Thomas R. Hilder

This talk is a call for care, pedagogy, activism. I ask pressing questions about what it means to be a music scholar in 2021, thinking through Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, decolonising academia, pandemics, bullying, and brave spaces. While in a neoliberal imagination the contemporary academic is presented as a free intellectual, entrepreneurial agent, they/she/he lives as an embodied human, shaped by intersectional discriminations and privileges, and accountable to different communities. I offer a holistic and relational view of a scholar as researcher, teacher, and administrator with a multitude of responsibilities, potentialities, and vulnerabilities. Drawing on feminist, Indigenous, and queer methods, I share autoethnographic stories of my own journey from graduate student to associate professor, a path that led me via three European countries – the UK, Germany, and Norway – and multiple academic institutions. First, I recall moments from my work on Sámi Indigeneity and LGBTQ+ creativities and ask questions about the ethics of research as we learn the trade of our disciplines. Why do we choose certain research projects, who do they benefit, what are our obligations? Sharing scenes from the classroom, I then reveal my own call to teaching as I began to look for emancipatory spaces within the neoliberal university. What legacies do we impose on students, what do students need today, what is the knowledge we are morally compelled to share? Finally, I trace my acknowledgement of the failures of the academy and my collaborative attempts to transgress academic structures and build new spaces, such as the LGBTQ+ Music Study Group, while being mindful of the co-option of social justice in the academy. What institutional practices perpetuate abuse, how do we hack the system in order to resist injustice, how do we build communities of radical care in a mental health pandemic? The talk offers a polyphony of voices who urge us to imagine – through the body, the environment, the spiritual – new musical and scholarly worlds.

Key Questions

• What are our responsibilities as researchers and teachers?
• How do we navigate, challenge and transform the institutions of our work?
• How can we reimagine music scholarship as radical care?

Recommended Reading

• hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge. Introduction

• Cheng, William. 2016. Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Chapter 1

• Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Introduction

• Brown, Danielle. 2020. https://www.mypeopletellstories.com/blog/open-letter

Biography

Thomas R. Hilder is a writer, teacher, researcher, musician, activist, and associate professor in ethnomusicology at NTNU. His experiments in scholarship, pedagogy, and outreach explore musical performance, community, activism, well-being, virtuality, and the body, shaped by feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives. He is author of “Sami Musical Performance and the Politics of Indigeneity in Northern Europe” (2015) and co-editor of “Music, Indigeneity, Digital Media” (2015). In 2016 he co-founded the international LGBTQ+ Music Study Group and currently acts as chair. At the Department of Music at NTNU he runs the EDI group RILM. And he is chair of Trondheim’s queer choir Kor Hen.