Sounding Freedom and Liberation
Alumna and bye-fellow launches new podcast
How free are we when we define music? When we hear it? When we perform it?
Alumna and bye-fellow, Férdia Stone-Davis (University of Cambridge) and Charissa Granger (Trinidad and Tobago) have launched a new, seven-part podcast series ‘Sounding Freedom and Liberation’ that listens closely to music as a practice of thought, feeling, and world-making. Each episode invites scholars, musicians, and thinkers from across disciplines to think through how music and sound shape our understanding of freedom, to explore how it can unsettle inherited ideas of freedom and open new ways of being and knowing.
Episode 3 is a conversation with our bye-fellow in English, Polly Paulusma. Polly reflects on how her scholarship and creative practice are entwined, her work on the musicality of Angela Carter’s writing inflecting her own compositional approach. Polly tells us how folk song engages with freedom, allowing individuals to take on the personas and experiences of others by adapting stories and lyrics, making them their own, and offering ways of imagining different ways of being and acting.
The podcast has been created as part of the CRASSH Events & Initiatives programme.
About Sounding Freedom and Liberation
The idea of a podcast looking at music, sound, and freedom came in the wake of a collaborative intervention that Férdia and Charissa made to a CRASSH trans-disciplinary symposium, Rhythm as Knowledge. As part of her FWF-funded project The Epistemic Power of Music, Férdia had recently been thinking and writing about epistemic injustice within the context of listening and the western music canon. Charissa continued her research into the liberatory potential of music practices within the context of Afro-Caribbean musics. Together we sought to draw attention to how rhythm was not an automatic and unmitigated means of being-together, but depended on practices that attempted to move from unfreedom to freedom (or refused this movement). We decided that we would like to explore this further together, in a way that gathered in voices from different disciplines, and in a way that kept open the idea of freedom as it moved across conversations. It was with this aim in mind that we decided on the format of a podcast which would invite dialogue partners from different disciplines, encouraging listeners to unsettle any inherited ideas of freedom they might have by discussing their own research and practice, and thinking through freedom not only in individual terms but as part of communities and community practices.
