Marina Peterson

My work traces modalities of matter, sensory attunements, and emergent socialities, exploring diverse and innovative ways of encountering and presenting the ethnographic. With research primarily in and of Los Angeles and small cities of Appalachian Ohio, I have taken up these concerns through investigation of entanglements of sound, sensation, and urban infrastructures below and above ground.

My most recent book, Atmospheric Noise: The Indefinite Urbanism of Los Angeles traces environmental noise, atmosphere, sense, and matter that cohere in and through noise pollution legislation and the politics of airport noise in the 1960s, addressing key ways in which noise amplifies ways of sensing and making sense of the atmospheric. Engaging with a burgeoning literature on forces, attunements, and forms of containment that bring the atmospheric into focus, I depart from its emphasis on air, examining, instead, crucial ways in which noise has been central to how we know how to feel and think atmospherically.