On 11th January 2019, Laudan Nooshin presented a Keynote paper at the Royal Musical Association/British Forum for Ethnomusicology Annual Music Research Students’ Conference, held this year at the University of Sheffield.
Laudan’s keynote was entitled: ‘Space Invaders? Reflections on Diversity, Disciplinary Identities and a Music Studies for the 21st Century’ and discussed a number of issues around the need to foster a more inclusive and diverse Music Higher Education for the future. The keynote asked what the current state of Music HE reveals about the workings of power and privilege: what are the barriers to diversity, and how do such issues intersect with recent debates over ‘decolonising’ the academy? The second half of the keynote addressed similar questions, but in relation to disciplinary and sub-disciplinary identities.
City was well represented at the conference, with presentations by current City PhD student Jonathan Higgins, who played some of his compositional work and presented a paper entitled ‘Faking the Past: The Noise of Obsolete Technologies in Contemporary Composition’; as well as by City alumni now pursuing doctoral studies elsewhere: Beanie Arkle (University of Surrey) talking about ‘Gustav Mahler and the Wagnerian Musical Turn: An Analytic Reading of the Role of the Turn’ and Hannah Gibson (Queen’s University, Belfast), whose paper was entitled ‘Dancing and Sociality in the Irish Country Music Scene’. It was so nice to see our former students doing so well in their postgraduate studies.
The RMA/BFE Research Students’ Conference brings together music research students from across a wide spectrum of areas, including musicology, ethnomusicology, composition, performance and other kinds of practice-research, music education, music psychology and more. Next year’s conference will be held at the Open University in Milton Keynes from 9th to 11th January 2020 and all our research students are strongly encouraged to attend.
Hannah Gibson Presenting