Kwame Phillips (University of Southampton). The Multisensorial as Maroon
| Dates: | 13 October 2025 |
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| Times: | 15:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Kwame Phillips |
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Collins, et al. (2017) invite anthropology into a renewed engagement with contemporary media ecologies and with the transformative potentialities of the multimodal. This position advocates for embracing the multicultural and polyvocal, and encourages academics to be imaginative, creative, boundary-pushing, and system-challenging. In this talk, Dr Kwame Phillips discusses his multisensory work as a vantage point from which to respond to injustice and his use of “alternative” practices to engage meaningfully in alternative solutions and social action, specifically through the theoretical lens of marronage. Maroon communities were those settlements established by runaway slaves, who sought to escape their condition as fungible, accumulated property. Marronage was and is typified by Maroons “cultivating freedom on their own terms within a demarcated social space that allows for the enactment of subversive speech acts, gestures, and social practices antithetical to the ideals of marginalizing agents” (Roberts 2015). Bearing this definition in mind, Phillips explores how multisensorial work might be investigated through the politic and framework of marronage, the use of the multisensorial as a Marronage space - alternate, subversive, personal, and communal, and how multisensorial practices embody forms of resistance and survival that is both historical and contemporary, challenging dominant narratives and sustaining Black cultural and political imagination.
Kwame Phillips is Senior Lecturer in Media Practices and Co-Director of the Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics research group (CIIP) at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton, specialising in sensory media production, mixtape scholarship and critical media studies. Phillips’ work uses multimodal and experimental methodologies, often grounded in remix and repurposing, to focus on marronage, race, and social justice. He is producer of the visual mixtape Lovers Rock Dub: An Experiment in Visual Reverberation and the accompanying chapter "Dub, Ecstasy and Collective Memory in Lovers Rock" in ReFocus: The Films of Steve McQueen. He is also co-author of "'The People Who Keep on Going': A Radical Listening Party" mixtape for The Futures of Black Radicalism and creator of the multi-sensorial sound art installations “Kabusha Radio Remix” and “Dreadstar Meets the Space Invaders.” His current project, Echoes of Care, is a collaborative multidisciplinary performance exploring the theme of haunting and Black ways of care.
Speaker
Kwame Phillips
Organisation: University of Southampton
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Boardroom (2.016-17)
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
