The Vinyl Polis

I just found out this morning I was accepted to the Cultural Analysis research master’s program at the Universiteit van Amsterdam!  It’s been two years since I was last in Amsterdam, and I’ve been trying to get back there ever since; now I’ll be living there for the next two years!

So what is Cultural Analysis and why the heck am I going to the Netherlands for grad school?  Well the program is an incredibly interdisciplinary adventure that studies and creates inquiries into several phenomena surrounding the production and circulation of contemporary culture using objects and artifacts (in the broadest sense) as a point of departure.  More specifically, the faculty encourages students to

analyze cultural phenomena - such as social systems of belief and value, works of art and literature, film and the new media - and their conceptual underpinnings as well as their aesthetic and social-material structures. We emphasize textual, visual and historical details and also the implied normativity and the ways in which identity, difference and otherness are negotiated across the various media.

Yeah, that’s some good shit.  What gets me really excited about the program is how interested the current faculty is with research on sound and music as lens of culture.  One of their periodical publications, Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex, and Race, has the entire newest issue devoted to sound, called Sonic Interventions.  Specifically, the book investigates

political appropriations of music and sounds, they explore the poetic use of the sonic in novels and plays, they develop theoretical concepts out of sonic phenomena, and pertain to identity formation and the practice of mixing in hip hop, opera and dancehall sessions. Ultimately, the book brings to the fore what roles sound may play for the formation of gendered identity, for the stabilization or questioning of race as a social category, and the conception of place.

Needless to say, I’m completely pumped up about the whole thing; I’ll be leaving on a jet plane in 14 short weeks!!  So all this morning I’ve been listening to this song by Justice (thanks Miri!!)–best music video EVAR