Migrating Music: Media, Politics and Style

Consisting of an international conference and a book based upon it, this project seeks to locate BBC World Music broadcasting in the larger context of musical flows and diasporic contact zones across the world. The conference in July 2009 brought together seventy five scholars, musicians and media practitioners from around the world to discuss this broad question. The book, to be published by Routledge in the Culture, Economy and the Social series, consists of fifteen chapters by up and coming young scholars together with a number of leading academics in the fields of world and diasporic music.

Project contact: 

Dr Jason Toynbee, Open University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology, j.a.toynbee@open.ac.uk

Project members: 

• Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies in the Sociology Department at The Open University. He researches and writes on creativity, copyright, and race especially in relation to popular music. Among his books are Making Popular Music (2000) and Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? (2007). He is currently leading the AHRC Beyond Text large grant project What Is Black British Jazz? Routes, Ownership and Performance which is also based at The Open University. The project takes forward some of the ideas and approach developed in Migrating Music. The website can be found here:
  
  Byron Dueck is Lecturer in Music at the Royal Northern College of Music. He studies the music and dance of Cree, Ojibwe, and Métis people in western Canada, drawing connections between intimate contexts of aboriginal music making and broader indigenous social imaginaries. Additional research interests include jazz in Britain and popular music in Cameroon.

Core theme reference: 

• Migrating Music