Title of PhD: Analysing the reciprocal relationships between music, place, and power: an examination of local music practices in Birmingham, UK
Supervisors: Dr Phil Jones, Dr John Round, Dr Stefan Bouzarovski and Dr Julian Clarke
I am a final year PhD student, my research is on local music practices in Birmingham and I am aiming to understand how music shapes the production of place in the city. My research brings together three research techniques; interviews; participant-observation; and discourse analysis; through my empirical research I have developed an in-depth insight into to the spatialties of music in Birmingham.
The theoretical underpinnings of the research largely come from critical cultural geography and social musicology literatures. The three key theoretical themes for the research are music, place, and power; notable authors that are important to my research include; Jacques Attali, Michel Foucault, John Allen, Susan Smith, and Nigel Thrift. In my research I attempt to bring traditional lines of enquiry such as Marxism and Feminism together with new ways of thinking about cultural politics under the broad heading of non-representational theory.