Stories About Listening

University of Gloucestershire

Abigail Gardner, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Gloucestershire, presents her inaugural lecture.

Lecture Room TC014

The LectureAbigail’s lecture covers some of the connecting concepts that have driven her research over the last decade, all of which revolve around a politics of listening. In the first section, she discusses key ideas from her published work on age and time in relation to women and popular music. These centre on the relationship between image and memory, on rock memoirs and the ‘menopausal gap’, and on the ‘time crunch’, a clash between women musicians’ aged bodies and ‘genre age’. The second section focuses on her applied digital storytelling research, where she introduces us to projects with the Cheltenham Hebrew Community and Age UK Gloucestershire that highlight the affective importance of listening. She ends with her most recent project, ‘Mapping the Music of Migration’, a project that she led across Europe, where she and her research team used songs to open up listening spaces.The SpeakerAbigail read Japanese at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge (1984) and at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (1986). After a decade working in publishing, translating, travelling and being in bands, she embarked on her Masters in Cultural Studies at the ‘Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ at The University of Birmingham, where she continued onto her PhD, writing it up at the University of Gloucestershire. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Associate Editor of the Journal for the International Association of Popular Music Studies, has written for The Conversation and appeared on Radio 4’s Soul Music, and leads research in the School of Creative Industries at The University of Gloucestershire. She was appointed Professor in Cultural Studies in 2021.Abigail’s theoretical research has focused on women within popular music, particularly in relation to age, time, and memory. Her applied research has used digital storytelling and listening methodologies to work with a range of different people, war veterans, migrants, teenagers across Europe and members of the Cheltenham Hebrew Congregation. She has led three Erasmus + European-wide projects, the most recent one using song as a mechanism to listen to migrant experiences. She has written, co-authored, and edited five books, contributed research papers and book chapters, produced documentary shorts with Paul Zinder, and is currently working on a new book, ‘Listening, Belonging and Memory’ for Bloomsbury Academic.Admission is free.We continue to be mindful of running events such as this with COVID-19 safety in mind. Please do not attend the lecture if you are unwell. We encourage the wearing of face coverings when moving around busy areas on campus, although you are not required to wear one during the lecture if you prefer. The lecture theatre is well ventilated, and hand sanitising stations are available for your use.

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