Mosh Pit Methods: Team-based Collaborative Fieldwork at a Hardcore Punk Festival
SEM conference presentation (2023). In this paper, we address the complexities of collaborating at these multiple levels: with each other, research assistants, festival organizers and staff, community leaders and members, and festival attendees. In attending to these challenges and opportunities, we open a conversation about the power and potential of team-based, collaborative fieldwork.
The Ethnomusicology of Religion: Fieldwork Methods and Ethics
SEM conference roundtable panelist (2017). Ethnographic fieldwork is often shaped by logistical issues including access, documentation, rapport, and fluency (both cultural and linguistic). Ethnomusicologists researching musics within religious or sacred contexts, however, face additional challenges. For example, moments of spiritual transcendence complicate participant-observation, both for ethnographers who belong to the faith tradition they are researching and for those who do not. Similarly, the varied expectations of the researcher’s audiences problematize documentation and representation. In this roundtable, participants consider these and other issues, addressing the ethical and methodological challenges of fieldwork posed by the ethnomusicology of religion.
Music Festivals as Scenes: Producing Ephemeral Space Annually at Cornerstone Festival
SEM conference presentation (2015). Based on interviews with festival staff, historical research, and ethnographic fieldwork in 2009–2012—including time working on the festival’s setup, stagehand, and teardown crews—this paper examines the production of space and place at Cornerstone Festival. In doing so, it contributes a vital link between scene theory and the growing ethnomusicological literature on festivals.
“We Are Called Here to Worship Together”: Ethnographic Outsiderness and Insiderness in Religious and Popular Culture
SEM conference presentation (2012). In this paper, based on several years of ethnographic research at the Anchor Fellowship, I address the challenges of fieldwork as a religious outsider and cultural insider. In constructing a rich description of an Anchor worship service based on my observations, those of church-goers, and formal interviews of Anchor pastors, this paper confronts the multivalence of experience and the interpretation thereof, demonstrating the importance of phenomenology to ethnography of religious and popular cultures.
The Price of Profit? Changing and Challenging Priorities in the Christian Recording Industry
SEM conference presentation (2011). In this paper, I examine EMI Christian Music Group (CMG), a major Christian record label (and division of EMI Ltd.), headquartered near Nashville, Tennessee. I provide a value-neutral analysis of the intersections of commerce, aesthetics, and theology. As with Keith Negus’s (1992, 1999) ethnographic research within the recording industry, my study illustrates that major record label practices and priorities are more nuanced than may be visible to outside observers.
We Are the Music Makers: Converging and Diverging Practices among Christian Major and Independent Record Labels
SEM conference presentation (2010). Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Christian music recording industry “cultural intermediaries” in 2009–2010, this paper’s nuanced study of Christian record labels contributes to a broader center-periphery perspective on the mediation of popular music in the United States.
Lost in the Sound of Separation: Mainstreams and Alternatives at a Christian Rock Festival
SEM conference presentation (2009). How do the performers, mediators, and listeners of alternative Christian rock negotiate these multiple tensions? How can their negotiations contribute to existing conceptions of mainstreams and alternatives? Describing the lived experiences of Cornerstone participants requires a perspective more subjectively nuanced than the strict dichotomies of previous models. In working through these ideas, this ethnography studies the ways in which Cornerstone contributes to participants’ self-conception of their Christian lifestyle: mainstream, alternative, and in-between.
Steady Diet of Nothing: Affinities, Sacrifices, and Change at Record Fairs
SEM conference presentation (2006). Building on Will Straw’s confluence of cosmopolitanism (“attentiveness to change occurring elsewhere”) and connoisseurship in his study of communities within popular music, this paper explores issues of everyday practice and changing identity through an ethnography of record dealers—individuals who act both as mediators and audience members within popular music exchange—using record fair events as the primary public cultural space.
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