Music, Mediation, and Disability:

Representation and Access

Online Symposium
November 21-22 2020

 
The words “Music” “Mediation” and “disability” are arranged vertically in white letters against a black background. The “M” in “Music” and “Mediation” and the “d” in “disability” are stylistically designed and vertically connected to look like eight…

Whether at work behind new technologies of access in a time of crisis or portraying people with disabilities on screen, mediation plays a critical role in the social construction of disability. The current pandemic-driven mediation of music on digitized platforms draws increased attention to access, as demarcations between public and private musical experience are navigated and/or redrawn.  This renewed focus on mediating modes of musical experience resonates with ongoing scholarly conversations about liveness in performance, space and sonic environments, and qualities of aurality, especially in relation to audiences with diverse perceptual capacities and dis/abilities.

“Music, Mediation, and Disability: Representation and Access” brings together researchers, practitioners, musicians, performers, and activists to explore how mediation shapes musical performance creation and reception, the effects of live and digitized sonic practices on embodiment, and the role of new technologies in shaping our social spheres.

Keynote Presenters

Keynote presentations from Joy Elan, award winning author and spoken word artist, and Xuan Thuy Nguyen, Assistant Professor in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies and the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women and Gender Studies at Carleton University.

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Joy Elán

Joy Elan is an award winning author and spoken word artist from Oakland and Berkeley, CA. She uses her writing to advocate for civil rights for Blacks/people of color, women, and people with disabilities. With her poetry and novels, she speaks about social issues that affect people from locally to globally. Joy Elan received her BA degree in African American Studies at UC Berkeley and her MA degree in Education at Stanford University. 

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Xuan Thuy Nguyen

Xuan Thuy Nguyen is an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies and Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University. Growing up in Vietnam after the war with a chronic illness, Nguyen has deeply engaged with the lived experiences of girls and women with disabilities in different regions in Vietnam. She is the Principal Investigator for Transforming Disability Knowledge, Research and Activism (TDKRA), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [2016–2020], and a co-investigator of a SSHRC’s Partnership Project, Engendering Disability Inclusive Development (EDID) [2020–2027]. Her work has been published in numerous peer-review journals and she is author of The Journey to Inclusion (2015, Sense/Brill Publishers).