seeking participants in an SEM roundtable proposal

[Kendra Salois]

Dear SRM Members,

I hope this finds you well! Along with Aleysia Whitmore and Ben Teitelbaum, I'm working on a roundtable proposal for this year's SEM on various ways scholars research/respond to the uses of music in cultural conflict, broadly defined. We're hoping to gather a range of approaches and settings so that we can include trans-national and beyond-US perspectives. Our draft roundtable abstract is below (emphasis on draft!). Please do get in touch at salois @ american.edu and/or aleysia.whitmore @ du.edu if you are interested!

All the best,

Kendra Salois

Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology

Department of Performing Arts

American University

DRAFT ABSTRACT:

Music scholars have offered multiple ways to study how people make, listen to, and wield music as weapons in cultural conflict. Today, social media platforms are the newest, most visible places to take cultural or political positions by consuming, interpreting, and resignifying musics, but this practice is not new. Across locations, generations, and orientations, people practice or simply reference music to stoke outrage or activism, resentment or solidarity. In the US alone, examples as diverse as union songs, the Parents’ Music Resource Center, Disco Demolition Night, and Cowboy Carter show both how music enhances political activity, and how music can be counter-mobilized.
      This roundtable gathers scholars of diverse traditions in and beyond North America to conceptualize a cohesive approach to musical conflict. We seek to unite two perspectives: studying musical examples as representations of conflict, which tends to privilege artists, and studying music as harm to others within distinct conflicts, which tends to privilege powerful consumers. One presenter explores how US social media users leverage popular songs to demonstrate the belief that one's political opponents lack the capacity for moral reasoning. Another asks how US cultural diplomacy participants evoke heritage and historical continuity to respond to conflicts provoked by their participation in nationalist projects. A third considers how activists in transnational white nationalist movements recode recordings and sounds as part of their messaging and ideology. Overall, we examine music as both a form of expression and a method of investigation, demonstrating how scholarship can recenter culture in timely public conversations on cultural conflict.