Music as critical theory: Knowing and being through musical performance

Description

Music as critical theory has generous yet complex scope for emancipatory and restorative social change, which is at once indelible, expansive, contesting and challenging. Bonnie's participants are locally-based musicians writing and performing music which supports intersectional feminism and decolonisation, demonstrate the significance of music as critical theory across their creative works and in conversation with her about them. In this seminar, Bonnie will share two key ideas from her first round of data collection; Affect, Music and Collectivity, and Vulnerability and Hope. Both of these ideas illustrate how musical performances are important sites of critical theory in that lived experience, knowledge and collective mobilization are held together at once through subversive, politically-conscious everyday practice manifest in the music performed by her participants.