The Frisby Lecture 2019 - What We Learn From Music: Hidden Musical Lives and the Craft of Understanding Society
This talk develops the idea of doing sociology with music through focusing on the hidden musical lives of sociologists. It will argue that sociologists learn a great deal from music both in terms the insights it produces into the workings of culture and society but also in terms of how it sustains our sociological imagination and inspires us to make sociology differently.
Sociology
Date: Thursday 14 March 2019
Time: 17:00 - 18:30
Venue: Sir Charles Wilson Lecture Theatre
Category: Public lectures
Speaker: Professor Les Back, Goldsmiths, University of London
Sociologists are often secret musicians. This goes all the way back to W.E.B. Du Bois and Max Weber for whom musical life was always woven into their sociological thinking. In recent times, there have been numerous appeals to use music to reimagine sociology itself. For example, David Beer has called for a punk sociology – as urgent and vital like a Clash single - as an antidote to the showy and technical ‘prog rock’ tendencies in the mainstream discipline.
The talk will explore a range of examples from Howard Becker’s grounding in field research as a pianist in the Chicago jazz clubs and his theories of deviance and labelling to the impact playing the guitar has had on Paul Gilroy's understanding the cultures of the African diaspora to the connection between Emma Jackson’s life as a bass player in Brit pop band Kenicke and her feminist punk sociology.
Speaker: Les Back is Professor of sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work attempts to create a sensuous or live sociology committed to searching for new modes of sociological writing and representation. This approach is outlined in his book The Art of Listening (Berg 2007). He has largely conducted ethnographic studies of race and racism, popular culture including sport and music focusing largely on London but he has also done fieldwork in the American South. His books include New Ethinicities and Urban Culture (UCL 1996), The Changing Face of Football: Racism, Identity and Multiculture in the English Game (with Tim Crabbe and John Solomos Berg 2001) and Out of Whiteness: Color, Politics and Culture (with Vron Ware University of Chicago Press, 2002). He also writes journalism and has made documentary films. In 2016 he published a book entitled Academic Diary: Or Why Higher Education Still Matters and most recently he publsihed Migrant City (2018) with Shamser Sinha, Charlynne Bryan, Vlad Baraku and Mardouche Yembi which is the story of contemporary London over the last ten years told from the vantage point of thirty adult migrants.