Didn't think I'd be spending my part of my hols defending myself against Christoph Cox's response incl. accusations orientalism and creationism in my work, but here we go. A (long) thread:
1)Nature/culture. By framing the debate in his own terms, which insists upon the division between nature/culture Cox has ignored my Harawayan call to shift debates around "the nature of sound" to the "natureculture of sound". (p283)
In my article I follow Haraway to depart from a dichotomy of naturalism vs social constructivism in an attempt to get to a political-philosophical "elsewhere". Instead Cox doggedly rehearses this very same dichotomy. (soz to dogs) 
Digging his heels into "material-realism" and straw-manning onto-epistemology as hopelessly "correlationist" is a crude move.
In Karen Barad's reply to Trevor Pinch (in a more nuanced an interesting debate than this) she reiterates why measurement is a material-conceptual practice inseparable from apparatuses of measurement (Barad 2011)
Hence why ontology and epistemology are irrevocably intertwined and subjects and objects do not simply pre-exist but emerge from intra-action betw. phenomena, matter and apparatus
However this is not the same thing as saying that matter did not exist prior to human existence! It merely foregrounds the entanglement of the material and the semiotic/discursive.
It is an argument about the processes of (scientific) knowledge production not a debate about the age of the universe! 🙄
2)Creationism. Conflating onto-epistemologists, "correlationists" AND creationists as those people not being able to "make sense of natural science" i.e. in denial of the age of the universe is sloppy to the point of foul play.
Using his personal connection to Haraway as his former professor to "school" @DrMarieThompson and me about Copernicanism and Darwinism is laughable (for obv reasons) as well as Haraway's whole body of work being precisely NOT about putting (techno)Science on a pedestal
Rather, the question of nature is inherently political and contested and feminism/feminist STS must pay attention to human-nonhuman relations in how the humanities configure science AND how science itself is done by scientists
Cox's accusation of Marie and I being mired in cultural relativism was something Haraway was also critiqued for - and elaborated many times why this is not so (quote from Haraway 2004, 330)
This “elsewhere" outside of the binary or naturalism/realism/materialism vs social constructivism, neither-nor, appears to be inaccessible to Cox.
3)Orientalism. Additionally, and without wanting to dwell on my own ethnicity for too long, a white(presenting) male professor calling a woman scholar of East/SE Asian descent "orientalising" is problematic to say the least
The charge of my/our positions as ignorant of non-European intellectual traditions and knowledges is not only ironic given my PhD on forms of knowledge which challenge Western masculinist scientific notions of knowledge...
But also as Cox appears to conflate *his* notions of reality and knowledge based on Western science with all others - he tries to draw parallels with "other" Asian/African philosophies as if these further serve his point about the "nature of reality"
The point is - how could one be sure that the Nagarjuna, Samkara or Akan philosophies he mentions have the same or comparable notions of realism or universalism as his? Surely a robust philosophical inquiry would not presume this to be the case.
His accusation that "It's as though there exist no Chinese astrophysicists..." exemplifies his conflation of the superiority of "Western science"* and simplistic (and frankly essentialist) usage of ethnicity throughout his response...
"Western Science”* which is in fact ofc hugely complex global/multi ethnic/multi national thousands of years of entangled histories of intellectual traditions
I similarly find his mentioning of Oliveros’, Delanda's & others’ ethnicities or traditions tokenistic - these come closer to textbook orientalism which in his own words (correctly) concern the "fantasy that the racial and cultural other harbors mysterious sources of knowledge"
Overall, Cox's response - instead of challenging my argument on any reasonable grounds (which there certainly are) - ends up affirming my critique of his sonic ontology as "posthuman sonic naturalism."
My argument was simply to call for accountability in knowledge production in sound studies - the embodiedness of listening is not necessarily commensurate with situatedness as accountability&responsibility in producing knowledge
I join @DrMarieThompson in sending #Parallax Journal some serious side-eye that they sent us this two days before it went public when Cox's response lacks serious/respectful engagement with our ideas & accuses us of "not understanding science”/being creationists-orientalists
@DrMarieThompson To be clear- I'm not anti-debate nor unable to take criticisms of my work. There IS surely a meaningful debate to be had in sound studies about all of this. But that would demand good faith not bad faith critiques
@DrMarieThompson For those missing the texts, PDFs can be found here: Cox 2018 bit.ly/2HQwRC8 and Thompson 2017 & Goh 2017 bit.ly/2HMT9ER
