[We have the following announcement.]
Rethinking Protest Music, October 24–25, 2015, Bowl 016, Robertson Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.
Few moments seem as ripe as the present for a reconsideration of protest, protest cultures, and music’s role in both. The past decade has witnessed a notable surge in protest activity across the globe, as witnessed in the Red Shirt rebellion in Thailand, the Arab Spring uprisings, post-Fukushima anti-nuclear protests in Japan, the Greek anti-austerity movement, the Occupy movement, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, the Euromaidan movement in the Ukraine and, most recently, the “Black Lives Matter” movement in the United States. The inventiveness and ingenuity with which activists have mobilized music and related sonic practices within these and other recent protest movements point to ways in which the familiarity of this object of inquiry might profit from its defamiliarization, as much in theory as in practice. This conference gathers scholars from a range of disciplines to reexamine the place of music and sound in protest, with a view toward generating fresh perspectives on this subject.
