Christabel Stirling

en

Christabel Stirling is a PhD candidate in Music at Wadham College, Oxford University, where she holds an Ertegun Graduate Scholarship in the Humanities. She obtained an MA in Popular Music and Culture from Oxford Brookes University funded by an AHRC award, and a BMus from King’s College London. Her ethnographic work focuses on evolving musical and sonic publics in London, and particularly on questions of affect, access, and socio-political transformation. She is an affiliate graduate student of the ERC-funded program “Music, Digitization, Mediation” at Oxford University, and an external affiliate of the collaborative research group “Recomposing the City” at Queen’s University Belfast. She is also a member of the Lucky Cloud Sound System, and occasionally DJs and co-runs club nights in London.

research

research expositions

  • Sound Art / Street Life: Tracing the social and political effects of sound installations in London (2016) author(s): Christabel Stirling published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in London (2013-14) to address the social and political effects of installation and place-based sound-works. I begin by reviewing a number of theoretical approaches to the city, using my own and others’ ethnographic accounts of London to problematize some of the affirmative conceptualizations of the city being propagated by non-representational theories and cultural geographers. In so doing, I provide the theoretical and contextual substratum for my ensuing discussion of the sound-works, and offer an initial view on why physical urban public space remains crucial to progressive politics. I then examine the sonic re-arrangement of public space in three site-specific sound installations. Through ethnographic analysis of the social dynamics summoned into being by each sound-work, and the “multiple mediations” that animated such dynamics (Born 2005), I offer interpretations as to whether, and if so how, the sound installations might be enlisted as part of a process oriented towards mobilizing democratic designs.
     open exposition comments (0)