Juniper Clark

Drawing from a range of methodologies and disciplinary inclinations (most often a combination of sound, voice, and critical animal studies), my research interrogates normative constructions of “animality” as it comes to be articulated and rehearsed through emergent forms of media, discourse, and performance. I ask how anthropocentric notions of the nonhuman animal voice—construed broadly and often simultaneously as “mere” voice/sound, a capacity for political agency, the ultimate signifier of subjectivity, and/or even silence—impinge on the lives and deaths of those (nonhuman or otherwise) implicated in the necropolitics of the so-called animal-industrial complex. To this end, I am particularly interested in understanding the complicated roles that listening (as a potential form of attunement, care, and response-ability, but equally an instrument of exoticism, essentialism, and colonialism) plays in the resistance and reproduction of Western human exceptionalism.

My current work, across speculative-theoretical and ethnographic projects, attempts to trace configurations of transspecies intimacy across a contemporary terrain upon which the terms of human-nonhuman relationality are increasingly mediated by technologies of distancing, obfuscation, and abstraction.

I hold a BA in Musicology (with an additional concentration in Philosophy) from the University of California, Los Angeles, where I was a MacDowell Fellow with the Undergraduate Research Center for Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and a recipient of the UCLA Library Prize.