(Black-Queer-Feminist) Ethics of Listening

Catalog description

This course will explore modes of listening across a wide variety of musical genres and traditions, past and present, considering the ways people hear music differently in a broad range of contexts. Students will reflect critically on their own listening paradigms, on the assumptions and preconceptions that affect how we translate what we hear into feeling and knowing, and on the stakes of those translations. The intention of the course is to develop our critical awareness of the power and politics involved in both everyday listening practices and listening as a scientific ethnographic method. Centering a black queer ethic of care, the course will bring together key texts from Black feminist musicologists, cultural theorists, and ethnographers in order to help cultivate an ethic for listening as carework. Attending the power dynamics of listening both in the archive and in the field, participation in this course will be grounded in students' individual objects and sites of study.