Call for Papers [deadline 31 October 2021]
'Rethinking Participatory Processes Through Music'
14-15 January 2022, online event
https://musicdemocracystudydays.wordpress.com
Convened by Igor Contreras Zubillaga (British Academy Postdoctoral
Fellow, University of Huddersfield) and Robert Adlington (University
of Huddersfield)
Keynote speakers: Hélène Landemore (Yale University), Anna Bull
(University of York), Raymond MacDonald (University of Edinburgh)
In recent times, the UK's Brexit vote, the 2016 US presidential
election, and other elections worldwide have made democratic processes
the subject of unprecedented public debate. This has led to widespread
questioning of the mechanisms for people's participation in the
democratic system and in political decision-making. One of the most
ground-breaking inquiries into what public participation ought to look
like within democracy has recently been carried out by political
scientist Hélène Landemore (Yale University). In her book Open
Democracy (2020), Landemore favours the ideal of 'representing and
being represented in turn' over direct-democracy approaches. Drawing
on recent experiments with citizens' assemblies, Landemore offers a
different concept of nonelectoral democratic representation.
Inspired by Landemore's work, this third and last study day on the
theme of music and democracy aims to explore the potential of music to
contribute to this rethinking of participatory processes. As Robert
Adlington and Esteban Buch (2020) argue, 'music is an arena for many
kinds of decision-making, and thus for the negotiation of power. It is
such parallels that have attracted the attention of many musicians,
who have seen in their practice the possibility of modelling new or
ideal kinds of democratic social arrangement'. Thus, we will address
questions such as: What might democratic participation look like in
music? What can music-making tell us about participatory processes in
general? What is achieved, politically, by rethinking the way in which
music is made? How might we pursue in musical life Landemore's
aspiration to 'reinvent popular rule for the twenty-first century'?
We invite proposals from scholars working in any discipline for papers
exploring participation, decision-making and power negotiation in
relation to any musical practice in any historical and geographical
context. Alongside Professor Landemore, who joins us as one of our
keynote speakers, we will have keynote presentations from Dr Anna Bull
(University of York), who has written stimulatingly and critically on
the idea of cultural democracy in relation to state funding and
pedagogy of music, and Professor Raymond MacDonald (University of
Edinburgh), who has explored new approaches to the distribution of
power in the domain of jazz and improvisation. Papers will be
20-minutes in length followed by 10 minutes of discussion time. Please
submit proposals (250-300 words) to I.ContrerasZubillaga@hud.ac.uk by
the deadline Sunday 31 October 2021. The programme will be announced
in early December.
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Dr Igor Contreras Zubillaga
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
University of Huddersfield
School of Arts and Humanities
Queensgate
Huddersfield, HD1 3DH
