Blunt: Can be used to describe the force of an object, or a direct and swift point of action or inaction—for example, through defunding or censorship. As Walcott writes, acts of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions and censure operationalize bluntness; the suspension of participation forces parties under censure not only to address the issue at hand, but also to reconsider the politics from which they act.
Carceral: Relating to, or evocative of prisons and prison systems. Refers not only to the literal spaces, structures, and institutions of prisons and jails, but to frameworks and practices that emulate, foster, or expand their strategies of control: see Mohamed on carceral structures in schools; Bain in SDUK07.2 on the link between incarceration, health care, and affordable housing in Black communities; and Radiodress (Take Care broadsheet) on solidarities between incarcerated and non-incarcerated people.
Choir: An organized group of persons or things; an ensemble of speakers or instruments. By definition, a choir consists of at least three harmonious singers. Choir song is often associated with religious ceremonies, school bands, or national anthems, but has been employed to many ends, including to make political demands (see Mohamed).
Connectivity: The property of being in communication or relation with another. For many, speech and song are important catalysts to developing connectivity (see Avasilichioaei). Conversely, absences or deficits of communication often spur linguistic or technological innovations (see Hickman; Scott). In ecology, connectivity refers to the ease through which plants and animals can traverse an area; roads, train tracks, and dams are barriers that inhibit migration routes or disrupt habitats (see Robertson in SDUK04).
Deviance refers to behaviour that violates established social rules, codes, structures, or standards. A deviant is often ostracized from their community for their non-conformance—and the term often describes those who do not adhere to normative notions of gender, sexuality, and the law (see Rangwala on normativity). As a rejection of rigid and oppressive normativity, deviance can also be a strategy of resistance or celebration (see for example, Scott on the poetics of claiming the stutterer’s deviant language, or Doujak for deviant human-animal hybridity).
Glitch: a malfunction, error, irregularity, bug, interruption or disruption—for instance, in a technology, game, or image. What if this effect, often considered a failure, can also be a place for subversion and experimentation? See Avasilichioaei; Nish-Lapidus.
Hegemony: Leadership or dominance, particularly pertaining to political or military affairs. In regular usage, often employed to note the enduring power of Western worldviews and governance structures, as they have been perpetuated and maintained by colonial domination and capitalism (see Rangwala). Euro-American hegemony endures in many diffuse ways, such as in the dominance of English as the pre-eminent global language (for contributors challenging linguistic hegemony, see Dion Fletcher and Chun; or for reflections on the dominant healthcare system, see Dodd, James, and Rosella).
Interpretation is the process of carrying meaning across verbal or non-verbal communication, often associated with translation. See Hickman for consideration of how interpretation is an important and underrepresented facet of accessibility work; or Dion Fletcher for a performative approach to linguistic interpretation. Interpretation is inseparable from personal subjectivity and bias, which highlights its fragility when communicating across languages or cultures. See Chun and Taniguchi for more on the mutability of communication.
Machines are apparatuses or technologies created by humans to mimic or simplify our labour. Machines are assemblages of parts that transmit signals, motion, or energy between them. Synonymous with computing, most modern machines are run by computer software; in order to build a machine, a programmer must accurately train and anticipate its processes, thus blurring the boundaries of human-machine interaction (see Hickman). As Nish-Lapidus describes, the machinic processes of AI regurgitate human knowledge.
Mine: A declaration of ownership; to unearth and extract; or an explosive. Mining is a destructive process of extracting valuable minerals and ores from the Earth, thereby negatively impacting the landscape and often the associated workers’ health (see Halpern in SDUK06; Cutler in 05). Recently, “mining” also refers to the process of resolving cryptocurrency transactions, which has been found to be similarly costly and detrimental to the environment. In computing, data mining is an analytic method used to discover patterns and extract information from datasets (see Mattern, SDUK01; James).
Orientation often refers to the creation and formation of an identity; as feminist scholar Sarah Ahmed puts it, orientations are “about the intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places,” an intervention that expands “orientation” beyond sexuality to include our racial, gendered, and sexual identities, cultures, knowledges, personalities, and shared histories. As Chandler describes, one experience of disorientation occurs as language loss through the imposition of settler colonialism.
Recognition: To see a quality or characteristic; often used in a political or legal context. In discussions of Indigenous sovereignty, recognition denotes the potentials and limits of nation-to-nation negotiation (see Emmelhainz in SDUK09; Simmons in 05). As a trait often associated with sentience—since recognition requires thought—it emerges as an important issue in AI (see Nish-Lapidus for a comparison of recognition and pattern matching).
Redaction is the act of obscuring parts of a text before publication, often for security or privacy reasons (see HOW ARE WE in SDUK08). While documents obtained through freedom-of-information requests are often liberally redacted (beyond legitimate claims to protect sensitive information), redaction is also often employed strategically by artists and writers outside such positions of power. Such tactics include the redaction of an image (see Syjuco, SDUK08), or the pre-emptive redaction of text in the form of an omission (see Wren; see also Refusal).
Score: For the noun, a dictionary entry may offer a group of twenty things or a large number of something as primary meanings. Also a notch or line cut into a surface, or a reckoning. Also a number to express accomplishment. Yet, the import of definitions is context-specific. What might be primary to one individual can be quite secondary to another. Hence more “secondary” meanings come to the fore: a musical composition or its written representation, or the representation of composed sound through the use of visual language and drawing, as in graphic score, or a series of physical, verbal, or sound actions conceived by an artist and meant to be interpreted, as in a performance score or textual score.
Scream: A loud, sharp, and penetrating cry or the voicing of such a cry. Hence a present, insistent, irreducible sound emitted by the vocal apparatus or the image of a mouth producing this sound. In Western art history (or its symbolic mythology), the word might forever be caught in the iconic yoke of the nineteenth-century painting by Norwegian Expressionist artist Edvard Munch, a painting in which the signifier and the signified merge.
Scree: A collection or accumulation of small loose stones or rocky debris covering a mountain slope or lying at the base of a hill. From the Old Norse word for landslide. To invoke this term in the context of the voice is to suggest a deep, gravelly, rough-sounding quality; is to evoke the idea of unpredictability and looseness; is to call up the sudden (almost violent) transition between the quiet stillness of the vocal cords at rest and the thundering torrent of their vibrational sounding, i.e. the trigger of a vocal avalanche.
Definitions in blue by Oana Avasilichioaei in relation to Living Scores.