Soundscapes of Belonging

What does belonging (or lack thereof) sound like? This entry reflects on the experience of belonging as an Eastern European migrant-academic navigating post-Brexit Britain. Through a series of personal soundscapes, it explores how the acoustic dimension of academic spaces may reveal power dynamics, exclusion and the politics of belonging. It asks how sonic markers – accents, silences, institutional noise – mediate experiences of othering within UK higher education. Following care-full listening as both methodology and political practice, the chapter attends to the affective dimensions of tuning and being tuned within post-Brexit Britain. It listens to the reverberations of Brexit alongside the precarious soundscapes of neoliberal universities, tracing how belonging is sonically constructed and contested and offering soundscape as a pathway for wilful resistance.