What I would like to hear more audibly in our field—what I want all of us to work to make more prominent and more possible—is scholarship that explicitly confronts, and broadcasts, the underlying whiteness of the field, and of the generic terms that provide so much currency in it: terms like “the listener,” “the body,” “the ear,” and so on. This work does exist. I believe it should be aggressively encouraged and pursued by the most influential figures in sound studies, regardless of their disciplinary background.
This is from Gustavus Stadler's essay "On Whiteness and Sound Studies", an insightful piece pointing out how what is being codified into "Sound Studies" only partially attests to the more American Studies-influenced work on sound and racialized practices that precede it. (Here's a quick commentary one of my old professors Tweeted out about it as well, reiterating that scholarship has long investigated how music/sound and race/ethnicity infuse each other with meaning.)
From my vantage point, the same happens in library & information science: what power relations are we encoding when we pretend that only "unbiased" points of view can aspire to coherent accounts of library practice, of "information," or of whatever we catalog?