Ultimate Outsider Genre: Metal, Diversity, Activism [UCL Music Futures]

About the event

In times of widening economic inequality, encroaching climate crisis, rising fascism, and the horrors of war - extreme metal music has emerged as a vital site of political engagement and resistance. Over the last decade or so, the field of extreme metal (death and black metal, doom and sludge, industrial, and noise, etc) has demonstrated a renewed sense of diversity, inclusion, and political consciousness, especially from left-wing, antifascist/antiracist/anticapitalist positions across the globe. The political anger and anti-authoritarian impulse animating metal since its beginnings (Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Napalm Death, Sepultura) is now undergoing a renaissance, opening up exciting new pathways for activism and solidarity.

Ultimate Outsider Genre: Metal, Diversity, Activism is an interdisciplinary conference bringing together scholars, writers, and musicians, for a day of dialogue on how extreme metal music is meeting today’s world on fire. From a variety of perspectives (from feminist/queer theory to environmentalism, sociology to aesthetics, activism and community-building) we will discuss and strategize how extreme metal can be a vehicle for raising consciousness and creating social change, towards a politics of inclusion, care, and anticapitalist futures.

This conference is convened by Dr Riitta Valijarvi, Associate Professor (Teaching) at UCL SSEES and independent scholar and a metal journalist Daniel Lukes (co-editor of Black Metal Rainbows).

Information about panels, industry partners, and evening activities to follow. The event will be in person, with the option of joining remotely. 

Please contact Daniel Lukes (daniel.lukes@gmail.com) and Riitta Valijarvi (r.valijarvi@ucl.ac.uk) if you would like to be involved!

Schedule

1:00pm: Welcome 

1:15-2:45pm: Panel 1 - Analysis (scroll down for speaker list)

3:00-4:30pm: Panel 2 - Practices and Strategies (scroll down)

4:45-5:15pm: Book Presentation - Black Metal Rainbows (edited by Daniel Lukes [presenting] and Stanimir Panoyotov [presenting], designed by Jaci Raia) + Heavy Metal and Disability - Crips, Crowds, and Cacophonies (edited by Jasmine Hazel Shadrack [presenting] and Keith Kahn-Harris)

5:30-6:30pm: Keynote - Patricia MacCormack: “Queer Cunt Chaos Black Magick Contra Nationalist Pseudo Occultism"

6:30-7:00pm: Wrap-up

Panel 1 - Analysis

Kayley Whalen, University of California Davis, “Heathen Pilgrimages: Women and Nonbinary People Finding Spiritual Belonging within Black Metal and Dark Folk”

Frankie Stevens, Falmouth University, “Women’s Rescription in Metal’s Past, Present & Future: (Re)writing Metal Canons and Histories”

Charlotte Doesburg, University of Oxford, “‘When You Hide Your Own roots’ – Metal Music from Finnish and Russian Karelia”

Claire McGee, Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, “Representing Marock: A Study of Visual and Material Culture, Identity Formation and Community-Building in Botswana”

Adam Christopher Jones, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Acid Horizon, “Waiting for Ormagöden: Utopia and Heavy Metal Fantasy”

Luigi Monteanni, School of Oriental and African Studies, “Mineral Entrails: Phono-Material Ecologies of the Sound-As-Physical-Assault Continuum”

David Burke, Bath Spa University, “Metal and Negative Universality”

Panel 2 - Practices and Strategies

Melissa Arkley, University of Huddersfield, "Being the Metal Feminist Killjoy: Feminist Activism and Affective Disruption in Extreme Metal"

Emma Wilkes, Freelance Journalist, “Sound and Fury: How Metal's Diversification is Shaping the Sounds of Its Future”

Lily Kahn, Hebrew and Jewish Studies, UCL, “Metal, Yiddish, and Language Revitalisation”

Holly Royle, University of Chester, Disconnected Souls, Deviate PR, “‘End the Hierarchy, Kill the Boys Club’: How Quotas Can Improve In/Visible Representation in Heavy Metal Subculture”

Arianna Mahsayeh, Cellist and Activist, “Usually the Only Brown Woman in the Room”

T. Coles, Author and Journalist, "Gender Is About the Roles You Don't Play”

Owen Coggins, Brunel University London, “Is It fash? Is [X] Sketch? Noisy Politics Beyond Words and Beliefs

Thomas Cardwell, University of the Arts London, “Displays of Resistance? Clothing, Customisation and Protest in Metal Subcultures”

Presenters and convenors

This conference is supported by qUCL, UCL's  university-wide initiative that brings together UCL staff and students with research and teaching interests in LGBTQ studies, gender and sexuality studies, queer theory and related fields. Find out about qUCL here. 

Further support is provided by UCL Music Futures, the initiative dedicated to thinking, writing and performing music, jointly hosted by the UCL European Institute and the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, with support from UCL Grand Challenges. Read about UCL Music Futures here. 

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Image: Collage of Black Kaleidoscope, by Ry Cunningham, with permission