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POP CONFERENCE 2025

Baby, It’s a Look!
Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge

March 13 - 15, 2025

Los Angeles, California

Presented by USC Thornton School of Music

With the  International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US) and Critical Minded


Over three exciting days of panels, roundtables, keynotes, and special events, the 23rd annual Pop Conference will explore the deep and complex relationship between popular music, style, and fashion. This year’s theme, “Baby, It’s a Look: Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge,” draws its inspiration from a 2017 Leikeli47 lyric and marks the first joint gathering of PopCon and IASPM-US since 2012.

Fashion and music are inextricably linked, from Josephine Baker’s banana skirt, Cab Calloway’s zoot suits, Billie Holiday’s signature gardenia, to The Beatles’ mop-top haircuts. Today, the connection between pop music and fashion remains stronger than ever. Visualizers thrive on streaming platforms; fashion runways in Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and Johannesburg deploy pop music to bring designers’ visions to life; and musicians themselves blaze new trails designing streetwear collections and serving as creative directors for major fashion houses. 

But style has always been much more than just commerce or escapism—it has long been a space for critique, refusal, defiance, and radical expression. At its most powerful, style challenges norms, blurs boundaries, and pushes artistic and cultural frontiers, moving us right to the edge. 

This year’s conference returns to USC’s Thornton School of Music in Los Angeles just months after January 2025’s catastrophic Eaton and Palisades wildfires, and during a time of profound global upheaval and turmoil. The 2025 “Baby, It’s a Look: Popular Music, Style, and Fashion at the Edge” conference presents a remix, an opportunity to reconsider how fashion and music shape the world we live in, reflecting our realities, struggles, and aspirations while leading us toward the very edge of what feels possible.

Open to the public and free admission with conference registration on Eventbrite. Some events may require separate registration.
Type: Roundtable clear filter
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Saturday, March 15
 

9:00am PDT

The Fashions of the Eastside Sound: A Discussion of the History of Self-Fashioning in Los Angeles' Eastside Music Scenes (Roundtable)
Saturday March 15, 2025 9:00am - 10:45am PDT
This roundtable will explore the fashions present and developed within the Los Angeles Eastside sound music scenes throughout different historical eras by showcasing key fashion items that will be part of the upcoming A Great Day in East L.A.: Celebrando the Eastside Sound. This is a multi-media exhibition that explores the dynamic musical influences of East Los Angeles artists who developed an eclectic musical identity and history that, against all odds, developed a rich musical tradition that became known all over the world in the last century and into the present.
The roundtable will center the discussion on the concept of self-fashioning as one of the key elements within the Eastside Sound music scenes, past and present. As Marci McMahon reminds us, “the term self-fashioning highlights the intersections of dress with bodily performance and the possibility of these sites in the negotiation of gendered and racialized ideologies.” Ethnic Mexican women —who have long been a part of the Eastside music scenes— have pushed against gendered ideologies of domesticity through self-fashioning as pachucas or reinventing punk-rock and gothic aesthetics in the 1970s and 1980s, even when faced with a scarcity of materials due to their marginalized economic status. In the 1990s and the beginning of the twentieth-first century, artists within the “Chicano Groove” scene used their clothing, such as t-shirts, jackets, and shoes to highlight their connection to their Mexican roots, messages on jerseys a form of social commentary, while also displaying their pro-immigrant and global-left solidarities. The participants will assess how clothing, and the look of the Eastside Sound community (artists and fans) are more than just fashion statements, but in fact are artistic expressions that highlight the development of their Eastside identity formation.
Piero F. Giunti and Jorge N. Leal the exhibit co-curators, along with textile and fashion conservator Laleña A. Vellanoweth, will showcase and discuss both visually and on site, various attires worn by musicians and fans of the Eastside sound, such as the suit zoot worn by Lalo Guerrero, early Chicano music icon, the coats worn by Thee Midniters in their performances, the leather jackets customized by Chicano hip-hop group Aztlan Underground, artisan-made shoes worn by Marisoul, the singer of La Santa Cecilia among other fashion-related objects worn and created by fans of the Eastside Sound artists. Media and cultural studies scholar Veronica Paredes will moderate the conversation.

