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FUAIM Lecture - Dr. Áine Mangaoang - 20/02/25, Ó Riada Hall, 11:00am
“Unheard by Most: Soundscapes of Incarceration in Irish Prisons”
This FUAIM lecture provides an overview of PRISONS OF NOTE, a four-year research project that employs mixed-methods to investigate the multifaceted role of music within the penal systems of Norway, Iceland, and Ireland. One of the primary aims of this research is to contribute new, interdisciplinary knowledge on how music is used and is useful in prisons from a peripheral perspective, shifting from isolated, single-nation case studies to interconnected, transcultural experiences. This lecture offers a critical reflection on this research project in progress, underscoring both the unforeseen challenges and the innovative opportunities encountered during the research process.
With a particular focus on fieldwork conducted in the Irish prison context, the lecture will delve into two illustrative case studies: First, an “inside-outside” choir uniting men serving sentences in Mountjoy Prison with women from a Dublin workplace choir, and second, a collaborative soundscape created by students and their teacher from Cork Prison, exhibited as a sound installation on Spike Island in summer 2024. These cases uncover the nuanced dynamics and emerging tensions in the intersection of prison music-making, community-based artistic activities, and their various stakeholders. As such, the lecture explores music’s dual role as a medium of artistic citizenship and as a site for the negotiation and contestation of artistic agency and social values, highlighting the complexities inherent in such collaborative creative endeavors.
Biography
Áine Mangaoang is Associate Professor in Popular Music at the University of Oslo. Her books include Dangerous Mediations: Pop Music in a Philippine Prison Video, winner of the 2021 IASPM-US Woody Guthrie Book Prize, and Made in Ireland: Studies in Popular Music (with John O’Flynn & Lonán Ó Briain). She is Principal Investigator for the four-year interdisciplinary project Prisons of Note, supported by the Norwegian Research Council’s Young Research Talent Award. Recent writing on music on the margins appears in the Journal for the Society for Musicology in Ireland, Musicæ Scientiæ, and in her forthcoming collection Sound & Detention: Towards critical listening, sonic citizenship, & social justice.