Conference Agenda

Organized by the Music, Sound, and Trauma Study Group.

We continually encounter trauma as musicians, teachers, scholars, and humans. Whether causing harm or offering possibilities for healing, music and sound are uniquely connected to trauma—as evidenced by the ever-expanding interest in musical trauma studies. Yet this emerging disciplinary subfield raises profound ethical and methodological questions. How do we research and relate ethically, particularly in relation to trauma? What can we learn from the disciplinary history and interdisciplinary reach of trauma studies? How do we emphasize care? Crucially, how do we avoid retraumatizing ourselves or others?

This two-hour session, sponsored by the AMS Music, Sound, and Trauma Study Group, addresses these questions via a film screening, panel discussion, and audience Q&A. In the first part of this session, Janie Cole will screen highlights from the film WE ARE NOT AFRAID: Music and Resistance in Apartheid Prisons, which has been scheduled for release in 2025. This film explores how Black political prisoners incarcerated in South Africa’s brutal apartheid-era prisons turned to music as a crucial means of resistance to apartheid, creating community and healing. WE ARE NOT AFRAID also explores how Black women prisoners understood music as a means to cope with racially-motivated and gender-based violence. In the words of the film’s co-directors, “Through these remarkable resilient individuals, testimonies and music, the film touches on broader questions about cultural expression as advancing social change and the uses of music by individuals suffering and protesting the violation of human rights under oppressive patriarchal regimes at the intersections of music, resilience, power, violence, gender, race, trauma and human rights.” Following the screening, Janie Cole will be joined by panelists Emily Abrams Ansari and Eric Hung for a discussion of ethical approaches to not only ethnographic and historical research, but also to media-making, particularly when engaging with people who have experienced trauma. To close this session, co-chairs Erin Brooks and Jillian Rogers will open the floor to questions and discussion with the session’s audience members.