Moderator: Veronica Paredes, University of California, Los Angeles

Piero F. Giunti
Jorge Nicolás Leal, University of California, Riverside
Laleña Arenas Vellanoweth
Moderators
VP

Veronica Paredes

Veronica Paredes is a media and cultural studies scholar. Her research interests include media histories, feminist research and pedagogical practices, Latinx studies, and Los Angeles historiography, especially related to its vintage movie theaters and designated screen landmarks... Read More →
Speakers
PF

Piero F. Giunti

Piero F. Giunti is an award-winning music photographer and filmmaker known for his iconic images of legendary artists such as Public Enemy, Tom Morello, Los Tigres del Norte, Becky G, and Carla Morrison. Giunti’s work has been featured in major publications including, Esquire, Rolling... Read More →
avatar for Jorge N. Leal

Jorge N. Leal

Assistant Professor, UC Riverside—History Department
Jorge Nicolás Leal is an Assistant Professor of Mexican American/Latinx History at the University of California, Riverside. In his role as a public historian, he curates The Rock Archivo LÁ, an online collection of Latinx youth cultures ephemera. Additionally, Professor Leal is... Read More →
avatar for Laleña Arenas Vellanoweth

Laleña Arenas Vellanoweth

Conservator, Private Practice
Laleña Arenas Vellanoweth is a textile conservator and cultural worker. She has held conservation positions at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum. Laleña has also worked as an independent conservator... Read More →
Saturday March 15, 2025 9:00am - 10:45am PDT
Simon Ramo Recital Hall 820 W 34th St BMH 100, Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA

11:00am PDT

Style and Pop Music Studies: An Oxford Handbook of Pop Music Roundtable
Saturday March 15, 2025 11:00am - 12:45pm PDT
he Oxford Handbook of Pop Music, edited by Eric Weisbard, will feature about forty contributors thinking about pop music studies in relationship to popular music studies, with sections on the emergence of pop, pop forms, pop as music, intersections of identity, icons, and 21st century developments. For this roundtable, we propose to gather some of the book’s contributors and discuss pop style from the perspective of their different chapters. As of the conference, ideally, the collection will have just been sent off for peer review. This would be a perfect moment for an exchange of ideas and to receive feedback on particular approaches.
Roundtable participants will make opening remarks that showcase their project in general and how in particular style factors. Here are the topics that presenters are working on.
Moderator: Eric Weisbard, University of Alabama

Emily Gale, “’Oh, Lady, Touch Thy Lute Again’: Sex in Early Pop” -- case studies from an 1844 collection of song texts, The Parlour Songster, Containing A Superior Collection of the Most Popular Sentimental Songs. In particular, I am interested in how early pop song writers engaged musical instruments as sexual metaphors—lutes and guitars, in particular, feature prominently.
Jordan Brown: “Queen Bey: The Sampling Historiographies Behind the Icon” -- what aspects of her artistry solidify her as a “pop icon.” I stress the sampling practices within her own music, creating a sonic archive of popular music  and Black socio-political movements, blending cultural context with the usage of 1s and 0s. 
Marita Buanes Djupvik, “Vocal resistance – The defiant virtuosity of Whitney Houston”—critical musicology of how gender and race are negotiated in Houston's vocal performances, which resulted in both her popular success and her exclusion from forms of popular music seen as more "authentic" and worthy of serious academic study.  
Craig Seymour -- “Be Your Natural Self:” How Black Queer Men Influenced Pop Music -- an attempt to map several animating moments when Black queer men—as innovative artists, taste-making curators, and interpretive audiences—helped birth sounds and performance styles that were later adopted as part of the pop mainstream.
Alex Blue V and Kyle DeCoste, The Dirty, Dirty South: Authenticating Place and Identity in Country Rap –for this roundtable, how country rappers use the Confederate flag to symbolize being outlaws and the aesthetics of mud as fashion.
Ann Powers, “The Beatles Are Not What You Think They Are”-- the Beatles as pop icons, as flexible and emblematically translucent as they were group-bonded and “progressive.” Given our tendency to default to a view of pop icons who suffer or overcome, might we need to reach, as well, to Abba and BTS, and think about collective icons, with the sustained success made possible by a diversified portfolio?
Sara Marcus, Pop Anthems -- pop songs that have been identified as feminist and/or queer anthems. What makes a pop song sound “anthemic,” aside from its lyrics or performer? What formal qualities in a song signal its intended reception as an anthem, and how do the songs’ receptions bear this out or pull against it? What’s the relationship between the pop anthem and the pop protest song? 
Dan DiPiero, “Be Sweet”: Reflections on the Indie/Pop Nexus -- contemporary indie, including its feminization in music discourse, return to DIY roots, and the ways that its expansive approach to genre opens potential for crossing over into mainstream popularity. The idea that music can be widely popular while remaining recognizably “indie” by listeners is supported by shifts in the term’s usage over time.



