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About: This symposium brings together emerging and established music scholars who prioritize labor as a focus of our teaching and research, and who are developing it as an organizing concept in our work. The symposium will take place May 15–17 at the Friday Harbor Laboratories at the University of Washington, on San Juan Island, WA. Marianna Ritchey (University of Massachusetts Amherst) will deliver a keynote address, and the program will also feature presentations by Kirsten Carithers (University of Louisville) and John Pippen (Colorado State University).
Call: We invite music scholars from all disciplines to submit abstracts of no more than 250 words for research presentations or teaching demonstrations of 20 minutes. We welcome submissions on a wide range of topics encompassing music and labor, and we encourage applicants to think expansively about both terms—“music” and “labor”—in preparing their abstracts. Topics of special interest include but are not limited to:
- The material conditions of musical work(s)
- Historical forms of musical labor (e.g. guilds)
- Organized labor (e.g. musicians’ unions)
- Work songs and labor songs
- Music and the “gig economy”
- Hidden or suppressed labor
- Emotional and creative labor
- Labor in higher education
- Theories of labor
Submission: Applicants should submit their anonymized abstracts and (in a separate document) a short biography to musicandlaborsymposium@gmail.com no later than 11:59 pm on Sunday, March 1. The program committee will notify applicants of their status no later than Sunday, March 15.
Funding: All meals and accommodations will be provided free of charge to all accepted participants, who will be responsible only for arranging their travel to Friday Harbor. Travel funding will also be available for graduate students accepted as participants.
Program Committee: Mark Rodgers (University of Washington), Kirsten Carithers (University of Louisville), and Marco Ladd (King’s College, London)
