Justice Beyond the Courts: Music, Testimony, Voice

How do people talk about and seek justice beyond formal the legal system? What does it mean to testify publicly? What role do music, sound and voice play in the articulation of injustices?

This workshop, sponsored by the Law in Societies Research Cluster at Wolfson College, Oxford, will address the role of music, testimony, sound, and voice in making justice claims beyond the courts. Bringing together artists and academics, we will consider how music and other vocal and auditory practices document experience and make demands for redress and restoration that the courts cannot or will not hear. For example, folk songs may serve as archives of women’s rights and complaints, while hip hop or poetry may put forward the claims of people marginalised by the law. Survivors of sexual abuse may also use creative forms of testimony when they feel they are silenced by formal institutions and actors. These examples highlight the often-fraught relationship between formal testimony and listening. They also showcase the ways in which artists and ordinary citizens find extra-legal means to tell their stories about injustices. Drawing attention to voice and sound in and around the courts, we will think together about what sound and listening mean for justice.

The workshop will culminate with an evening performance and conversation by renowned folk singer, writer, and activist, Sam Lee. Sam will perform and speak about his work as a song collector, in the UK and beyond, to bring life to stories contained within song.

Workshop Programme

1.30pm Welcome and introductory remarks: Nomi Dave and Linda Mulcahy, The Buttery

2-3 Session One: Hearing Justice Chair: Nomi Dave Showing of Palais de Justice Artist Carey Young: The sound of the Palais de Justice

3-3.20 Tea coffee and biscuits

3.20-4.00 Session Two: Unheard Voices Chair: Ellie Whittingdale Poet Damian Gorman: Will I be heard? Trauma, Stories and Healing

4.00-4.40 Session Three: Visualising Justice Chair: Linda Mulcahy Artist Rawz: Finding Justice through Art

4.40-5.00 Comfort break

5.00-5.40 Session Four: Thresholds of hearing Chair: Nomi Dave Naomi Waltham-Smith, Oxford University: Hearing outside hearings: Audibilities at the limits of judicial regimes

6-7.30 Performance by Sam Lee, The Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, Wolfson College Chair: Linda Mulcahy

Biographies of speakers

Nomi Dave is an Associate Professor (Critical & Comparative Studies) in the Department of Music at the University of Virginia. She is an interdisciplinary researcher and former lawyer, working across music and sound studies, law, and anthropology. Nomi is a founder and co-director of the Sound Justice Lab, an initiative for socio-legal research, advocacy, and creative work. She is currently co-producing the film, Big Mouth (directed by Bremen Donovan), on women’s testimony and sexual justice in Guinea, and is completing a book manuscript on voice, listening, and responses to sexual violence. Her second project is an exploration of the history and practices of audio livestreaming of court proceedings in the US.

Damian Gorman is an award winning poet, filmmaker and playwright. His work draws on his experience of growing up and becoming a writer during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. He is a Fellow of the Oxford Initiative for Global Ethics and Human Rights. Gorman is renowned for his readings, in Ireland and much further afield. His works include As If I Cared: Poems and Other Parts of a Life and So Young: The Taking of My Life by the Catholic Church.

Sam Lee is a Mercury prize nominated singer, highly inventive and original arranger, folksong interpreter, passionate conservationist, song collector and creator of live events. Sam’s work as an artist attempts to break down boundaries between traditional and contemporary music and the assumed places and ways folksong is appreciated. Sam's voice has helped challenge what old songs hold for us today. In 2021, Sam released his debut novel 'The Nightingale, notes on a songbird' telling the epic tale of this highly endangered bird and their place in culture, folklore, music and literature throughout the millennia. Sam's a regular radio and TV broadcaster, film soundtrack composer and has provided songs for several major feature films. As a change-maker in the music industry he is a co-founder of Music Declares Emergency, FAC board member and the pioneering artist to work with leading environmental charity Earthpercent to whom a portion of proceeds of the current album will be donated.

Linda Mulcahy is a multi-disciplinary researcher with an interest in marginalised stories about law and justice. Across her career she has undertaken hundreds of interviews with victims of medical negligence, council flat tenants, food bank users and radical lawyers. In recent years she has written about the architecture of law courts, the representation of law and justice in the public sphere and street art. Linda is the Director of the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. She has a particular interest in methodology, radical listening and narrative interviews. Linda is an expert adviser to the British Library Life Stories programme.

Rawz is an MC and poet with a style rooted in Hip Hop. He uses his music to connect people with each other and communicate ideas and questions. Rawz grew up in Oxford where he was one of the founders of the Urban Music Foundation. More recently he has worked with the collective Inner Peace Records, a group of like-minded musicians who all enjoy the same style of hip hop and do a lot of community work together. In 2021 he came up with the idea for the Digging Crates project which involves using instruments from the Pitt Rivers museum for use in Hip Hop performances. Rawz was recently a Sound Artist in Residence at St John’s College Oxford.

Naomi Waltham-Smith is Professor of Music at Oxford and Douglas Algar Tutorial Fellow at Merton College. She is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersection of music and sound studies with continental political philosophy, focusing on the politics of listening. She is the author of Music and Belonging Between Revolution and Restoration (Oxford UP, 2017), Shattering Biopolitics: Militant Listening and the Sound of Life (Fordham UP, 2021), Mapping (Post)colonial Paris by Ear (Cambridge UP, 2023), and Free Listening (Nebraska UP, 2024). Beyond academia, she works collaboratively to explore and deepen democratic listening practices via public workshops, creative citizens’ assemblies, gallery installations, and long-term community-based projects, working, for example, with the Slought Foundation, law reform charity JUSTICE, and sound art collective Ultra-red.

Ellie Whittingdale is a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies. She is currently working on an oral history project on the history of the rape crisis movement in England and Wales. This project is a partnership between CSLS and the national charity Rape Crisis England & Wales, which is being funded by The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

Ellie holds a PhD from the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies in which she explored how those working within English sexual violence support services talk about and understand sexual violence. Alongside her PhD, Ellie volunteered for a frontline support service and worked within the policy team at Rape Crisis England & Wales, particularly around the Keep Counselling Confidential campaign.

Carey Young is a Professor of Fine Art media at the Slade School of Fine Art. She works across video, photography, text, performance and installation explores relations between the body, language, rhetoric, and systems of power. Early in her practice she was inspired by business and economics, using the tools, language and rituals appropriated from multinational corporations as starting points for her installations, performances, text works and videos. Since 2002 Young has created conceptual and lens-based works which address and critique law and justice in the light of artistic foci such as the body, site, materiality, portraiture or the sublime. A further strand in her practice relates to women, addressed in relation to regimes of power such as law or the cam