Moderators
avatar for Eric Weisbard

Eric Weisbard

American Studies prof, Univ of Alabama, University of Alabama
Eric Weisbard is professor of American Studies at the University of Alabama, author of such books as Top 40 Democracy, Songbooks, and Hound Dog, co-founder and longtime organizer of the Pop Conference, and a former Village Voice music editor and Journal of Popular Music Studies co-editor... Read More →
Speakers
EG

Emily Gale

Emily Gale is a feminist music scholar and assistant professor of musicology/ethnomusicology at the University of Lethbridge on Blackfoot Confederacy Territory in so-called Alberta, Canada. Emily’s book in progress, Sentimental Songs for Sentimental People: An Unheard History of... Read More →
JR

Jordan R. Brown

Graduate Candidate, Harvard University
Jordan R. Brown (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology and Presidential Scholar at Harvard University with a secondary field in African and African-American Studies. She is currently co-chair of Harvard’s Southern-Pian Society, co-chair of Project Spectrum, and a UNESCO... Read More →
MB

Marita Buanes Djupvik

Marita Buanes Djupvik is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Inland Norway. Her research adopts an interdisciplinary approach, encompassing musical theoretical and socio-cultural analysis, audiovisual analysis, and music theory. Dr. Djupvik has published extensively... Read More →
CS

Craig Seymour

Craig Seymour has been studying Black music for nearly 30 years. He is the author of Luther: The Life and Longing of Luther Vandross and has published in such publications as The New York Times Magazine and the Washington Post. He has a Ph.D. in American Studies.
AB

Alex Blue V

Alex Blue V is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies in Media and Technology at McGill University. Blue is currently working on two books. The first, A Matter of Death and Life, is a “necrographic” study of narratives of death and dying in contemporary Detroit hip-hop. The second... Read More →
avatar for Kyle DeCoste

Kyle DeCoste

Visiting Assistant Professor, Tulane University
Kyle DeCoste (he/him) is a scholar of popular music from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Music at Tulane University. He specializes in U.S. popular music. His work, which is often collaborative and (auto)ethnographic... Read More →
avatar for Ann Powers

Ann Powers

Writer, NPR Music
Ann Powers is NPR Music's critic and correspondent. She has worked at the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Village Voice, and is the author of four books, most recently Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell (2024). With Evelyn McDonnell, she edited Rock She Wrote: Women... Read More →
SM

Sara Marcus

Sara Marcus is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Marcus is the author of Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2023)—which was shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award in literary... Read More →
avatar for Dan DiPiero

Dan DiPiero

Dan DiPiero is a musician, Assistant Professor of Music Studies, and Affiliated Faculty in Race, Ethnic, and Gender Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His first book, Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life (University of Michigan Press) was... Read More →
Saturday March 15, 2025 11:00am - 12:45pm PDT
Newman Recital Hall

2:15pm PDT

Filth and (Un)Fashion in Country Rap
Saturday March 15, 2025 2:15pm - 4:00pm PDT
Country rap, also known as “hick-hop,” has a passionate fanbase on the ground and a
massive online following. Performed primarily by white people in the Southern U.S.,
country rap encapsulates many seeming discrepancies. It offers images and sounds
associated with rural, white working-class identity while also drawing from a sonic
vocabulary derivative of–and associated with–Black urban experience in the U.S.
Country rap crafts a self-contained aesthetic world wherein, according to the logics of
the genre, a white woman twerking in a confederate flag bikini carries with it no
contradictions. Many practitioners of the genre offer no clear genre history; numerous
artists within country rap speak of its aesthetics and stylistic conventions as if the
genre’s provenance was spontaneous, and in a vacuum, like a backwoods big bang.
With a focus on sound and image, our research into the genre explores issues of race,
gender, place, and nation. This group panel considers the (un)fashionable aesthetics of
country rap, in particular the use of mud and the Confederate flag as signifiers of
defiance.

