2021 Research

For the 2020-2021 academic year, the Global Popular Music team is considering the topic of Musical Bodies.

Led by professor Alisha Lola Jones, our scholars will spend the year considering the following:

How can we understand music as one medium in a multimedia world? How do technology and production processes mediate music in essential ways? How does writing about music, or filming music, supplement or change music’s impact and meaning? How can we write well about music, in a way that captures not just what and how music means, its history, and social insertion, but also in a way that acknowledges different groups who consume writing about music? What is the long history and present possibilities of the relation between film and music?

All of these inquiries are designed to get at the heart of one final question: what is the relationship between performance and discourse?