Professor Tia DeNora

In company with the SocArts Research Group at Exeter, my research examines how culture is made informs felt social life in real places and in real time.

Within that focus, I work as a music sociologist, mostly focused on health and wellbeing. I work in the area of sociological theory but am very committed to empirical research and to the values of 'gentle empiricism' and 'slow' sociology.

My current research is ethnographic. I use micro techniques of observation, including a focus on interaction over split-seconds. My current research examines scenes of care - from a flagship hospice to a care facility for people living with different forms of neuro-disability (primarily dementia), to a palliative care ward in a large urban hospital. I am interested in how people find ways of existing and being creative in extremis, and in music's role within this process. In my collaborative projects - e.g., around the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra, and in connection with Gary Ansdell and Wolfgang Schmid's work in music therapy at end of life, I'm interested in the sounds of music making - how those sounds are produced and experienced by different people - musicians, patients, residents, clients, audiences, visitors, staff.

For example, what can count as 'beautiful' music and what bearing does such a question have on opportunities for action and wellbeing? Who can do or be what, where and when? What does each person bring to a collaborative music making situation? How do adaptations, technical innovations, and 'good enough' attempts at musical gesture and sound get blended into the whole sound matrix and in ways that sometimes lead to new things - new musical values, new ideas, new understandings (of issues but also of people) and new relationships?

My work has been funded by  AHRC, Leverhulme, and ESRC and I collaborate with others on Norwegian Research Council and Australian Research Council projects.   For more information see the Care for Music Website

and the Island Life and Death website. 

The SocArts journal, Music and Arts in Action (MAiA), founded by PhD students and postdocs from SocArts is now in its 16h year. The most recent issue can be found here: http://musicandartsinaction.net.

SocArts celebrated its tenth anniversary in May 2016 with the international symposium, The Pebbles in the Pond.

Biography:

My undergraduate studies were in music (my major instrument was flute) and sociology at West Chester University in Southeastern Pennsylvania. I completed my PhD in Sociology in 1989 at the University of California San Diego. From then until 1992, I worked at University of Wales Cardiff (where I was a University of Wales Fellow from 1989-91). I moved to Exeter in 1992. I have been a Fellow of the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology since 2004 and recently was elected Fellow of the British Academy. I've served as Chair of the ESA Network on Arts Sociology and on various councils of learned societies, editorial boards and the 2008/2014 national Research Excellence Framework sub-panel for Sociology. With Gary Ansdell, I currently co-edit of the Routledge Series on Music & Change: Ecological Perspectives.

Research supervision:

Sociology of Music, Music Sociology, Arts Sociology

I supervise work in the area of arts sociology. That includes anything from studies of music consumption, distribution, production, to studies of creativity, to historically-based studies of music and social change.