Rebellious Style: Country Rap and Confederate (Un)Fashion
(Alex Blue V and Kyle DeCoste)


One of the most prominent recurring visual signifiers in country rap music videos is the
Confederate flag. As many bearers and wearers of the Confederate flag would note, to
them, it’s about “heritage, not hate.” However, this obscures the very real histories sewn
into the fabric of the symbol, namely the true reason behind the Civil War: the South’s
resistance to ending chattel slavery. Rather, it contorts and refashions it into a hollow
symbol of rebellion. We argue that similar to this ahistorical recontextualization of the
Confederate flag, country rap attempts to vacate hip-hop of its history and attachment to
Black cultural production, instead remixing the music genre itself into a rebel yell.

Mud It Up: The Filthy Aesthetics of Country Rap
(Kyle DeCoste and Alex Blue V)


Out of all of country rap's recurring themes, mud is one of the most prominent strategies
for authenticating artists and making territorial claims on the country. It’s seen covering
trucks, as the central thematic of mudding (the practice of driving vehicles through mud
bogs); covering bodies as a visual signifier of class difference and deviance; and
referenced in lyrics meant to represent place, identity, and class. Mud is so strongly
caked onto the genre that it appears in numerous song and album titles – it conveys
authenticity as a rural counterpoint to rhetorical uses of “the streets” in mainstream hip-
hop. We claim that mud serves the slippery purpose of collapsing categories of race,
genre, and space into a portable, general idea of “countryness” that can be worn at will.
Moderators
FR

Francesca Royster

Professor of English, DePaul University
Francesca T. Royster is Professor of English at DePaul University, Chicago. She is the author of Sounding Like a No-No: Queer Sounds and Eccentric Acts in the Post-Soul Era (University of Michigan Press, 2013), Becoming Cleopatra: The Shifting Image of an Icon (Palgrave MacMillan... Read More →
Speakers
avatar for Kyle DeCoste

Kyle DeCoste

Visiting Assistant Professor, Tulane University
Kyle DeCoste (he/him) is a scholar of popular music from New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Gender and Sexuality Studies and Music at Tulane University. He specializes in U.S. popular music. His work, which is often collaborative and (auto)ethnographic... Read More →
AB

Alex Blue V

Alex Blue V is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies in Media and Technology at McGill University. Blue is currently working on two books. The first, A Matter of Death and Life, is a “necrographic” study of narratives of death and dying in contemporary Detroit hip-hop. The second... Read More →
Saturday March 15, 2025 2:15pm - 4:00pm PDT
The Music Complex (TMC) G156 The Music Complex, TMC G156, Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA

2:15pm PDT

Sapphic Pop (Roundtable)
Saturday March 15, 2025 2:15pm - 4:00pm PDT
Lesbian pop music, despite rare instances of becoming fashionable and achieving chart viability,
has been construed as otherwise niche and embalmed in past eras like the 1970s and 1990s. As
we’ve entered deeper into this millennium, the lesbian/queer woman presence in pop been
revivified through the expansive sexual and aesthetic imaginary of “sapphism,” a fluid and
purportedly trans-inclusive term that signals the explicitly gay, as well as the more implicitly
“queer coded.” Women pop artists, whether they’ve made a point of being out or not, have
inspired an au courant interest in sapphic pop culture comprised of both performers (like
Chappell Roan, Billie Eilish, MUNA, Janelle Monae, Girl in Red, Adrianne Lenker, and others),
and a robust fan culture who draw upon the historical archives and intimate reading practices
of lesbian cultures and queer theory—including the resurgence of actual Sapphic poetry and
aesthetics.

This roundtable explores the explosion of sapphic pop over the last decade, while revisiting
some of the historical and aesthetic touchstones of sapphism. Among the topics we plan to
cover include certain controversies about“Gaylorism,” queer baiting, and queer coding more
broadly. We will also parse between flourishing, open and out expressions of sapphic sexuality,
and the loud insinuations or expressions of “allyship” that set themselves ever-so-slightly apart.
Moderators
avatar for Karen Tongson

Karen Tongson

Chair, Gender & Sexuality Studies; Professor, English and American Studies & Ethnicity, USC
Karen Tongson is the author of Normporn: Queer Viewers and the TV That Soothes Us (November 2023), Why Karen Carpenter Matters (one of Pitchfork’s best music books of 2019), and Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (2011). In 2019, she was awarded Lambda Literary’s Jeanne Córdova... Read More →
Speakers
avatar for Trish Bendix

