Sensing Precarity tunes into the sonic ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic to reveal how moments of crisis are commonly framed as moments of rupture. Combining traditional ethnography with media analysis, creative writing, and poetry, Sensing Precarity reveals how what Ailsa Lipscombe calls “the medicalization of the everyday” is a long-standing phenomenon, one acutely experienced by disabled and chronically ill communities. Lipscombe asks: how do the sights, sounds, behaviors, expectations, and interpretive lenses of medical environments (and activities) inflect or infect everyday spaces and activities? The study argues that during crises, encounters with precarity—real, potential, and imagined—instigate widespread engagement with notions of embodiment and relationality, and that in this context, bodies are understood as both being at risk and posing risks for others.

Ailsa Lipscombe is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati.

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Provocations for Reading
Introduction: An Invitation to Listen
March 2020
Chapter 1: Understanding Medicalization: Of Hospitals and Homes
Breathe In
Chapter 2: Acoustemologies of (Dis)ease: Sonic Archetypes of the Endemic Era
Chapter 3: Mediated Medicines: Affected Listening, Affective Resonances
Five Crip Moments
Chapter 4: “What Time Is It?”: Encountering Blursday and Crip Temporalities
Listening on Temporal Edges
Chapter 5: Embodied Attunements: Musicking Traumatic Memory
Epilogue: Listening Futures and Discursive Futuring
Bibliography