Inspired in part by Michel de Certeau’s, The Practice of Everyday Life, in this paper, I examine mundane-life in early to mid-twentieth century Cairo from a pedestrian’s street level perspective. “Walking and Working the Streets” is devoted to the sounds and activities of ordinary Cairene men and women as they used, physically occupied and walked through public roads to commute, work, sell, shop, and sometimes to be entertained. I will especially focus on the calls of street hawkers, entertainers and merchants who relied on their voices to advertise their goods and services. As I elaborate in my talk, the streets were not only a living, breathing laboratory for all of the rapid infrastructural and technological transformations unfolding at the turn of the twentieth-century, but they were one of the few places where all elements of society interacted face to face. Public streets and squares at the turn of the twentieth century however, were a contested space. In the second half of the paper, I examine both the Egyptian government’s attempts at regulating and silencing the streets and the class implications of these policies. New anti-begging and anti-homelessness discourses invoking fears of an imminent breakdown of public security, order and even public health. Here I document the ever-present class bias in the Egyptian press, especially with many articles and editorials calling for the silencing of street hawkers and the itinerant poor. These classist discourses were a dominant theme in the Egyptian press and were mostly a byproduct of a small yet growing upwardly mobile educated Egyptian middle class. Insecure perhaps in their newly acquired and still forming class position, and armed with an almost messianic civilizing mission to uplift the Egyptian masses to some subjective and idealized level of “modernity,” these writers and intellectuals vulgarized, infantilized, and sometimes dehumanized the vast majority of the Egyptian population. This was not merely a matter of aesthetics, cultural taste or re-enforcement of class distinction, but it was equally, a reflection of a deep-seated fear of the masses and a growing anxiety about street disorders. However, as I will elaborate in the conclusion, there were varying and creative ways with which ordinary Egyptian men and women clashed, negotiated with, or evaded state authorities. The itinerant poor and especially street hawkers, refused to be silenced and out of economic necessity, they often re-appropriated the “public” streets for their own use.

The Ottoman Empire granted concessions to two British companies to construct the first railroads in Anatolia. These railroads connected the port city of Izmir to the fertile river valleys of inland western Anatolia during the second half of the 19th century. The construction of railways was an intensely material act, requiring not only the laying of tracks and the construction of station buildings, but the alteration of an entire landscape in order to accommodate the particular movement of the train. Beyond this physicality, railroads brought with them to this region novel sensory stimuli. From the moment the first locomotive whistle was heard in Izmir, to the bells of the camels transferring their cargo to the trains, and to the calls of porters waiting in front of train stations, a new and auditory sensorium was woven onto the existing sensory geography of the area. The sounds of this new machine, the train, reformulated the everyday sounds of this place, and impacted the people living in and around Izmir in myriad ways. The auditory aspects of the railways, therefore, constitute a salient element in unraveling a burgeoning space-based dialectic between technology and people. Railways were noisy. Locomotives produced rhythmical tones as they traversed the terrain. Whistles frequently called out to draw people’s attention to the dangers of the machine. A whole set of auxiliary sounds, ranging from the humming of machines in repair shops to the chattering of passengers enjoying a new mode of sociability filled the new railroad spaces. Railway spaces were also liminal, enabling the acting out of cultural transgressions. Embedded into a changing urban fabric, railway sounds became part of the everyday experience of the city. Utilizing evidence available in official documents, such as company reports, city directories and furniture inventories, as well as newspaper and travel accounts, this paper will explore the effects of railways on the soundscapes of Izmir and beyond.

This paper sets radio broadcasting and listening within the broader "picture" of sound in 1930s-1940s Jerusalem. It examines several layers of the radio soundscape: the sounds of the broadcasting studio, the sounds and noise that radio listeners might have experienced from their set, and the sounds of radio broadcasting as mingled with other kinds of sound in Jerusalem's public and private urban spaces. It argues that contextualizing radio sounds and noise within the broader urban soundscape offers a better understanding of radio's position within the social world of mandate Jerusalem, and hence on its impact. This paper draws upon several kinds of primary sources to develop an understanding of the sound ecologies relating to mandate radio broadcasting and listening in mandate Jerusalem. It looks at government archival documents, including period photographs, to discern the kinds of noises and sounds that characterized the Palestine Broadcasting Service's studio. Here, it focuses on the ways in which sounds were politicized: broadcasting languages, recorded music, and even the sounds of the guards hired to protect the station from attempts at hostile takeovers. The paper also looks at period newspapers, to discern what radio sounds were available to listeners in Jerusalem: what hours were radio broadcasts available, in what languages, on what stations, and with what degree of interference. Finally, it turns to memoirs and other private documents to consider the broader urban soundscape, focusing on other "modern" sounds - gramophone and cinema, automobile and train, telephone and loudspeaker. How did radio fit into the aural picture of welcome and unwelcomed sounds? How were radio sounds incorporated into hearers' and listeners' understandings of sounds and noises as expressing different forms of identity: socio-economic status, gender, ethnicity, or religious community? In this process, this paper also reflects upon the kinds of written sources that highlight sound and noise - including newspaper articles, letters, memoirs, station archives, and consular or other government officials' reports. How might scholars read these various kinds of written documents in ways that assess their limitations without discarding their utility? How might they provide a helpful entrée for thinking through intersections of sound and social contexts, sound and politics, sound and religion, and sound and economics, that would help provide a better understanding of mandate-era radio's impact within the world of urban Jerusalem?

Iran's 1979 revolution presented a stark break in Iranian politics, which was reflected in the country's public soundscapes. In this paper, I will aim to construct an aural tapestry of the years leading to the revolution, the revolution itself and the first decade or so afterwards. What does this tapestry of sound tell us about the political, social and cultural influences that culminated in the revolution, and more broadly, what does it tell us about the lifecycle of the Islamic revolution and its aftermath? I will start out by tracing some of the aural environments that Tehran residents inhabited during the 1970s, and the possibilities and directionalities that those soundscapes afforded, both social and political. I will highlight some of the more prominent features of the Pahlavi soundscape, such as the modern noise of car traffic brought on by increased urbanization, the lax air of the cabaret district, punctured by music and mixed-gender laughter, and religious sermons broadcast from the progressive Hosseiniye Ershad mosque. I will then examine Tehran's soundscape during the revolution, the chants during demonstrations, the music played on cassette recorders broadcast on megaphones on the back of pick-up trucks, the radio programs that people huddled together to listen to in shops and on street corners, the rooftop calls of Allah-o-Akbar, and Imam Khomeini's sermons. Following a period of immense opening and freedom right after the Shah's departure came a strict period during which the new revolutionary state aimed to regulate the public and construct a whole new polity. What did the new revolutionary aural space sound like, and what did it portend about the new Iran? Methodologically, I will consult audio and video recordings as well as written accounts of the given period, in memoirs, journalistic and academic writings. Toward a conclusion, I will highlight those aspects of the urban soundscape that were driven into private spaces under the Islamic Republic. What kinds of aural forms and contents were initially pushed out of the public? I will then show how since the easing-up of the public sphere in the mid-1990s, people have taken increasing charge over the aural output in semi-private spaces, imbuing the public with insertions of the private, and thus actively producing a Tehran soundscape that is politically and culturally contested and heterogeneous.