Oxford Policy Engagement Networks Leaders Award
Workshops on Music and Sound Research
Taking place in June and July 2024 are three workshops organized by Professor Naomi Waltham-Smith and supported by an Oxford Policy Engagement Network Leaders Award. The series is designed to raise awareness of the potential for research on music, sound, and listening to engage with and inform public policy. The workshops bring together academics from multiple disciplines with NGOs, grassroots and other civil society organizations, lawyers, and others working to influence policymaking. There is a focus on making time for discussion with the aspiration that we can work together to overcome the challenges in respective areas, including by considering how diverse academic work or expertise can be brought together and harnessed in socio-political and legal contexts. From these conversations, we hope to identify possibilities for collaborative opportunities and to expand the range of policy areas for which music and sound research is recognized as relevant and productive, beyond the sphere of the creative industries, health and wellbeing, and music education.
1: Listening and Democratic Participation
Tuesday 18 June, 10:00–12:30
How can an opera transform a public space?
In this interactive workshop designed by Juan López-Aranguren and Jonathan Reyes from The Democratic Society (DemSoc), we explore listening as a method for democratic participation.
In their practice, listening is a central element when it comes to uniting wills and aligning objectives, impacts and resources. Listening processes require a more emotional than cerebral approach, which means that collaboration dynamics initially focus on more cultural and artistic fields than technical ones: music, dance, or performance are essential tools on many occasions.
These processes are not free of conflicts (quite the opposite), but they are conflicts that invite and lead to a change in routines and the cancellation of prejudices.
At the end of the night no one wants to dance alone.
2: Regulating Sound and Music
Tuesday 18 June, 12:30–17:00
How are sound, music, noise, and listening implicated in the regulation of protest and freedom of expression? What can music- and sound-specific expertise add to our understanding of how law and policy operate to restrict certain musical cultures? Or what does it tell us about the ramifications of public order legislation that enables police to impose conditions based on noisiness? Or how does a richer concept of listening aid in understanding how to balance the rights of academic free expression with other rights? This workshop brings together academics from multiple fields, legal practitioners, NGOs, and grassroots organizations to discuss these questions.
The workshop features a panel organized by JUSTICE on the suppression of drill music in law and policy with Danielle Manson (Matrix Chambers), Habib Kadiri (StopWatch), and Lambros Fatsis (City, University of London).
The second panel is devoted to the law of freedom of expression, academic freedom, and protest, featuring James Murray (Doyle Clayton/University of Buckingham), David Mead (University of East Anglia), and Illan rua Wall (University of Galway).
4: How Should the New Labour Government be Listening?
Monday 16 September, 12:30–17:15
“They’re just not listening” has become a familiar lament in contemporary politics. Politicians often promise to listen, and citizens still feel let down. If listening is often hailed as a remedy for the ills of distrust, disaffection, and polarization, what do we mean exactly by listening and what does listening well look like in practice? To whom should government listen, and how? What needs to be done to embed listening in the workings of government across multiple scales?
This workshop brings together people thinking about these issues in academia, think tanks, and charitable organizations to address these questions from multiple angles—from the impacts of unresponsive economic policy to the potential of deliberative democracy, from the political challenges of building sustainable coalitions to the marginalization of minorities in public policy. The workshop will be interactive, with two sets of short panel presentations, each followed by small-group discussion organized around prompt questions to help identify concrete policy proposals.
In the first half, we will look at a range of political and political-economic factors influencing distrust and how these can be tackled, with presentations from Will Jennings (University of Southampton), Claire Ainsley (Progressive Policy Institute—joining virtually), Phil Burton-Cartledge (University of Derby), Jonathan Hopkin (LSE), and Ben Ansell (University of Oxford).
The second half will focus on more inclusive practices of listening including deliberative democracy and combatting the marginalization of minority voices, with presentations from Ceri Davies (NatCen), Becca Massey-Chase (IPPR), Matt Johnson (Runnymede), and Aurelien Mondon (University of Bath).
3: Sonic Storytelling and Storylistening
Thursday 18 July, 14:00–16:30
If stories are powerfully forms of testimony, persuasion, community-building, how can sound and music be mobilized in storytelling to inform and enhanced community participation in policymaking? What makes sound and music distinctive media for sharing stories? And as interest rises in the use of narrative evidence in policymaking, how should we be listening to stories, and what can music and sound research tell us about how to cultivate a discerning ear?
This workshop brings together researchers across a wide variety of fields to explore the role of music and creative sonic practices in telling and listening to stories in diverse areas that inform policymaking from community arts and sonic heritage through collective memory and placemaking to sonification in science communication and storylistening in public reason.
In the first half the stage is set by Claire Craig CBE (University of Oxford), a geophysicist who has extensive public policy experience, who will speak abotu the importance of “storylistening” in public story. Then we will hear from Thomas Gernon (University of Southampton), an earth and environmental scientist with interests in how sonification can make scientific data more accessible, and from Miriam Quick, a journalist, artist and musician who is one half of the data sonification studio Loud Numbers.
The second half will feature panel presentations from music and sound researchers who have used creative approaches to sound in community engagement and to inform local policy and planning: Gascia Ouzounian (Oxford), Samantha Dieckmann, (Oxford), Noel Lobley (University of Virginia), and Laudan Nooshin (City, University of London/Charcoalblue).