Inequality and diversity in classical music
Diversity in the arts discourses are said to challenge social inequalities and racialised representations of otherness. My work, however, shows how diversity work in the 'western' highbrow sector, even when driven by genuine intentions of institutional change, operates hierarchically. These attempts therefore often turn into practices of race-making and elite-making that secure middle-class whiteness. Focusing on the field of classical music specifically, I study the specific relations and processes that enable the on-going exploitation of racialised and gendered others, their continuous construction as otherness, and the extraction of value from their existence and labour. Making use of ethnographic and interview methods with an empirical focus on Germany and the UK, I investigate how discourses of diversity are negotiated in the social, organisational, and aesthetic practices in a cultural sector so deeply implicated in gender inequality, hierarchies of class, systems of whiteness and legacies of imperialism.
Monograph:
(2024) The sound of difference: Race, class, and the politics of 'diversity' in classical music. Manchester University Press.
Peer-reviewed journal publications:
(2022) Producing (musical) difference: Power, practices and inequalities in diversity initiatives in Germany’s classical music sector. Cultural Sociology 16(2):231-249. https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755211039437
(2021) Playing the system: ‘Race’-making and elitism in diversity projects in Germany’s classical music sector. Poetics Volume 87. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2021.101532
Book chapters:
(forthcoming) ‘Western’ Classical Music, Diversity Work, and its Colonial Imprints: Challenges, Limits, and New Directions. In: Kok, Roe-Min; Liao, Yvonne; Johnson-Williams, Erin (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Music Colonialism. Oxford University Press.
(2023) (Un)settling hegemonies – The institutional challenge of diversity initiatives in the classical music sector. In: Bull, Anna; Nooshin, Laudan; Scharff, Cristina, (eds.) The Classical Music Profession: Inequalities and Exclusions. Oxford University Press.
At a time of growing wealth concentration and intensifying economic inequality around the globe, the question of how elites gain, maintain, and legitimise their status and power presents a crucial concern for sociology. Art and cultural philanthropy have long been a key arenas for elites to reproduce themselves. In turn, the arts also fulfill a critical function through which to interrogate, subvert, and resist past and present regimes of inequality. Yet, privatisation processes and austerity politics are impacting on the workings of art institutions, shaping and arguably constraining their managerial and curatorial practices. I investigate these ambivalent dynamics in the context of two research projects specifically. In the Return of the Medici project (funded by the Dutch Research Council), I collaborate with researchers from the University of Amsterdam to study the consequences of the global rise of private art museums in the 21st century for contemporary art and for wider processes of elite (re)making today. In the Arts, Inequality, and Social Change project (funded by the LSE Marshall Institute), I collaborated with colleagues from LSE to find out how artists, curators, and museum directors in the UK reflect on and respond to growing economic inequality, both in and beyond the arts.
Peer-reviewed journal publications:
(2023) The art of (self)legitimization: how private museums help their founders claim legitimacy as elite actors, Socio-Economic Review, https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwad051
(2022) The global rise of private art museums a literature review. Poetics. [with Olav Velthuis, Johannes Aengenheyster, Andrea Friedmann Rozenbaum, Mingxue Zhang]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2022.101712
(2021) Unequal entanglements: How arts practitioners reflect on the impact of intensifying economic inequality. Cultural Trends 31(3): 257-272. https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2021.1976594
(2020) The aesthetic critique and the challenge of inequality. Cultural Sociology 15(2):171-190. [with Chris Upton-Hansen and Mike Savage]. https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975520964357 [winner of the Cultural Sociology SAGE Prize for the most innovative article]
Project reports:
(2022) Beyond the global boom. Private art museums in the 21st century - project report. [with Olav Velthuis, Johannes Aengenheyster, Andrea Friedmann Rozenbaum]. https://privatemuseumresearch.org/report/
(2019) Report on the art world’s response to the challenge of inequality. LSE Research Online. [with Chris Upton-Hansen, Mike Savage, Nicola Lacey, and Sarah Cant]. http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/103146/
Migration discourses and the media
Based on a content and discourse analysis of the German press in 2015-2016, I worked together with colleagues from LSE to examine how borders are discursively reproduced in media representations. We show how the discourse of crisis obscures reasons for migration and instead shifts the focus to the (dis)advantages that refugees are assumed to bring to their host country. This research illustrates how some lives are framed as more deserving of protection than others along racialised, gendered, and classed lines.
Peer-reviewed journal publications:
(2018) Figures of crisis: The delineation of un/deserving refugees in Germany. Sociology 52(3): 534-550. [with Billy Holzberg and Rafal Zaborowski]. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038038518759460
Despite diversity policies becoming increasingly mainstream, raced, classed, and gendered inequalities in Europe's creative sector persist. Against this backdrop, my current research project From creative labor to social change: rethinking cultural work through a politics of care (funded by the Dutch Research Council, 2023-2027) explores how cultural work can be re-imagined, and notably, re-practiced through a focus on care politics. Looking at the music sector, I conduct a multi-sited ethnography of music collectives in the Netherlands, UK, Germany, and France to study how care is constructed in their creative, organisational, and social practices of music production. I trace how care offers a new principle for creative labor that unsettles inequalities but will also analyse under which institutional parameters it merely reproduces hierarchy and precariousness.
Another ongoing project Sounding cities: reconfiguring urban politics through music production (funded by the Independent Social Research Foundation, 2023-2025) investigates the transformative role of grassroots music collectives in (re)shaping urban politics in postcolonial, multicultural Europe, with a special emphasis on Berlin (Germany) and London (UK). Epitomising Europe’s contingent political moment, both cities sit between lived multiculture and sharply rising socioeconomic inequality, postcolonial melancholia, and strengthening ethnonationalism. Within these heightened junctures of urban politics, the project addresses the question of how local music collectives reconfigure the fabric of contemporary urban life in creative and grounded ways.