This article presents the results of an ethnographic study conducted in an emergency shelter for migrants in Paris, managed entirely by volunteers from the charity Solidarité Saint Bernard. The research explores how this shelter, sustained by the surrounding neighbourhood, cultivates a hospitable milieu that enables new arrivals to settle and participate in shared social life. At the heart of this dynamic is the practice of commensality: daily communal dinners that structured the shelter’s operations and embodied a collective effort to foster coexistence. Drawing on various ethnographic materials I focus on one particularly resonant moment: the singing of the guests during the final dinner of the season. Singing, understood primarly as a corporeal expression, sheds light on how shared meals enable participants to access emotional registers of nostalgia, thereby reaffirming intimate attachments. Far from being solely an act of charitable food provision, these shared meals reveal a more complex social support system – one rooted in neighbourhood solidarity, lived experience and the embodied enactment of hospitality. In sum, this research examines the material and affective conditions under which such expressions become possible in the context of migration.

This Voicing takes the form of six duets: a dance between the typed word and the dictated one, between text for the page and text for the stage, between vocal closeness and distance, between speaking and listening. It is offered as a poetic reflection on the shift of the voice from embodied live performance to the novel form informed by, the author, Paris’s research, which interrogates the visceral and the virtual, liveness, embodiment and intimacy and how spatiality and shifting proximities contract and expand levels of connectivity and closeness between audience and performer/audience. It references two performances by, the author Paris, Vena Amoris (1999), a work for an audience of one that takes place over a mobile phone, and Out of Water (2012), a live and recorded audio performance that takes place at the edge of the ocean and is performed by singers and swimmers.

Starting with a common approach, which consists in writing a book with words recorded by the author, this article examines the attempts of two contemporary French female authors at rendering voices and accounts collected from people in socially and psychologically vulnerable situations. In Fragmentation d’un lieu commun (2003), Jane Sautière records her memories of encounters with prisoners during her work as a prison social worker; in Rouge pute (2018), Perrine Le Querrec renders the voices of domestic violence victims she met at a community centre. The aim is both to highlight the listening practices shared by these authors (ways of meeting people, recording what they say, adjusting the author’s position in relation to the collected voices) and to emphasize the uniqueness of the poetic choices made, which depart from a raw transcription of the collected words in favour of fragments for Sautière and poetic rendering in verse for Le Querrec. Comparing these two books of voices allows us to gauge the shifts in a literary approach to listening over the course of two decades, highlighting the different terms of the authors’ commitment.

Whilst Welsh voices are used consistently within western film and television to denote Wales, across diverse multimedia spaces like Star Trek: Discovery (2017) and The Last Kingdom (2015), Welshness appears othered and fixed in the ‘magical’ in video games. English localizations of Japanese video games use Welsh voices and accents to encourage a connection with these magical spaces, and Celtic fetishized histories, for players who can identify this accent – which is primarily British audiences. This article highlights the impact of Welsh voices in signifying the mythological and magical game world across a combination of accent, language and music. I identify how Welsh voices are used in these spaces where other ludomusicology scholarship often does not acknowledge language and accent when discussing aural and sonic elements of video games, specifically focusing on localizations of Japanese role-playing games so consistently by analysing games such as Ni No Kuni, Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and 3, and Elden Ring.

This piece elucidates modes of embodying non-human animal avatars, experimenting with the alternative vocalities afforded to me as a player by the sound design that enrich my embodied imaginative play as I play as, relate to, and imagine my corporeality as I play characters beyond the human. Drawing from ethnographic gameplay, I use the non-human main characters of two games that I refer to animal avatar games: Untitled Goose Game where you play as a goose and Stray where you play as a stray cat. These novel avatar identities and the treatment of avatar vocality offer the exploration of novel processes of representation, imagining, embodiment and worldmaking.

In response to Rosemary Coombe’s provocation ‘Who authors the celebrity?’, this interview with actor, singer and impressionist Christina Bianco considers the process, performance and cultural politics of vocal impressions as a vicarious form of popular entertainment. Responding to Mladen Dolar’s assertion that voice can be located at the juncture of subject and Other (2006: 102) the discussion considers the performer’s reflections on the relationship between her own voice and those she ‘lives in’ during performance, the tensions between visuality and vocality in the creation and reception of impressions and the influence of new creative technologies and changing social mores which are changing whose voice(s) may be authored – and by whom.

This article explores the concepts of voice and ventriloquism in translation through examining Finnish translations of Anglophone Caribbean novels. Four novels and their Finnish translations are discussed with focus on the translation of proverbs and references to Caribbean oral tradition. The translator’s own voice and the voices of other agents participating in the translation process become manifest both in the translation itself and in contextual materials related to the translation. The literary translator can be seen to act as the mouthpiece for a multitude of agents in addition to the author of the original work. The concept of ventriloquism can help shed light on the complex ways in which different voices can interact within the translation process and the ways in which translators must make choices on which voices to give precedence in the translated text.

Jacques Derrida’s early critique of Husserlian phenomenology discusses the production of the ‘phenomenological voice’ as the consummate model of human consciousness. Challenging Husserl’s conviction that consciousness is produced from the self-enclosed act of ‘hearing-oneself-speak’, Derrida points to vocality as the complex site of the self’s relationship to presence and exteriority. The internal division between hearing and speaking, he argues, introduces difference into the generation of conscious life. The use of delayed auditory feedback (DAF) as a prosthetic for stuttering provides an opportunity to engage Derrida’s insights on the connection between consciousness and voice with an ear to the speech of people who stutter. DAF, which may reduce or increase dysfluency depending on the speech of the user, introduces a series of delays, alterations and supplements to speech that underwrite the heterogeneous experience of conscious life. What can the philosophy of deconstruction add to conversations about the function of DAF, and what can theory about and experiences with DAF teach us about the self’s presence to itself and the role of alterity in shaping speech? What does stuttering teach us about the necessity of dysfluency for all speech? This article examines the relation between the voice and the phenomenological voice, and between stuttering and prosthetics. Concluding with an analysis of Richard Serra’s experimental recording, Boomerang (1974), it argues that voice is always already prostheticized with alterity, and that in hearing-oneself-speak we exist with voice in an expansive and unfinished conversation with our own mystery.

Review of: Teaching Strategies for Neurodiversity and Dyslexia in Actor Training: Sensing Shakespeare, Petronilla Whitfield (2019) New York: Routledge, 218 pp., ISBN 978-0-42945-859-0, e-book, £31.49