A Playlist for Teaching With Halberstam’s “What’s That Smell?”
I’m teaching the last chapter of Halberstam’s In A Queer Time And Place, the chapter on queer music subcultures. I’m more interested in the music part than the subculture parts (the sounds more than the ethnography or critical geography or…
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department’s Proposed Exclusion Zone Policy Is Racist
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police is considering adopting a policy that prohibits people with arrest/criminal records from being in specific “high-crime” areas called “safety zones”. As the Charlotte Observer‘s Steve Harrison explains, Here is how they would work: If CMPD found an area…
My SPEP 2015 Paper: Noisy Feminists, Neoliberal Sophrosyne, & Post-Identity Politics
It’s time for SPEP this year, and that means it’s time for me to post the text of my paper (that’s link to a gdoc). My session is Thursday afternoon, and I’ll be doing the typical Robin thing where I take a…
On the Origin of “Gender” and “Race”
In my social & political philosophy class, we’re beginning the course by talking about social contract theory. The other day we considered Charles Mills’ claim that a theory of a prior “domination contract” would put us “in a position to…
“Music as Predictive Science”: Attali, music, & the science of forecasting
For as influential as Attali’s Noise has been, most scholars have sidestepped its central claim: “music is prophecy” (11). It feels really undersupported; Attali asserts that music anticipates or foreshadows social change, but he doesn’t seem to provide anything more…
A few quick thoughts on Stadlers’s “The Whiteness of Sound Studies”
Gus Stadler published a smart and needed critique of the whiteness of sound studies as a discipline. It’s a great piece, and not just because it quotes me, lol. I wanted to post a few informal reflections on the piece,…
30 Day Song Challenge, Day 23: A Song You Want Played At Your Wedding
I got married 10 years ago this October, one month after I defended my dissertation, so I think that this question is more historical than speculative: there were songs played at my wedding…not like I remember what they were. We…
30 Day Song Challenge, Day 22: A Song You Wish You Had Written
Surprise surprise, I like to break songs down more than I like to write them; analysis is more my thing than composition. I’ve been thinking about this question for days, and, honestly, I keep coming up with null set. Like,…
30 Day Song Challenge, Day 21: A Song That Is Best Heard Live
So, for me, the point of seeing live music is social–listening and dancing with other people. This is probably because the music I like most generally sounds better when recorded: there’s a lot of subtle details that just don’t always…
30 Day Song Challenge, Day 20: A Song To Listen To While You’re Angry
I made a Beats playlist titled “Fed Up”–it’s full of songs to listen to when I’m angry. But, there are a lot of different kinds of anger–some more seething, some more immediately aggressive. Whatever kind of anger I’m feeling, I…
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