ANU School of Sociology x CCLAB seminar: 'The Sound of the Alarm' with Dr Andrew Brooks (UNSW Sydney)

[Thao Phan]

ANU School of Sociology x CCLAB seminar: 'The Sound of the Alarm' with Dr Andrew Brooks (UNSW Sydney)

Please join us for the next ANU School of Sociology x ANU Computational Culture Lab event on 'The Sound of the Alarm' by Dr Andrew Brooks (UNSW Sydney)

• Date: Friday 7 August
• Time: 1:30 - 2:30pm (AEST)
• Location: RSSS Room 4.69, and Zoom
• Register to receive Zoom link: https://events.humanitix.com/anu-school-of-sociology-x-computational-culture-lab-event-dr-andrew-brooks-unsw

The Sound of the Alarm

This paper begins with the noise of the whistle: three short blows, the sound of  an alarm; three long blasts, a call to assemble in the street. I consider the noise of the whistle as emblematic of the forms of self-organising that emerged in response to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) raids and racialised state violence in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis-St. Paul beginning in 2025. In order to make sense of the forms of resistance to immigration raids, the paper first sketches the expansion of immigration policing, arguing that the Trump administration’s designation of immigrants as ‘criminal aliens’ and those engaged in community resistance as ‘domestic terrorists’ constitutes a racialised moral panic in which the economic anxieties arising from half a century of deindustrialisation and economic downturn can be displaced. I argue that the administration’s targeting of immigrants as symbolic enemies indexes the collapse of the foreign and the domestic into a single sphere that Nikhil Pal Singh terms “Homeland Empire” and which seeks to advance a form of economic white nationalism. The paper briefly considers the transformation of the cybernetic border from a territorial boundary to a floating signifier that has moved inside the nation, with its enforcement reliant on an arsenal of automated and AI technologies. I conclude by returning to the noise of whistles and the rapid response networks that emerged to document and disrupt ICE raids, positing that such noise can be read as a refusal of the traditional grounds of communication and the emergence of forms of political organising that move beyond the party. 

About the speaker

Andrew Brooks is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts & Media, UNSW, a co-director of the UNSW Media Futures Hub, a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network, and a co-editor of the publishing collective Rosa Press. He is the author of Year of the Ox (Cordite, 2025), Inferno (Rosa, 2021) and the co-author of Homework (Discipline, 2021). Forthcoming projects include: The Long Finger of the Law: Contemporary Art and Police Power in Australia (with Astrid Lorange) and Fugitive Listening and the Sociality of Noise.

This seminar will be chaired by Dr Pia van Gelder (ANU School of Art & Design).