Building Anti-Racism and Music Science Resources
Last week the panel discussion from last year’s SMPC was published in Auditory Perception and Cognition. The article comes only a few months after Anti-Colonial Strategies in Cross-cultural Music Science Research was published in Music Perception. I regret not being able to incorporate a reference to the latter article in our panel discussion introduction (published ~2 weeks after we had submitted this), but we missed this when going over the article proofs.
This miss did get me thinking that now would be a good time to start to collate #musicscience specific resources in a central location. Maybe in the form of a community designed lesson plan, that helps researchers start discussions in their labs or classrooms that directly tackles issues of anti-racism, colonialism, sexism, and other issues related to equity in the (music related) sciences.
On more than one occasion, I have had people ask if something like this does exist and each time have just had to say that this is something that the SMPC AREC committee wants to get to soon, but just has not yet.
This type of thing has also been on my mind given many of the on-going discussions concerning sexisim and AI, recent work relating to the ethics work group for the musicality and genomics consortium, and reading articles about facial recognition technology unsurprisingly leading to the false arrest of at least six people, all of which were black.
Just thinking out loud here, but a reading list or bibliography specific to music science would ideally have…
- Recent articles explicitly addressing issues of equity and anti-racism in science (which, by the way, is not at all about getting more diverse samples, a pet peeve of mine for another time)
- Links to recent news articles showing the clear theory + practice link
- General reading on these issues (thinking of books like Superior: The Return of Race Science and Mismeasure of Man)
- Passages from things like Koza’s Destined to Fail on Seashore and other published work by Devaney and current work from genomics and musicality that is anticipating future analyses in this world.
- Readings discussing the history and motivations of the universality literature and why so many people get upset by this.
- A list of key, critical questions to help examine foundation assumptions and premises in any music and science related literature.
Writing this all out makes me realize this is actually probably a whole course, not a one-off lecture or two, obviously. But that’s the great thing about writing out little blogs. You start with something small, and just see where it takes you.
If the new SMPC AREC committee doesn’t take this up as one of their projects and you’re interested in chatting more about this after summer holidays, please get in touch.