Anna Bull
I am a lecturer in the sociology department at the University of Portsmouth.
I am also a co-founder of the 1752 Group, a lobby and research organisation set up to address the issue of staff-student sexual harassment in higher education http://www.1752group.com/. You can follow us on twitter @1752group
My PhD, funded by the ESRC and awarded in 2015, examined how class and gender are reproduced and embodied by young people playing classical music, through an ethnography of youth music ensembles (a youth choir, youth orchestra and youth opera group). It was based in the sociology department at Goldsmiths College under the supervision of Professors Bev Skeggs and Les Back. Against prevailing discouses of classical music as a text, I studied it as a bodily practice, demonstrating the ways in which classical musical practice works as a mechanism for storing value in particular bodies, and thus reproducing inequality.
I have published two sole-authored articles for publication based on this research, and a further article, co-authored with Christina Scharff, will be published as part of a special issue of Cultural Sociology on inequalities in cultural production and consumption in August 2017. I also have a book chapter forthcoming in an edited collection on the classical music industry which will discuss how young musicians pathways into classical music careers are shaped by gender and class. I am currently working on a monograph based on my PhD research which will be published by Oxford University Press.
Since 2015 I have been working with the music education sector in the UK to organise workshops discussing the issue of abuse in music education. You can read overviews of these events at www.annabullresearch.wordpress.com
I previously worked with Jonathan Gross and Nick Wilson on a project looking at everyday creativity in the UK. This involved an evaluation of the BBC campaign 'Get Creative', launched in February 2015, as well as looking at the ways in which people in Britain engage in creative and cultural practices.
At the University of Portsmouth, I convene a unit on Class, Inequality and the Lifecourse, as well as teaching on a unit on sociology of the body. I am also on the Athena Swan self-assessment team.
I completed a BA and M.Phil in social and political sciences at Cambridge, working with Georgina Born on cultures of classical music as well as a masters dissertation on political music in the UK. I subsequently worked as a research assistant on several research projects. I have taught at the University of Cambridge, Goldsmiths College and Anglia Ruskin University.
My previous career was as a pianist and cellist in New Zealand and Scotland. My portfolio involved performing, teaching and education work, including playing with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the New Zealand Chamber Orchestra and the Wellington Sinfonia, and teaching at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, as well as leading workshops for Scottish Opera Education, and working as a piano accompanist at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.
I am also a committed activist; having previously been involved in environmental, asylum/detainee issues, and feminist activism.
Supervisors: Les Back and Bev Skeggs
Phone: 02392842227
Address: School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies
LB 2.03 Milldam, Burnaby Road
Portsmouth, PO1 3AS
I am also a co-founder of the 1752 Group, a lobby and research organisation set up to address the issue of staff-student sexual harassment in higher education http://www.1752group.com/. You can follow us on twitter @1752group
My PhD, funded by the ESRC and awarded in 2015, examined how class and gender are reproduced and embodied by young people playing classical music, through an ethnography of youth music ensembles (a youth choir, youth orchestra and youth opera group). It was based in the sociology department at Goldsmiths College under the supervision of Professors Bev Skeggs and Les Back. Against prevailing discouses of classical music as a text, I studied it as a bodily practice, demonstrating the ways in which classical musical practice works as a mechanism for storing value in particular bodies, and thus reproducing inequality.
I have published two sole-authored articles for publication based on this research, and a further article, co-authored with Christina Scharff, will be published as part of a special issue of Cultural Sociology on inequalities in cultural production and consumption in August 2017. I also have a book chapter forthcoming in an edited collection on the classical music industry which will discuss how young musicians pathways into classical music careers are shaped by gender and class. I am currently working on a monograph based on my PhD research which will be published by Oxford University Press.
Since 2015 I have been working with the music education sector in the UK to organise workshops discussing the issue of abuse in music education. You can read overviews of these events at www.annabullresearch.wordpress.com
I previously worked with Jonathan Gross and Nick Wilson on a project looking at everyday creativity in the UK. This involved an evaluation of the BBC campaign 'Get Creative', launched in February 2015, as well as looking at the ways in which people in Britain engage in creative and cultural practices.
At the University of Portsmouth, I convene a unit on Class, Inequality and the Lifecourse, as well as teaching on a unit on sociology of the body. I am also on the Athena Swan self-assessment team.
