Events
Social sciences events going on across the University of Glasgow and beyond.
What Sociologists Learn from Music: Identity, Music-making and the Sociological Imagination
Sociologists often have extra-curricular lives as musicians. This talk explores the relationship between musical life and sociological identities. Through 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 to the connection between Emma Jackson’s life as a bass player in Brit pop band Kenickie and her feminist punk sociology an argument is developed about the things sociologists learn from music. Based on twenty-seven life history interviews with contemporary sociologists this talk show how sociologists learn to understand society through their engagement with music.
Sociology; College of Social Sciences Hub
Date: Monday 27 November 2023
Time: 11:00 - 13:30
Venue: St Cecilia's Music Museum and Concert Hall, 50 Niddry Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1LG
Category: Public lectures
Speaker: Les Back
Co-organised by Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, RACE.ED, Sociology at the University of Edinburgh School of Social and Political Science, and Sociology at the University of Glasgow School of Social and Political Sciences
Sociologists very often have extra-curricular lives as musicians. This talk explores the relationship between musical life and sociological identities. Through 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 to the connection between Emma Jackson’s life as a bass player in Brit pop band Kenickie and her feminist punk sociology an argument is developed about the things sociologists learn from music. Based on twenty-seven life history interviews with contemporary sociologists this talk show how sociologists learn – both directly and tacitly – to understand society through their engagement with music. Music offers them an interpretive device to read cultural history, a training in the unspoken and yet structured aspects of culture and an attentiveness to improvised and interactive aspects of social interaction. For sociologists, involvement in music making is also an incitement to get off campus and encounter an alternative world of value and values. Music has enabled sociologists to sustain their research imaginations and inspire them to make sociology differently. However, the talk concludes that in the contemporary neoliberal university it is harder for sociologists to sustain a creative hinterland in music. The tacit knowledges that often nourish sociological identities may run the risk of being depleted as a result.
Venue: St Cecilia's Music Museum and Concert Hall, 50 Niddry Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1LG
Time: 11.00am-12.30pm GMT, with lunch to follow 12.30-13.30pm
Places are limited. Please register in advance if you wish to attend.