Trish Bendix

Managing Editor at AfterEllen.com, MTV Networks
Trish Bendix is a GLAAD-nominated and NLGJA-award winning writer based in LA and a regular contributor to the New York Times. Her work has been published in Time, The Wall Street Journal, NBC, Spin, and Elle, among many others. The former editor-in-chief of AfterEllen and Managing... Read More →
SK

Summer Kim Lee

Summer Kim Lee specializes in critical race and ethnic studies, feminist theory, queer theory, performance studies, and Asian American art, literature, and culture. She is completing her first monograph, currently titled, Spoiled: Hostile Forms and the Matter of Asian American Aggression... Read More →
AM

Alice Motion

Director, University of Sydney
Alice Motion is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of School at the School of Chemistry, University of Sydney where they lead the Science Communication, Outreach, Participation and Education (SCOPE) research group. The overarching theme of Alice’s research and practice is to connect... Read More →
MS

Mairead Sullivan

Loyola Marymount University
Mairead Sullivan is Associate Professor and Department Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at Loyola Marymount University. Sullivan is the author of Lesbian Death: Desire and Danger Between Feminist and Queer. Sullivan’s work sits at the nexus of feminist and queer cultural s... Read More →
Saturday March 15, 2025 2:15pm - 4:00pm PDT
Jeanette MacDonald Recital Hall Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA

2:15pm PDT

“Slippin and Slidin”: Black Popular Music and Religious Self-Fashioning (Roundtable)
Saturday March 15, 2025 2:15pm - 4:00pm PDT
This roundtable discussion centers on the profound and lasting influence of Teresa L. Reed’s
pathbreaking, award-winning book, The Holy Profane: Religion in Black Popular Music (2004).
Reed opens her text by questioning how “the black church, once the most vehement opponent of
secular indulgence, could spawn so many celebrated performers of ‘the Devil’s music’” (Reed
7). This curiosity, born of her experience growing up in Gary, Indiana’s Open Door Refuge
Church of God in Christ, launched a groundbreaking line of inquiry. Reed’s exploration of how
the Black church — often seen as a moral and spiritual authority, yet also a site of personal and
cultural tension for Black artists — became the foundation for a reimagining of sacred and
secular relationships. Her work calls attention to how Black musicians, while shaped by religious
influences, often engage with and challenge the strict boundaries placed upon them. Reed’s
insight provided a critical framework for understanding these artists’ lives and their navigation of
sacred and secular binaries, laying the foundation for scholarly explorations that, even two
decades later, continue to grow.

Our roundtable considers how Reed’s questions and insights have expanded the field,
particularly as they apply to notable Black artists whose music, performance, and public
personas complicate simplistic readings of religious and cultural affiliations. Ambre Dromgoole
examines the genre-bending religious performances of Black women artists like Sippie Wallace,
Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Nina Simone, and Alice Coltrane, each of whom embodies Reed’s “holy
profane” dynamic. Ahmad Greene-Hayes explores the Black religious self-fashioning of Little
Richard, whose boldness in style and performance made him both a celebrated and polarizing
figure. Similarly, James Howard Hill, Jr. further extends the conversation to the contested legacy
of Michael Jackson, homing in on his complex relationship with Black religious traditions and
his own self-styled, genre-defying spirituality. These artists are not only musical innovators but
also figures who subverted expected norms. They have challenged misrepresentation and
misunderstanding, crafted a performance of interiority that melded personal and public devotion,
and negotiated complex histories of family, abuse, and trauma within Black (sacred) music.

Through this lens, we observe how each artist, while situated within or in proximity to
marginalized religious communities like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh-day Adventists,
and/or Pentecostals, wrestled with these traditions as sites of both inspiration and heartbreak.
Our inquiry builds on Reed’s legacy, emphasizing the “powerful connection between the holy
and the profane in the black-American psyche,” by paying close attention to these artists’ sonic,
sartorial, religious, and gendered performances. These musicians were rule breakers, genre-
benders, stylistic innovators, and culture bearers who engaged with religious traditions not only
as sources of theological meaning but as spaces where creativity flourished even under
constraint. Reed’s work, therefore, remains foundational to the field as we seek to further
examine how Black artists navigate and reframe their religious identities, thereby contributing to
a rich, ongoing dialogue about Black spirituality, culture, and self-expression.
Moderators
GW

Gayle Wald

George Washington University
Dr. Gayle Wald (gwald@gwu.edu) is a professor of American Studies at George Washington University with specific interests in African American culture, including music, television, and literature. Her latest book, This Is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children's Music, and the Long Civil Rights... Read More →
Speakers
avatar for Ambre Dromgoole

Ambre Dromgoole

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Music, Cornell University
Dr. Ambre Dromgoole (ad2262@cornell.edu) is an assistant professor of Africana Studies and Music at Cornell University. Her current book project There’s a Heaven Somewhere: A Sonic History of Black Womanhood is the first of its kind to document the twentieth century history of itinerant... Read More →
JH

James Howard Hill, Jr.

