Listening to the Urban Fracture: Co-Creating Soundscapes, Partnerships and Futures in the French Periphery during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic with its social distancing measures changed the course of many anthropological projects involving fieldwork, rendering many unfeasible but also opening up new possibilities. The cancellation of a participatory filmmaking project is the starting point of the aural collaborations discussed in this article. These consist in a series of podcasts I co-created with an environmental journalist who specialized in radio, podcast, and soundscape production. In these sound pieces the research participants-a musician, a bird specialist and activists mobilized against territorial inequalities-build on their perception of the aural environment during the first coronavirus lockdown of 2020 to reflect on the present and on possible, perhaps more livable futures.