Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the SEM 2026 Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the search bar to search by name or title of paper/session. Note that this search bar does not search by keyword.
Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 29th Aug 2026, 08:46:41pm EDT
|
Daily Overview |
| Session | |
|
03F: Sonic Publics: Performance, Space, and Belonging in the City Location: Maple | |
| Presentation 3 | |
“A Tale of Two Protests”: Soundscapes of Urban Immigration Rights Shared-Care Spaces in Cincinnati, Ohio 2025–2026 University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music How do urban shared-care sites sound? How do sacrality and secularity blur to emerge as spaces for traumatized communities through sound during public life-and-death political crises? Using site-specific ecumenical gatherings led by faith-based leaders in response specifically to the incarceration and release of the Iman Ayman Soliman in greater Cincinnati, OH and generally in support of local immigrants during 2024 and 2025, I ask how immigration rights gatherings transformed public and private digital, geographic, and physical sites to shared-care spaces (Gelsthorpe, Mody, and Sloan 2023). Synthesizing Soliman’s public addresses, participant interlocutors’ stories, advocacy-informed ethnographic experiences, an open letter, social media posts, and journalistic reporting source the ways that religious and secular organizations’ boundaries blurred as individual and collective culture, identity, and values merged dress, geography, images, and sound. From a positionality of advocacy, I bear witness to acoustemologic and emotional entanglements of sacrality and secularity permeating shared care-based gatherings, memorials, and protests at sites of resistance framed by Soliman’s detention and release (Balkenhol, van den Hemel, and Stengs 2020). I explore free-Ayman and anti-ICE soundscapes on a city sidewalk, detention center lawn and parking lot, within a church sanctuary, and reverberations of “A Tale of Two Protests” merging a “No Kings” resistance and “Good Trouble” vigil on a bridge connecting US states Kentucky and Ohio. I show how gatherings in these locales blur sacred-secular binaries and boundaries and reframe these experiences as praxelogic, shared-care sites promoting belonging within the broader US immigration rights community. | |
