Music Studies & the Anthropocene: Agitating for New Futures
4-5 May 2024
The Music Studies & the Anthropocene Research Network invites provocations for our third meeting, which will take place virtually in May of 2024.
Our impetus for this call emerges from two threads of inspiration—or, indeed, provocation. The first is Michel Foucault’s insight in Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), in which he queries “moments of discontinuity, rupture, threshold, limit, series, and transformation” that surface amidst efforts to unite discourses, inbetween-ness serving “new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations.” Our second point of departure is Bathsheba Demuth and Kerri Arsenault’s work on environmental storytelling and, in particular, the question of how the non-human narrates or bears witness to environmental change. Inviting the rebuilding of relational knowledge in a fundamental way, they ask: what might stories about the end of the world look or sound like if they were produced by sentient beings other than ourselves? These avenues of thought lead us to wonder, how might music scholars intervene otherwise?
To grapple with our current disciplinary and planetary moment, we are putting aside (for now) the “conference as usual”: we want provocations—challenges to the status quo and incitements to new futures.
The Anthropocene—the name that geologists have given to our current geological epoch, defined by measurable and ongoing human intervention into global ecologies—prompts scholars of music and sound to reimagine disciplinary foundations, priorities, and investments, structures of knowledge, value, and power. We ask that, in your provocation, you identify cracks between environmental thought and musical thought—disjunctions, limitations—with a particular eye towards the challenges that the concept of the Anthropocene poses to our fields. The format of your provocation is flexible: we encourage submissions that unite medium with intent, which can take the form of paper presentations, performances, seminar discussions, collective brainstorming, and more. We welcome experimentation and aim to put together a program that runs the gamut from intensity to fun.
Submission Guidelines
We are particularly interested in provocations that address one or more of the following topics, but are by no means limiting submissions to these themes:
- Music in/and the history of science and colonial expansion (including bio-prospecting, plant transfers and scientific plant development, patterns of world trade, labor, and resource extraction)
- Infrastructures of music, sound, and their environmental materials
- Petrosonics
- Global critical organology
- Global music theory
- Environmental storytelling
- Institutional politics in the anthropocene
- Modes of political organizing
- Ideas of the commons and enclosure
Your provocation will consist of two primary components: a “statement of provocation” and formatting requirements for your session.
First, your statement of provocation should take the form of an abstract of about 250 words that explains the following:
- What your provocation, question, problem, or theme for discussion is
- Why it is important for scholars of music and sound
- What examples you’re drawing on (your work, the work of other scholars, music, sound art, material objects, etc.).
Second, you should also include the following information in an explanation of roughly 150 words.:
- What format you would like discussion of your provocation to take with a brief explanation for how you envision the session unfolding. Keep in mind that the sessions will take place virtually and that each session will be about 90 minutes in length. Options include, but are not limited to:
- Seminar or discussion-based session
- Series of formal paper presentations
- Performance-lecture or performance-seminar
- Collective action planning or collaborative work
- Who will be participating, beyond informal attendees. You can list up to 5 participants, including a moderator, but can also leave it up to us to allocate participants for your session.
The deadline for submission of all of these materials is February 1, 2024 via the following Google form: https://forms.gle/CsuvJ5ijVRn72xTz8
Graduate students, contingent scholars, and scholars from the Global South are particularly encouraged to apply. The Program Committee will aim to contact those who submitted at the beginning of March to communicate its decisions.
Please direct your questions to the Program Committee Chair, Kirsten Paige (kspaige2@ncsu.edu).
Program Committee
Andrew Chung
Gabrielle Cornish
Sadie Menicanin
Kirsten Paige
Maria Fantinato G. de Siqueira
Lee Veeraraghavan
