Music and Ethnography Seminar Series 2025, Goldsmiths, University of London
Dr Christabel Stirling: ‘Music Ethnography in and of the city’
This seminar will focus on ethnographies of music and sound in contemporary urban environments, drawing on a body of ethnographic work produced over the last 10 years as part of my PhD research and as a postdoc on the ERC-funded project SONCITIES. I will start by exploring how ethnography’s slow, non-totalising mode of research multiplication can help us to ‘draw the city near’ (Simone 2014), while also posing significant challenges regarding the proliferation and containment of complexity. I will talk about the specifics of conducting urban ethnography in a musical/sonic register—for example, how music and sound are often the primary realms through which differences of all kinds jostle and challenge one another on the urban public stage, sometimes antagonistically; but equally how sound, in its relational ontology, is a powerful medium and method for understanding how, qualitatively, such differences often manage to co-exist and function together. I will discuss my use of experimental and participatory ‘live methods’ (Back & Puwar 2012), such as audio journaling, DIY field recording, and hand-drawn mind mapping, probing the kinds of understanding that such methods afford and the ethical challenges they raise. And I will touch on my current work producing two research outputs—a collaborative multi-media platform and an ethnographic piece of writing—from the same fieldwork material, talking through some of the interesting problems this presents.
Dr. Christabel Stirling is a musicologist specialising in ethnographic approaches to contemporary music and sound art. She joined the Royal College of Music in January 2023 as a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher on the ERC-funded project SONCITIES at Oxford University, having completed a DPhil in Music there in 2019 supported by the Ertegun Graduate Scholarship Programme.
The Music and Ethnography Seminar Series is co-ordinated by Martin Stokes, Peter McMurray, Georgina Born, and Barley Norton. Warm thanks to all for this invitation!