[Week 11] Abstracts, Applications & Administration

This week starts with some great news in the form of my abstracts for both the Sounds of Climate Justice event at the University of Southampton and the ABLE Assembly conference at the Berklee Institute have been accepted. I’m already booked to go out to Boston in April for other research and culture commitments, so it’s great to be headed back to one of my favourite US cities for so much academic activity.

As these wonderful opportunities get on the tracks I’m already working on more ways to convene the community in the UK – one of my supervisors has asked me to put together an application to present at MeCCSA, as well as a call for papers for our own sustainability symposium in June. I am most excited by these kinds of prospects, so it didn’t take long to pull together a few hundred words on the impact of media discourse in relation to environmental practice, or to send out a couple of emails to key academics and practitioners who might be interested so it’s on their radars. Also in my quest to continue my writing challenge (I can’t believe this blog is still going) I thought I’d torpedo my own joy further and accept an offer to write a book chapter on entrepreneurism in music for Routledge. I’ve got nine months to get 6,000 words together, so I imagine I’ll circle back to this in around eight months and 28 days-time.

Graphic of me and the CEF practitioner's board

I’ve also had some great chats with fellow academics in the form of Dr Teresa Moore and Claire Drakeley, the latter of whom I have a regular check in locked in the diary. Claire has been a brilliant connection having got over my initial fanboy introduction having followed her work for years. A timely connection, Claire and I have been combining on the Canada work, but also exchanging ideas and information about emergency decision making protocols and systems, in particular Calian and SIREN from the brilliant You.Smart.Thing. Considering the NOC’s presentation at Pop3 last year, it seems that adaptive strategies for extreme weather events would be a good component to explore as any part of an artefact for the city – especially being as it is so close to the water. I've also joined the Centre for Events and Festivals (CEF) practicioner board, at Claire's introduction, to help connect my research and the work of Music Futures more broadly.

Thursday morning started with a joyful chat with Linnéa Svennson, European environmental heavyweight and owner of the uber-legends Greener Events. We discussed the work YOUROPE is currently involved with, how this could intersect with the upcoming activities in Liverpool then discovered a shared love of jazz through our commitments to various festivals and networks we’re involved with – so hoping I may be able to travel to Oslo later in the year to check out how they run things over there, it’s been almost a decade since I was last year so well overdue for a trip I reckon.

Cheese - our little kitty in recovery 💖

My final action of the week, before I went dark to complete my tax return at the 11^th hour was to miss the RSA’s session on Cultural as the missing pillar of Sustainable Development on Thursday due to a combination of a poorly kitten and emergency school run duty, so have followed up with the team to see if there is any way to access learnings / recordings from the session.

And I got the final draft of my PAF back to the bosses to pick apart – so we’re all on track!