SEM Disability and Deaf Studies 

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Friday, November 16 - 1:45-3:45p, Hotel Albuquerque

Chair: Ailsa Lipscombe

Michelle Jones, "Correcting Our Vision: How "Musicking" Helps Us Recognize the Musicality of Students with Multiple Disabilities"

Dominika Moravclkov, "Natural - Prosthetic - Folkloric. Discursive Positions of National Folklore Towards Disability in Contemporary Slovak Culture"

Vero Leduc and Line Grenier, "Music At the Fingertips: Music and Ageing in Deaf Communities in Montréal"

Byrd McDaniel, "Spectacular Listening and the Legibility of Disability in the U.S. Air Guitar Championships

Description

Historically, discourses surrounding disability have characterized it as in contestation with that difficult-to-define – yet challenging to displace – category of the “normal” (Linton 1998). Even when seen as something extraordinary and worthy of comment or praise (Straus 2014), disability is more often than not understood as the unfortunate endpoint on a spectrum of normalcy, defined by what the body or person lacks. Those living with D/deafness, too, are frequently understood within dominant discourses as outside of “normal” standards of hearing and communication, thus always left to compensate for their non-normative styles of knowing, being, and living (Mills 2015).

The presenters in this organized panel seek to challenge such notions that view those living with disability and D/deafness as outside of normalcy. From re-conceptualizing disability as complementary to dominant national identities in Slovakia, to exploring the integration of disability performance in the U.S. Air Guitar Championships, to offering alternative narratives and strategies to understand the role of music in the lives of ageing Deaf people, as well as for students with multiple disabilities, this panel unpacks the resonances between disability and deaf studies and Small’s musicking (1998). Ultimately, conversations across the papers call for a new approach to understanding the integration of disabled and D/deaf individuals within music-making practices; where they do not exist as outside of dominant discourses, but rather dynamically contribute to a re-characterization of “standard” approaches to talking about, performing, and hearing music.

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Correcting Our Vision: How “Musicking” Helps Us Recognize the Musicality of Students with Multiple Disabilities                                      

What does the development of musical skill mean for a person whose physiology alters their ability to sing, read notation, or play an instrument? Pedagogical guidelines for age-appropriate competencies in music assume strength of both reading and verbal communication. Such a limited understanding of the development of musical skill discounts the engagement and musicality of many students who have multiple disabilities. However, the ethnomusicological understanding of musicking is more expansive. It encompasses not just performing music, but engaging with music and through music with other individuals. By analyzing ethnomusicological texts to determine (a) the range of activities that constitute musicking, and (b) the logical extension of those activities to their most subtle action, we can construct a scaffold of musical skills appropriate for individuals of all abilities at any developmental stage. This would enable teachers of students with multiple impairments to assess the abilities of their students and focus on actionable instruction that is appropriate to the student’s age and developmental level. It also allows us—within our respective roles as teachers, ethnomusicologists, and cohabitants in a world that includes people with disabilities— to appreciate a more inclusive understanding of musicality. This presentation explores modes of musicking demonstrated by individuals with multiple disabilities as they are understood through both ethnomusicological and pedagogical scholarship.

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Natural - Prosthetic - Folkloric. Discursive positions of national folklore towards disability in contemporary Slovak culture
To express nationality through folklore performances in Slovakia, one must become completely deindividualized in order to embody the archetype of a folkloric body. This body should move and sound just like the body next to it, amplifying figurative eroticism and mechanical, oppressive sameness of the natural “cycle of life”. Consequently, disability creates a blank spot in this discourse because it is not repetitive, but individual and uncategorized: “a stroke of fate”, a reminder of the unnational, medical realities of bodies. This paper will examine the process of “folklore-ing disability”, by which I mean discursive suturing of disabled people into folklore imageries and national fantasies through body ornamentation and familiar soundscapes. This process will be observed in Slovak folklore groups consisting exclusively of disabled performers and in representations of disabled individuals in the folklore TV talent show “The Earth is Singing” (2017-2018). The aim of this paper is to understand how nationality and disability as two opposite cultural identities (the former dominant and ubiquitous, the latter rare and marginalized) can coexist in the act of folklore performance. In addition, I will try to answer a more challenging question: Do these identities only coexist, or could their collision produce another identity that is rather visionary than traditional?

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Music at the Fingertips: Music and Ageing in Deaf Communities in Montréal
In our audist societies, where superiority is ascribed to those who hear or behave like those who do (Humphrey, 1977), the common perception is that music constitutes a solely auditory art form, one that Deaf people cannot fully perform as artists, have access to, or appreciate. Combined with ageist discourses that tend to associate (popular) music predominantly with youth (Forman & Fairley, 2012) and to focus almost exclusively on its therapeutic function for seniors, a narrow definition of music strongly affects ageing Deaf individuals, adding to obstacles to their social participation (Gaucher, 2012). Yet, music has played an important role in Deaf cultures (Maler, 2013), and Deaf artists have developed a range of musical forms (Cripps, et. al. 2015). How have ageing Deaf people accessed and experienced music as a cultural practice in the past? How are they doing it now? What media and technologies shape their "musicking" (Small, 1998) and inform their attachments (Hennion, 2014) to music? To which music cultures do they feel a sense of belonging? How does music mediate the experiences of ageing of Deaf seniors? These are the key questions guiding Music at the fingertips, a project that explores Deaf music in Montreal as it is practiced and/or experienced by ageing Deaf individuals. The paper offers a preliminary analysis of video recorded interviews conducted in Quebec (LSQ) and American (ASL) Sign Languages which, combining life histories (Chazel et. al., 2014) and techno-biographies (Blythe et. al., 2002), focus on the participants' music trajectories across their life-course.