Dr. James Howard Hill, Jr. ( jhhilljr@bu.edu )is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Boston University. Hill, Jr is the author of two forthcoming books under contract: The Haunting King: Religion, Michael Jackson, and the Politics of Black Popular Culture (under... Read More →
AG

Ahmad Greene-Hayes

Harvard University
Dr. Ahmad Greene-Hayes (ahmadg@hds.harvard.edu) is an Assistant Professor of African American Religious Studies at Harvard Divinity School, and he is the author of Underworld Work: Black Atlantic Religion-Making in Jim Crow New Orleans, published by University of Chicago Press in... Read More →
Saturday March 15, 2025 2:15pm - 4:00pm PDT
Simon Ramo Recital Hall 820 W 34th St BMH 100, Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA

4:15pm PDT

Hip Hop in the Academy: Style or Substance? (Roundtable)
Saturday March 15, 2025 4:15pm - 6:00pm PDT
Since the 1994 publication of Tricia Rose’s seminal Black Noise: Rap Music and Black
Culture in Contemporary America, hip hop studies has rooted and grown in U.S.
universities, its rhizomes linking varied humanistic methods and critical ethnic studies.
Yet the institutional embrace of hip hop in the 21st century has often diverged from hip
hop studies’ academically radical beginnings; to riff off Sara Ahmed, hip hop’s
incorporation into traditional humanities departments lets them sound and look a little
less white without necessarily challenging the anti-Blackness upon which they are
founded. How might hip hop studies scholars center praxis, broadly defined, as a
corrective to the institutional cooptation of hip hop in U.S. higher education? How do
performance, ethnography, creative work, teaching, and engaged scholarly projects, for
example, suggest alternative ways of knowing that begin from a point of embodied
collaboration, and what could this mean for creating and sustaining solidarities with and
across the communities in/about/for whom we work?

Participants in this roundtable occupy multiple shifting and interconnected points along
a spectrum of hip hop praxis that includes performance, community engagement, public
facing scholarship, teaching and research. Drawing on our experiences as professors,
rappers, teachers, writers, and ethnographers, we consider how praxis and
collaboration allow alternative and potentially subversive modes of knowledge
production even as institutions continue to harness hip hop in the service of vacuous
“DEI” initiatives. As we explore issues of power that complicate praxis-oriented work, we
consider the following questions: From international research relationships to
engagements with local U.S. communities, how do hip hop scholars identify community
needs and address them meaningfully and without centering ourselves? How do hip
hop practitioners—many of us in novel roles within our respective institutions—respond
to the shifting terrain of what life means for hip hop artists who lack any kind of
institutional protection? And within the institution, what are the strategies for remaining
rooted in community while keeping pace with the sonic and music industry-related
changes happening in the rap world? What role does embodied knowledge play for hip
hop scholars positioned differently vis-a-vis performance? How can prioritizing
embodied knowledge, collaboration, and community spur meaningful, material
institutional change?
Speakers
CM

Catherine M. Appert

Catherine M. Appert is associate professor of music and sound studies at Cornell University, where she teaches courses on hip hop aesthetics and performance, global hip hop, African and African diasporic musics, postcolonial theory, migration and globalization, and ethnographic theory... Read More →
avatar for A.D. Carson

A.D. Carson

Professor of Hip-Hop, University of Virginia
A.D. Carson, assistant professor of Hip-Hop & the Global South at the University of Virginia, is an award-winning performance artist and educator working on race, literature, history, rhetorics & performance. His writing appears in diverse venues including Complex, The Chronicle of... Read More →
avatar for Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo

Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo

David S. Josephson Assistant Professor of Music, Brown University
Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo (SAMMUS) is a Black feminist rapper, beatmaker, and scholar from Ithaca, NY, with family roots in Côte D'Ivoire and the Congo. She holds a PhD in science and technology studies from Cornell and is an assistant professor in music at Brown University. Her current... Read More →
AN

