Politics of Memory Conference, September 2012

The third International Conference on Re-thinking Humanities and Social Sciences will be held this September at the University of Zadar, Croatia.  With the theme speaking to 'The Politics of Memory', the conference will be wonderful opportunity to present some research from our project and meet with other scholars working on memory in the humanities and social sciences.  Two papers based on work from the project have been accepted for inclusion in the programme:

Writing Workshop, May 2012

Now that data collection for the project is almost at an end, it's time for the team to shift focus to writing up the research. With this task in mind, the project team met for a two-day writing retreat in May. The aim of the meet-up was to circulate writing samples amongst the team, and obtain feedback on work in progress. We also had an opportunity to workshop a range of ideas for future publications, many of which will be collaborations between team members.

Here's a brief snapshot of the sorts of things that we're working on at the moment. Details of final publications will be posted on the website in the coming months.

Popular Music and Cultural Memory seminar - tales from Israel and Australia

Our Israeli partner investigator, Motti Regev, is currently visiting Brisbane and will be presenting a seminar paper at Griffith's Gold Coast campus today. His paper will provide a summary of key themes arising from the interview data collected in July/August 2011, when Sarah and he conducted fieldwork in Tel Aviv.

Also at the seminar, Sarah will be presenting a paper about the social and cultural functions of the Victorian Jazz Archive. The paper, co-authored with Alison Huber, considers the important work being done at this DIY institution by volunteers as they seek to collect, preserve and make public Australia's jazz history.

This lunchtime seminar will be held in G02 2.09 from 12-1.30pm.

Publication: Locating the Canon in Tamworth

Sarah and Alison have co-authored an article about the appearance and construction of a country music canon in Tamworth, Australia.  The piece will be published in a forthcoming edition of the journal, Popular Music (2013, 32(3)).  The article is based on fieldwork Sarah and Alison undertook in 2011, and is interested in the means through which certain aspects of popular music's historical past comes to be remembered over others.  Read the abstract here:

Our project in Adelaide, Canberra, Sydney

Project team researcher, Ian Rogers, has been gathering interview data in Australian capital cities over the last couple of months, and has spoken to dozens of locals about their city's music scenes, and the personal memories that coalesce around music practices there. First stop was Adelaide, a place whose vibrant music scene sometimes doesn't receive the recognition it deserves. Ian visited lots of music venues in the city and found a community of enthusiastic music listeners who were keen to participate in our project. Next on the itinerary was our country's capital, Canberra. On the day Ian landed, the Canberra Times featured a nostalgic piece on the twentieth anniversary of US band Nirvana's performance in the city, which set an appropriate backdrop to a series of interviews with people involved in the music scene there. Last stop was Sydney, where Ian interviewed a range of performers, audience members, record store workers, and radio people, and spent time exploring the city's inner city scenes that weekend visitors are rarely able to experience without a guide.