how it can contribute to school climates of both belonging and exclusion. We affirm that school climate matters, and encourage greater attention to the fluxing materialities of affective ecologies of school climate through such everyday processes as sound.