Jo Collinson Scott
Well well well... It seems time has swept me up on its inexorable wave, and here I am many months later with nothing but silence on my pop as research projects. This is a result of having too many things happening, rather than (as appears) nothing notable occurring. I am within a year of having… Continue reading Silences and System Holds
In my post "The Sound of Supervision", I spoke about my developing an EP of tracks to accompany a forthcoming book on mass supervision - Pervasive Punishment (McNeill, 2018). This work has been coming on apace and I wanted to share some of the context of the work and the process of developing the… Continue reading Clarity, Challenge and Change
This month I have been having an interesting discussion with colleagues at the University of the West of Scotland about submitting popular music to the REF. (For those readers who don't work in a university environment, the Research Excellence Framework [REF] is the system that rates the quality of research carried out in HE institutions… Continue reading Pop As Research and the REF
This week I have been thinking a lot about my most recent pop as research project - the Pervasive Punishment EP. Professor Fergus McNeill, a criminologist at the University of Glasgow, is finishing the writing of a book on 'Pervasive Punishment' and has asked me to write a sequence of songs to sit alongside the… Continue reading The sound of mass supervision
When I started on my journey as an academic - studying music and musicology in a university department with a heavy focus on what we might call 'classical music' - I kept my performing world separate. By day I read and wrote about Shostakovich, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, by night I wrote and performed what might be considered new- or alt-folk songs at gigs in dark cellars and bars around Glasgow. But I didn't read or write about new-folk. Rightly or wrongly, at the time, I didn't consider writing or performing popular music to be part of my developing research tool kit....