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Spectacular Listening and the Legibility of Disability in the U.S. Air Guitar Championships
The annual U.S. Air Guitar Championships give performers an opportunity to stage their own experience of listening to music. By simulating and exaggerating the theatrics of real guitar playing, performers manifest the powerful bond between recorded sounds and their bodies, in ways that showcase and comment upon the private experience of listening. Performers do not simply perform as themselves. They construct elaborate personas with costumes, fake names, and distinctive personalities. These personas serve as a proxy for their own embodied relationship to music. In 2017, I followed five competitors throughout the competition who experience a range of impairments—chronic pain, major depression disorder, bipolar disorder, social anxiety, and CPTSD. In this paper, I present their perspectives, by showing how air guitar competitions enable them to translate impairments into a visible, demonstrative performance of embodied listening. Drawing on Tobin Siebers’s notion of “disability as masquerade,” I show how air guitar competitions enable them to represent and expose invisibility and marginalization, while at the same time distorting and exaggerating impairments in order to make them legible and legitimate to their audiences. I call this process “spectacular listening.” By translating listening into a dramatic spectacle, performers leverage listening as a way to highlight ableism and its alternatives, all through miming and manipulating an imaginary guitar.

October 29, 2017 from 8:30-10:30am at the Society for Ethnomusicology 62nd Annual Meeting (Penrose 1 of the Denver Marriott City Center in Denver, CO.)

This panel focuses on decolonizing Deafness, disability, and autism from the perspective of American musical theatre, Zen Buddhist chanting, and music therapy. In each paper, ethnographic research provides a culturally-based understanding of disability and Deafness, challenging Western/Eurocentric notions of health and illness. The first paper raises the question: How can deaf individuals experience music? Here the presenter re-frames deafness as a socially-imposed disability and discusses how Deaf musical theatre works to revise American national identity. As a self-advocate in the music and disability studies movement, the second presenter focuses on the Denver-based Phamaly Theatre Company which challenges misconceptions about disability through productions exclusively performed by actors who have disabilities. The next presenter provides a Deaf monk?s perspective on chanting the Four Great Vows through American Sign Language, and discusses how he and hearing monks in the monastery incorporate signed chants into their daily practice. Finally, the last presenter discusses how Ugandan children with autism are changing the ways in which Western-trained music therapists practice music therapy outside Western contexts. Knowing how individuals with disabilities assert agency through music in everyday life is an important step in changing society?s attitude towards differently-abled and deaf individuals. The panel demonstrates how Deaf and disabled people are actively participating in making these changes happen.

October 27, 2017 from 1:45-3:45PM at the Society for Ethnomusicology 62nd Annual Meeting (Colorado Ballroom A of the Denver Marriott City Center in Denver, CO)

Chair: Jennie Gubner, Indiana University Bloomington

Michael Bakan, Florida State University: Re-presentation and the Musical Lives of “Autistic” Individuals 

Jennie Gubner, Indiana University Bloomington: Unlocking Memories, Rethinking Advocacy: Sensory Filmmaking in the Study of Music and Dementia 

Katelyn Best, Independent Scholar: A Transient Archive: Virtual Ethnographic Research within Deaf Music Studies

Discussant: Felicia Youngblood, Florida State University

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In recent years, ethnomusicologists have begun to question how physiological and neurocognitive diversity impact the ways in which individuals and communities make and experience music. It is to such questions that we, a collective of scholars studying autism, dementia, deafness, and Williams Syndrome, respectively, direct our attention in this panel. Specifically, we see this as a compelling opportunity to critically reflect on the particularities of conducting fieldwork and producing meaningful ethnomusicological work through our research collaborations with neurodiverse and perceptually diverse people. In looking to draw parallels across our experiences, we focus on some of the unique challenges we have encountered while employing traditional approaches to field research and, from there reflect upon how we have endeavored to overcome these challenges using methods ranging from virtual fieldwork to sensory filmmaking. Some of our papers additionally address the nature of our relationships not only with our research interlocutors, but with the people that surround those individuals as part of their care and support networks as well. Understanding ethnographic fieldwork as a series of complex encounters in which the nature of the encounter often shapes its outcome, we hope to encourage dialogue regarding alternative methodologies that have led to the production of rich ethnomusicological knowledge about neurodiverse and Deaf individuals and/or communities.

November 10, 2016 from 4-5:30PM at the Society for Ethnomusicology 61st Annual Meeting (Palladium Ballroom of the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.)

Chair: Michelle D. Jones, Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired

Ailsa Lipscombe, University of Chicago

Felicia Youngblood, Florida State University

John Murphy, University of North Texas

Meghan Schrader, University of New Hampshire

Joan Titus, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

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This roundtable explores opportunities for growth in accommodating diversely-abled students and faculty in music programs within higher education settings. Adaptive technology, college readiness programs, and increasing recognition of a wide variety of disabilities--both visible and invisible--have enabled people with a variety of abilities and bodily differences to participate in academia as students, faculty, and independent scholars. While greater inclusion has benefitted our field by introducing a more diverse choir of scholarly voices, it has also revealed the need to critically examine how we present content and communicate scholarly ideas. This roundtable provides practical strategies to ensure the success of differently-abled scholars and students through the insights of five scholars who have direct experience with disability. They will explore the ways in which their participation in higher education has been impacted by disability, as well as how they have adapted their teaching and learning styles to accommodate their students and/or selves. The panel will begin with brief presentations on: 1) being a blind or low-vision student in oculocentric classrooms; 2) having a nonverbal learning disability while attending graduate school in musicology; 3) showing empathy and developing adaptive teaching techniques for  students who have disabilities; 4) navigating school and academia with an invisible disability; and 5) accommodating students who have autism and related neurodevelopmental differences. Together these perspectives expand the discourse surrounding inclusion and acceptance in institutions of higher learning.