Modulations and Intersections: Disability and the (Un)Critical Role of Music (Music and Disability AMS Study Group and SMT Interest Group)

SMT Music and Disability Interest Group
AMS Study Group on Music and Disability
SMT Global Interculturalisms and Musical Peripheries
SMT Scholars for Social Responsibility Interest Group
Organized by Jeannette Jones, Stefan Honisch, Chantal Lemire, Miriam Piilonen, and Gavin Lee

Ryan Weber, Dismantling Narratives of (Dis)Ableism: Tracing Discourse of Belonging in the Era of COVID-19
Tekla Babyak, Saint-Saens' Suite Algerienne and President Trump's COVID-19 rhetoric
Andrew Chung, Music and the Maiming of the New World at the Orbis Spike, 1610
Anna Gatdula, Einstein's Einstein, on Opera's Hegemonic Assimilation of Disability
James Deaville, Colonizing the Coronavirus in China: Quarantine, Media Representation, and the Sounds of Neoliberal Biopolitics
How does music's troubled relationship to bodies, senses, and minds, legitimize the inequalities buttressed by neoliberal capitalism, and its empty forms of "inclusionism?" Going further, how have such inequalities been sustained within Disability Studies? Recently, the emergence of Critical Disability Studies, encompassing postcoloniality, and intersectionality demonstrate how affirmative gestures of collective identity through disability culture, founded upon universalizing rights-based discourses ignore the global, structural, and material inequalities that circumscribe the lives of disabled people around the world, and in particular, the GlobalSouth. This critically nuanced work confronts difficult questions about who is able to participate, and who is excluded in neoliberal rhetorics of empowerment, diversity, and inclusion.


Embracing a Critical Disability Studies framework that centers the work of queer, trans, disabled activists, educators, and scholars of color, this joint meeting of the AMS Study Group on Music and Disability and co-sponsoring SMT Interest Groups interrogates how the "social model" of disability reinforces Euro-American definitions of what is valuable in music, and whose knowledge about music counts. Topics include, but are not limited to, disability representation in music, performance and performativity, identity, ability and virtuosity, intersectionality, transnationalism, globalization, and postcoloniality; our discussions will also touch on the current COVID-19 pandemic. We encourage presentations to move within and around the Critical Disability Studies framework outlined above.