Keynote Lecture: "A Feminist Walked into an Archive: Telling Stories about Broadcasting, Music, and Power"

Keynote Speaker: Professor Christina Baade (McMaster University)

As we mark a hundred years of public service broadcasting, we are caught as music scholars between the new normal of music streaming and the growing impact of AI. They promise us accessibility, connection, and powerful new insights, even as they obscure the infrastructure, labour, and resources they require—including our own attention and data. 

For those of us who study the history of music and radio, these promises are familiar, making now a very good time to revisit the concept of public service broadcasting, its archives, and its impacts on music and dance. I’ll take as my case study a feminist “big data” project I conducted in the British Broadcasting Corporation Written Archives in the late 2010s, situating the project in relation to popular music historiography and critical archival studies. In my talk, I’ll engage with Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein’s (2020) assertion that feminist data research must resist the presumed neutrality of data and “make labor visible,” as well as Josephine Dolan’s (2003) insistence that the archive is not a “dormant repository of knowledge.” 

What new stories can we tell when we think about archival materials in affective and embodied ways? What happens when we approach archives as sites of negotiation and struggle? How can we reframe histories of public service broadcasting not as a nostalgic “golden age” but as a resource for imagining a more vital, more creative, more just future?