About
Jennifer Hsieh is an anthropologist of technology, the senses, and governance. Her work broadly examines the formation of political subjectivity through sensory practices in institutional and urban settings. Her current book project, From Festival to Decibel: Making Noise in Urban Taiwan, examines the way residents, civil servants, and environmental inspectors transform the fleeting qualities of sound into the regulatory object of noise that ties personal acts of hearing and listening with geopolitical questions of citizenship and belonging. Complementing her research on sound, Dr. Hsieh is producing a collection of audio montages based on field recordings of Taipei. Dr. Hsieh has previously held research fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the University of Amsterdam's Vossius Center for the History of Science and Humanities.
Select Publications
2021. "Making Noise in Urban Taiwan: Decibels, the State, and Sono-sociality." American Ethnologist. 48(1): 51-64.
2021. "Noise Viscerality: Navigating Relations in a Sonic Climate." HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 11(2): 491-505.
2021. “Noisy Co-Existence: Contestations of Renao and Zaoyin amidst Taiwan’s Noise Control System.” In Resounding Taiwan: Musical Reverberations Across a Vibrant Island, edited by Nancy Guy, 165–79. New York: Routledge.
2020. “To Hear as I Do: The Concessions of Hearing in Taiwan’s Noise Management System.” In Testing Hearing: The Making of Modern Aurality, edited by Viktoria Tkaczyk, Mara Mills, and Alexandra Hui, 189–212. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2019. "Piano Transductions: Music, Sound and Noise in Urban Taiwan." Sound Studies Journal. 5(1)4-21: 4-21.
