An Apprenticeship of Voice and Resonance

Katherine McNally 

In classic form and generosity, when presented with a lifetime achievement award, Kate immediately created an opportunity for us, her advisees, to speak about the work that we do. But since I am submitting my dissertation in March of 2026, the work that I am currently doing is very much work that I am doing with Kate, and I feel really lucky to have the opportunity to reflect on that ongoing mentorship and why it matters to me so deeply.

Kate has advised me through the innumerable iterations of my dissertation project, which is called Newfoundland Ghost Nets: Fathoming Imperial Fallout. That work is based on 36 months of fieldwork on the island of Newfoundland in Canada, conducted 30 years on from the date the government of Canada declared a moratorium on fishing for Atlantic cod, which was teetering on the brink of commercial extinction. The Newfoundland cod moratorium was the largest industry closure in Canadian history—an acute moment of a crisis centuries in the making—and over 30,000 people in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador alone lost their primary source of work essentially overnight. My research is with fishing people who have remained in their rural communities after that social-ecological collapse, who are also grappling with their own entanglement in the extractive systems that caused it. These are communities that have lived by catching fish for empire and industry for over three centuries. In one interview, a retired fisherman told me about the 400 foot plastic fishing nets he had lost 30 years ago, which he knows continue to drift and kill marine life indefinitely as ghost nets in the vast North Atlantic. In this telling, he conveyed a complex emotion—grief, anger, guilt, and deep love for his community that he understood as tied to the future of a fish. “It’s a crime,” he said, referring to the lost nets, to the cod collapse, to the depopulating towns, but he did not and perhaps could not name a perpetrator for that crime. In my dissertation, I follow the emergence of the nets that this fisherman and many others lost as a material throughline to trace how culpability for the cod collapse became tangled across institutions, tools, and history. And I center this structure of feeling as a telling orientation to a world where accountability for social-ecological collapse has become diffuse, differently snaring us all, and where the difficulty of discussing extractive violence distributed across oceans and centuries is itself constitutive of how it persists.

Or at least that’s the idea.

In practice, writing a dissertation is hard, as everyone in this room can attest. And one of the reasons why it is so hard is because we have to navigate so many voices, not just those we come to know through fieldwork, but also a chorus of authors, theorists, advice from people who care deeply about our success, and diverging perspectives on what success can and should consist of.

In one of my first meetings with Kate as a PhD student seven years ago, I was articulating what I now know is a common feeling of overwhelm amidst all these entreating voices. “One of the vanishingly rare opportunities a PhD program offers,” Kate replied, “is having a handful of years to find your voice.”

As Kate’s advisee, her frequent TA, and a co-instructor on a class we were fortunate enough to design together called “Inequality and the Anthropocene,” that project of attending to voice and learning to hear my own is the core endeavor she has helped me undertake. The best terms I can think of to describe this experience is that I feel I have spent the last seven years as an apprentice to a master craftsperson.

Because one’s voice is crafted as much as it is found.

Rather than merely having a set of opinions and the ability to communicate them well or vocally, for Kate I’ve learned that “finding one’s voice” entails the ongoing work of constructing an intentional orientation to and relationship with the world and the others one encounters in it. Voice, in these terms, is at least as much about listening as it is about speaking.

What does it mean to listen? Any iPhone can record an interview. That’s not what we’re talking about.

From Kate’s scholarship, her photography, her mentoring, and her teaching, I have come to think of listening in terms of creating the conditions for another voice to find resonance—for someone other than oneself to feel recognized and heard.

Resonance is a concept Kate develops and explores in Guitar Makers, her book about American lutherie organized around her own apprenticeship to a luthier. Different woods—called sound woods—metals, and instrument shapes all produce different qualities of resonance. These are the structural qualities luthiers draw from when they “voice” a guitar.

Finding one’s voice, in the terms Kate offers, is not so dissimilar from voicing a guitar—namely, recognizing and crafting one’s own unique structures of resonance.

 When thought of in these terms, the project of finding one’s voice is the opposite of an individualist quest. It is the project of attending to the way the world and its many voices resonate through and with you. Voice is what happens when you offer that resonance back as a conscious contribution. I have learned this from the way Kate teaches her classes, how she crafts her ethnography, how she mentors students like me.

 But perhaps the way in which I have been talking about these concepts seems abstract. The questions Kate asks with her work makes them powerfully concrete: Which voices get to contribute to decisions that shape the terms of their futures? And how might we come to understand the conditions that constrain and restrict those voices?

 This is a question about democracy—as a concept and as an ideal—that defines Kate’s work with wild horses as much as her work with auto plant workers. Voice and resonance cannot be confined to the particular and particularly haunted category of the human. When we say the world could have been otherwise and might still, for Kate this entails thinking and listening expansively with the voices that are structurally shut out of the decisions that shape their lives, illuminating the stakes of that silencing and the conditions through which it comes to pass.

 I am exiting graduate school and my apprenticeship with Kate at a moment when a thin mimicry of voice is becoming automated and the conditions under which voices can develop and find resonance are being constrained and suppressed. It is not an exaggeration to say that I feel blessed to have encountered Kate and her offer to journey with me as I fathom my own voice and others’ as unique sites of relation and resonance in times such as these. As I know other panelists will attest, the craft we all have been learning with Kate is as much about citizenship as it is about anthropology or ethnography. And it is with conviction, friendship, and bottomless gratitude that I say thank you for inviting me to consider that as a project of my life.