ISS21 Research Seminar

Music, Sound, and Power in Contemporary Places of Detention

in association with the School of Applied Social Studies, the Department of Sociology and Criminology, the Department of Music and the MusConYP Research Project (supported by the Irish Research Council)

2-4pm, Thursday, February 20th, 2020

Boole 2

ABSTRACT

Contemporary signs indicate we will soon be living in an age of mass incarceration. Recent years have witnessed a growth in academic investigation into the sonic qualities and musical experiences of those in carceral spaces, particularly prisons, via the work of Cusick (2006; 2008), Anderson and Overy (2010), Cohen (2012), Grant and Papaeti (2013), and Rice (2016), for example. But incarceration takes many forms beyond that of the “prison as punishment” model today as the carceral trend in using detention for immigration purposes continues to rise around the world. Furthermore, this trend towards containment impacts how controlled populations (most often poor, people of colour) subsequently experience and shape urban spaces following their detention.

This two-hour seminar features two individual 45-minute lectures by Tom Western (University of Oslo/ University of Oxford) and Áine Mangaoang (University of Oslo). Western presents his research-led radio recordings, which he co-produced as an element of his ethno-activist music research in Greece and Norway. The talks consider questions, including: how can a focus on music and sound facilitate interrogations of politics and power in contemporary places of detention and containment? How might musicians, music researchers, ethnographers, and anthropologists advocate for social justice by reaching out to and building alliances with communities that are impacted by these carceral trends? And how can we ethically sound contested citizenships in the 21st century?

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Áine Mangaoang is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Musicology, University of Oslo. Her work on music in detention appears in her first monograph Dangerous Mediations: Pop Music in a Philippine Prison (Bloomsbury, 2019) and in the journals Postcolonial Text and TORTURE. Research on popular music, (dis)ability, place, and politics is published in the edited volumes Beyoncé (University of Indiana Press, 2020), The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis (2018), and in the Journal of World Popular Music (2019). She is co-editor of the forthcoming book Made in Ireland: Studies in Popular Music (Routledge, 2020).

Tom Western is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of Musicology in the Faculty of Humanities. His researchcentres on sound, borders, and citizenships, combining approaches from ethnomusicology, anthropology, forced migration studies and sound studies. He is currently working on his first monograph, entitled National Phonography: Field Recording, Sound Archiving, and Producing the Nation in Music (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2021). He has also published in the journals Sound Studies, Twentieth-Century Music, Ethnomusicology Forum, and in several edited books.