The 2025 Harvard Graduate Music Forum invites proposals for individual papers or alternative-format presentations (lecture-recitals, performance demonstrations, or other scholarly and creative presentations) engaging with this year’s theme: "TRANS∗Media." We welcome submissions from graduate students, researchers, musicians, sound artists, and practitioners from diverse disciplines to join us in exploring the role of music and sound in relating trans∗ness to experiences of moving across, between, and beyond multiple media forms, technologies, and narratives. We are particularly interested in proposals that center the works, practices, experiences, and lives of transgender and transsexual individuals and communities. The conference will feature a keynote address by Dr. McKenzie Wark, author of Raving (2023), Reverse Cowgirl (2020) and A Hacker’s Manifesto (2006).
We address two principal questions: How does sound and/or music move across, between, and beyond media? And how does sound and/or music move media?
The program committee welcomes proposals exploring any aspect of the dynamic interplay between media, movement, and music/sound, inspired by the expansive possibilities encompassed by “TRANS∗.” Possible topics of interest may include, but are not limited to:
Trans∗ listening, musicking, vocality
Trans∗ technicity and technologies
Trans∗ media forms, connectivities, and histories
Trans∗ and transmedia storytelling, intermedia, and media mixture
Trans∗ identities, experiences, and epistemologies
Trans∗ of color critique
Trans∗ disability critique and trans∗/crip theory
Trans∗ radical critique (Marxism, anarchism, etc.)
Trans∗ as method, methodology, praxis
Trans∗ theories in the classroom, campuses, communities
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words to https://forms.gle/ykPVpwPbtKQ8VbSP8 by Sunday, December 22nd, 2024 at 11:59pm. Please remove all personal identifying information from the text of the proposal. Submissions after this date may be considered if space allows. Presentations are limited to 20 minutes, followed by a 10-minute Q&A. Proposals for alternative-format presentations should include a list of technical requirements in the submission form. Notice of acceptance will be sent by mid-January. A limited number of travel bursaries will be offered to participants. For further details, please visit https://sites.harvard.edu/gmf2025-transmedia (under construction!) or contact us at stephenai@g.harvard.edu.
Organizers:
Stephen Tian-You Ai
Christina Misaki Nikitin