I completed a BA and M.Phil in social and political sciences at Cambridge, working with Georgina Born on cultures of classical music as well as a masters dissertation on political music in the UK. I subsequently worked as a research assistant on several research projects. I have taught at the University of Cambridge, Goldsmiths College and Anglia Ruskin University.
My previous career was as a pianist and cellist in New Zealand and Scotland. My portfolio involved performing, teaching and education work, including playing with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, the New Zealand Chamber Orchestra and the Wellington Sinfonia, and teaching at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, as well as leading workshops for Scottish Opera Education, and working as a piano accompanist at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.
I am also a committed activist; having previously been involved in environmental, asylum/detainee issues, and feminist activism.
Supervisors: Les Back and Bev Skeggs
Phone: 02392842227
Address: School of Social, Historical and Literary Studies
LB 2.03 Milldam, Burnaby Road
Portsmouth, PO1 3AS
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Public engagement
We do not have any data on the prevalence of staff-to-student sexual harassment and misconduct in higher education in the UK due to a lack of research. However, a recent study from the US surveying 150,000 students across 27 institutions found that one-in-six female graduate students had experienced sexual harassment from a teacher or advisor.
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in a park and the other in a squatted social centre, and use these examples to argue that in this experiment the music 'itself' became different in different spaces, to theorise how and why this happens, and to explore how urban public space can affect and be affected by musical interventions.
We will draw on and extend Born's (1991) conceptualisation of music as multi-textual by foregrounding questions of spatiality. According to this groundbreaking work, musical meaning
is not fixed but multi-textual, constituted by various levels of mediation. We will explore how spatiality can be accommodated within this theory, asking how different levels of mediation compete to determine musical meaning. In particular, we will explore whether genre as a 'set of orientations, expectations and conventions' (Neale:1980) can be disrupted by spatiality; classical music as a genre has a powerful ideological force but by stripping it of some of its institutional trappings – hierarchy of performer/audience, ritualised social space, rehearsing to perfection, the assumption of transcendent experience – then the music 'itself' becomes less determined by its genre and more determined by the social and spatial relations it enables.
Finally, we will situate these questions within discussions of contemporary urban public space. Drawing on work by David Harvey and Hannah Arendt on co-presence, the city, and constructions of private and public space, we will examine the politics of space in relation to performance. Is there indeed still space for public musicking in UK towns and cities and, post-Reclaim the Streets, is claiming space with music still a radical act, akin to Hakim Bey's claiming of space in the
Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)?
Blog posts
Journal articles
We do not have any data on the prevalence of staff-to-student sexual harassment and misconduct in higher education in the UK due to a lack of research. However, a recent study from the US surveying 150,000 students across 27 institutions found that one-in-six female graduate students had experienced sexual harassment from a teacher or advisor.
in a park and the other in a squatted social centre, and use these examples to argue that in this experiment the music 'itself' became different in different spaces, to theorise how and why this happens, and to explore how urban public space can affect and be affected by musical interventions.
We will draw on and extend Born's (1991) conceptualisation of music as multi-textual by foregrounding questions of spatiality. According to this groundbreaking work, musical meaning
is not fixed but multi-textual, constituted by various levels of mediation. We will explore how spatiality can be accommodated within this theory, asking how different levels of mediation compete to determine musical meaning. In particular, we will explore whether genre as a 'set of orientations, expectations and conventions' (Neale:1980) can be disrupted by spatiality; classical music as a genre has a powerful ideological force but by stripping it of some of its institutional trappings – hierarchy of performer/audience, ritualised social space, rehearsing to perfection, the assumption of transcendent experience – then the music 'itself' becomes less determined by its genre and more determined by the social and spatial relations it enables.
Finally, we will situate these questions within discussions of contemporary urban public space. Drawing on work by David Harvey and Hannah Arendt on co-presence, the city, and constructions of private and public space, we will examine the politics of space in relation to performance. Is there indeed still space for public musicking in UK towns and cities and, post-Reclaim the Streets, is claiming space with music still a radical act, akin to Hakim Bey's claiming of space in the
Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ)?
Published version:
Baker, G., Bull, A. & Taylor, M. (2018) Who Watches the Watchmen? Evaluating Evaluations of El Sistema. British Journal of Music Education, 35(3), 255-269.