The UCLA Center for Musical Humanities, in collaboration with the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, is calling for papers and proposals for an upcoming interdisciplinary multi-day conference titled “Theorizing Trauma and Disability in Music Studies,” to be held in person with hybrid remote access on February 7-9, 2025. The conference will take place in the fully ADA-accessible Schoenberg Music Building on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. All presentations and performances will be livestreamed online, as well as in designated quiet spaces that will be open to attendees at all times.
Scholarly considerations of trauma and disability have evolved largely independently of one another over the past few decades, and yet their various lines of inquiry and close considerations of the human sensorium appear to share a great deal of substantive and meaningful overlap. Our goal is to bring together artists and scholars whose work concerns music and trauma and/or disability studies in order to identify these areas of overlap, and to open up necessary dialogues between people who may be engaging with similar kinds of questions using different but complementary sets of tools. By coming together to understand the intersections between trauma and disability studies more vividly, this event will seek to develop frameworks that can be flexibly shared by scholars in music studies and other related fields, especially given the complex intertwining of disability and trauma that characterizes so much of human life today.
We invite proposals for paper presentations, workshops, performances, and intermedia artwork related to the topics of music, trauma, and disability. We are especially interested in projects that engage with or emerge from both subdisciplines, as well as projects that critically address the following:
- how trauma and disability have each been medicalized and pathologized, and what ontological alternatives there may be for engaging with these complex human experiences;
- how trauma and disability are constructed and understood across a variety of cultures and diasporic settings;
- how trauma and disability impact musical pedagogy and approaches to teaching and learning;
- how trauma studies and disability studies connect to inquiries about musical materiality and the senses; and
- how the tenets that underlie trauma studies and those that underlie disability studies relate to or depart from one another, and why.
We are especially interested in receiving proposals from scholars and artists of color, emerging professionals, and those who work independently of the academy.
Proposals of no more than 500 words should be emailed to the Program Committee at traumadisabilityconference2025@gmail.com by 11:59pm Pacific Standard Time on September 1, 2024. Depending upon the kind of project you are interested in proposing, please prepare the following:
- For paper presentations (20 minutes + 10 minutes of Q&A): please include a 500-word abstract
- For workshops: please describe your goals, including what kinds of materials and space you would need, and how long your session would ideally be
- For performances: please describe the instrumentation, duration, and technical needs
- For installations: please describe the piece, its size, materials needed, the ideal kind of site, and average sound levels
- For other ideas (such as panels or roundtables): please give as much information as possible
We plan to inform participants of their acceptance no later than October 1, 2024. For any questions about this event, please contact Jenny Olivia Johnson at jennyolivia@g.ucla.edu