Akua Naru

akua naru is a hip hop artist and activist and assistant professor of hip hop at UC Santa Cruz. . Her work holds Black folk at its center, a sonic love letter sprawled across 4 albums and countless features. naru is acclaimed for her poeticism, musical acuity and powerful ability... Read More →
Saturday March 15, 2025 4:15pm - 6:00pm PDT
Simon Ramo Recital Hall 820 W 34th St BMH 100, Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA

4:15pm PDT

Transborder Musical Practices: Gender, Leadership, and Cultural Continuity in Oaxacalifornia (Roundtable)
Saturday March 15, 2025 4:15pm - 6:00pm PDT
This innovative roundtable unites Oaxacan music educators and scholars to explore the dynamic soundscape of Oaxacalifornia, focusing on Midcity and South-Central Los Angeles—home to the most significant Indigenous Oaxacan community outside of Mexico. Through critical dialogue and live musical demonstrations, our panel examines how gender, leadership, and cultural preservation intersect within traditionally male-dominated musical spaces, particularly in Oaxacan philharmonics and community-based bands. Drawing from their roles as practitioners, cultural bearers, and scholars, the presenters will demonstrate how women's increasing participation has transformed leadership paradigms while maintaining deep connections to cultural heritage. Additionally, how Oaxacan youth seek musical opportunities in higher education and mainstream venues. 
Addressing the conference themes of "Music, gender, and performance" and "Music, rebellion, agitation, protest," our roundtable explores how musical practices in Oaxacalifornia push against traditional boundaries and hierarchies. We examine how these musical borderlands serve as sites of both cultural preservation and innovation, challenging conventional notions of gender roles, leadership, and artistic expression. Integrating live performances by panelists will provide attendees with direct engagement on the sonic dimensions of these transformations, illustrating how musicians navigate the edges and borders of place, sound, genre, and style.
Our discussion illuminates how transborder networks facilitate the exchange of musical knowledge while creating new possibilities for cultural expression and community building. Through this combination of scholarly analysis and musical demonstration, we offer unique insights into how Oaxacan musical traditions adapt and evolve across borders while maintaining their cultural essence.


Moderators
avatar for Xóchitl C. Chávez

Xóchitl C. Chávez

Music Department, University of California Riverside
Dr. Xóchitl C. Chávez, is an activist scholar, musician, and associate professor at UC Riverside's Department of Music, making history as the first tenured Chicana in any UC system music program. Her ethnomusicological research examines transborder musical practices of Mexican Indigenous... Read More →
Speakers
YC

Yamili Conde

Yamili Conde, Zapotec musician and educator Yamili Conde began her musical journey in the community wind band of Yatzachi el Bajo, Oaxaca. A graduate of Universidad Autónoma "Benito Juárez" of Oaxaca, she now dedicates herself to teaching Indigenous Angelino youth in South Central... Read More →
avatar for Ernesto Cruz

Ernesto Cruz

Ernesto Cruz, a native Angelino and graduate of CSUN (BM) and CalArts (MFA) in Clarinet Performance, bridges the classical and traditional Mexican music worlds. As the Former Director of Banda Filarmonica Santa Maria Xochixtepec, he has played a vital role in preserving Oaxacan musical... Read More →
JH

Jessica Hernandez

Jessica Hernandez, the first female Oaxacan conductor in the U.S. to earn a Bachelor of Music from UC Riverside, began her musical journey at age 10 in her family's Banda Nueva Dynasty of Zoochila. Following her musical roots from Santiago Zoochila, Oaxaca, she participated in the... Read More →
JM

Johnny Miguel

Johnny Miguel, an LA-based Zapotec composer and arranger, navigates the intersection between Oaxacan musical traditions and contemporary innovation. His compositions honor cultural heritage while creating space for artistic evolution within Oaxacalifornian culture. As a musical bridge-builder... Read More →
HT

Hugo Tomas

Hugo Tomas, a trumpeter who began his musical journey at Hobart Elementary and Harmony Project, earned his Bachelor's in Commercial Trumpet Performance from the LA College of Music and his Master's from CSU Fullerton. Currently teaching with Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, he recognized... Read More →
Saturday March 15, 2025 4:15pm - 6:00pm PDT
Jeanette MacDonald Recital Hall Los Angeles, CA 90007, USA
 
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