Dr Hettie Malcomson awarded British Academy Newton Mobility Grant

Dr Hettie Malcomson (Music, University of Southampton) has been awarded a British Academy Newton Mobility Grant with Dr José Juan Olvera Gudiño (CIESAS Unidad Noreste, Mexico) for £9,993 for the project 'Music and violence in contemporary Mexico.'

 

The project will include exchange visits, training and two workshops which interrogate the particularity of the Mexican context and contribute new perspectives to scholarship on music and violence. Mexico is officially a country at peace, despite increased criminality and horrific violence, including over 60,000 deaths from 2006-2012 alone. Moreover, music and violence have been interlinked in Mexico for decades, famously in narcocorridos (drug-related ballads). Yet there is scant literature on narcocorridos that interrogates Mexico's current culture of violence, and analyses of the relationships between violence and other musics have received insufficient attention. This project will bring together scholars in the UK and Mexico to gain a more holistic understanding of the impact of Mexico¹s omnipresent violence on musicians' lives, livelihoods and music-making. Outputs will include a co-written article and a proposal for a journal special issue.