About

Music for Girls

The Music for Girls conference will bring together music researchers and fans to reconsider popular music knowledge and gender. Popular music experiences of women and girls reveal an ‘expertise’ that goes beyond stereotypes of male critics and collectors.

Professors Angela McRobbie and Kyra D. Gaunt, whose work on music and girls continues to influence the field, will provide the keynotes, and a special musical guest will perform.

About Kyra D. Gaunt

Kyra D. Gaunt, Ph.D. has been a cutting-edge scholar in the field of embodied ethnomusicology for more than two decades. Her first book, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop, won the 2007 Alan Merriam Prize from The Society of Ethnomusicology. The book, and Kyra's earlier publications, contributed to the emergence of black girlhood studies and hip-hop feminism. Her current research, featured in the 2022 TED Talk "How Black Girls Can Reclaim Their Voice in Music", is a primer to her second book, PLAYED: How Music and Tech Orchestrate Violence Against Black Girls on YouTube (SUNY Press).

Gaunt's keynote: 'Everybody but the Black Girl Profits', will expose the wickedly complex system that masks how music orchestrates structural violence against girls under the guise of a free musical Internet.

Full lineup and booking details will be announced soon.

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Curated by Dr Mimi Haddon (University of Sussex) and Professor Bethany Klein (University of Leeds) as part of their ongoing work on the AHRC (Arts & Humanities Research Council) funded network ‘Music for Girls: Women’s Knowledge Culture of Popular Music’