Patricia Hill Collins is Distinguished University Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, a Charles Phelps Taft Professor Emerita of African American Studies at the University of Cincinnati, and an activist-scholar. Her books include Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990, 2000, 2022); Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice (1998); Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism (2004); From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism (2005); Intersectionality (2016; 2020, co-authored with Sirma Bilge); On Intellectual Activism (2012), and Lethal Intersections: Race, Gender, and Violence (2024). In 2008, she became the 100th President of the American Sociological Association, the first African American woman elected to this position in the organization’s 104-year history. In 2023, she was awarded the prestigious Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, an award given annually to an individual whose ideas have profoundly shaped human self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world. A pioneering scholar in Black feminist thought and the study of intersectionality, race, gender, sexuality, and class, her seminal analyses of power, knowledge, and injustice have influenced scholars across social sciences and humanities.
Abstract
Keeping the Beat: Soundscapes of Black Activism
Music has long been central within African American culture and politics. Whether blues, gospel, jazz, R&B, or hip hop, Black musical traditions reflect creative responses to slavery, racial segregation, and colorblind racism. In the US context, Black music invokes distinctive soundscapes of Black activism that are embedded within an ongoing Black freedom struggle. Grounded in diverse musical genres, these soundscapes express the mood, experiences and political aspirations of different generations of African Americans. In my presentation, I explore how people who come of age during specific phases of this struggle rely upon Black music both to make sense of their common memories and experiences as well as to craft political strategies of Black activism. Using the idea of “keeping the beat” as a musical metaphor for intergenerational Black activism, I explore how soundscapes of Black activism express the political aspirations of Black people within and across generations.
Pirita Näkkäläjärvi has a unique career combining Indigenous rights advocacy and business. She is the President of the Sámi Parliament in Finland. She has had a long career working in global companies such as Merrill Lynch, Nokia and EY. Näkkäläjärvi is a doctoral researcher at the Sibelius Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki. Her topic is cultural appropriation of Sámi yoiking. Näkkäläjärvi holds MSc Media & Communications (with Distinction) from London School of Economics and MSc Economics from Aalto University. She has yoiked since she was a child, and yoiked in a short film called “The Killing of Čáhcerávga” representing Finland at the Venice Biennale 2019. Pirita’s mothertongue is Northern Sámi.
Abstract
What are possible motives for cultural appropriation of Sámi yoiking in Finnish music?
There is a long history of cultural appropriation of Sámi culture in Finland. The most common form is the use in tourism of poor imitations of gákti, the traditional Sámi clothing that is part of Sámi cultural heritage. Cultural appropriation of gákti also often involves presenting Sámi as primitive and dirty. However, criticism of cultural appropriation of Sámi culture usually gets categorised as useless whining. This brushes aside structural implications of cultural appropriation. A Finn can freely use a fake gákti for tourism promotion, but a Sámi walking in a gákti often gets ridiculed and discriminated against. In perpetuating stereotypes, cultural appropriation of Sámi culture strengthens racism and cements unequal power relations. Cultural appropriation of Sámi culture takes place also in music. The Sámi vocal music tradition, yoiking, has inspired many. As a Sámi researcher, I believe that the time is ripe for critically examining cultural appropriation of Sámi yoiking, understanding how music can discriminate, and learning from past mistakes. In this keynoet I begin to chart possible motives for cultural appropriation of Sámi yoiking. I do this by situating cases of cultural appropriation in different decades and their zeitgeist. I view the phenomenon of cultural appropriation of Sámi yoiking through the lens of settler colonialism. This keynote brings an indigenous voice in the discussion on racism, cultural appropriation and activism in music, and contributes to the understanding of why the use of Sámi yoiking by outsiders is problematic. The objective is not to prohibit being inspired but to suggest how to cooperate with the Sámi music field in a sustainable manner that benefits everyone.
Shzr Ee Tan (she/her or they/them) is a Reader and ethnomusicologist/performance studies researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, specializing in Sinophone, Southeast Asian, and Indigenous geocultures. She is committed to decolonial work and EDI (Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion) practices in sound studies and the performing arts. Tan has initiated EDI campaigns and workshops on topics such as inter-ethnic solidarity, mental health, and toxic masculinity.
Motivated by impact-led research, Tan’s interests range from issues of music and decolonization to how race discourses intersect with recent debates on climate awareness, changemaking, and precarity. In association with her most recent AHRC-funded research project, "Sounds of Precarious Labour: Acoustic Regimes of Transient Workers in Southeast Asia," Tan has launched a number of collaborative, creative, and pedagogical hybrid-delivered lifelong learning and activist campaigns.
In the research project Tan has collaborated with citizen researcher and domestic worker consultant Bhing Navato, from the Philippines. Bhing Navato was until recently a domestic worker in Singapore for almost 29 years. She writes poems and stories, and is a volunteer at the NGO HOME, where she provides advice and advice to fellow domestic workers in the region. Bhing was diagnosed with Cervical Cancer in 2023 and is now back in Manila for treatment. She continues to write and share stories on her health, labour and leisure journeys on various platforms and is active as a citizen researcher.
Abstract
Walking Together on Uneven Playing Fields: Musical challenges and sounded learnings in collaborative citizen research
In partnership with Bhing Navato and in memory of Rubel Fazli Elahi
This session takes a candid and heartfelt look at learnings and failures in ongoing work around music, sound and performance-based collaborations in different citizen research communities around the world, where playing fields may be grossly uneven or uncalibrated, and where investment, stakes and desired/feared-for outcomes - personal and community hopes, dreams and anxieties - will be wildly different. Particularly, I will offer case studies of three ongoing research-as-impact projects among Migrant Workers in Precarious Labour in Southeast Asia, Radical Aunties in the UK, and East Asian Voices in Global Music Stories more internationally. Some of the questions I/we hope to ask include: How do we establish networks and meet one another as fellow performers and citizen researchers beyond transactional or extractivist contexts? How do we deal with unequal hierarchies of economic, cultural and also academic capital which we can only change in a limited way, in everyday work/play-together contexts? What if we all want different things out of the same engagement? And how do we deal with initiative and sustainability fatigue? In trying to answer some of these questions, we bring in considerations of the special challenges and affordances provided by sounded and performed activities. We will not prescribe a ‘method’ per se, but rather share experiences and learnings on what seemed to work, what did not work, and – drawing hopefully from audience participation - what could be done better in our shared future(s).