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Notes on Women Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities: Participatory Research, Community Engagement, and Archival Practice
Since 2011, Women Who Rock (WWR) has brought together scholars, archivists, musicians, media-makers, performers, artists, and activists to explore the role of women and popular music in the creation of cultural scenes and social justice movements in the Americas and beyond. The project promotes generative dialogue and documentation by “encompassing several interwoven components: project-based coursework at the graduate and undergraduate levels; an annual participant-driven conference and film festival; and an oral history archive hosted by the University of Washington Libraries Digital Initiatives Program that ties the various components together” (Bartha 8). In our courses, programming, and archive, we examine the politics of performance, social identity, and material access in music scenes, cultures, and industries. Performance studies scholar Daphne Brooks argues that the “confluence of cultural studies, rock studies, and third wave feminist critical studies makes it possible now more than ever to continue to critique and re-interrogate the form and content of popular music histories” (58). WWR implements this approach, asking how particular stories of popular music determine a performer, band, or scene’s “legendary” status or excision from the official annals of memory. WWR reshapes conventional understandings of popular music studies by initiating collective methods of participatory research, as well as community collaboration and dialogue. By way of WWR, we seek to transform traditional models of popular music studies, instigating new convergences between academic disciplines and critical approaches that create alternative histories and new forms of knowledge