Platform | IU's Arts and Humanities Lab

A look back at the 2020-2021 academic year, the Global Popular Music team with Platform considered the topic of Musical Bodies. As one of the consistently highest ranked R1 universities in the country, IU has an obligation to continue pushing foward in areas of research and scholarship. Platform is a response to that obligation.
Called "a research laboratory in contemporary arts and humanities," Platform is a new, integrative initiative housed at Indiana University Bloomington. It was created to allow arts and humanities scholars at every level of education-from undergraduates to professors-to connect their research, via interdisciplinary collaboration, to units on campus that do not normally work with humanists.
For the 2020-2021 academic year, led by professor Alisha Lola Jones, the scholars spent the year considering the following:
How can we understand music as one medium in a multimedia world? How do technology and production processes mediate music in essential ways? How does writing about music, or filming music, supplement or change music’s impact and meaning? How can we write well about music, in a way that captures not just what and how music means, its history, and social insertion, but also in a way that acknowledges different groups who consume writing about music? What is the long history and present possibilities of the relation between film and music?
All of these inquiries are designed to get at the heart of one final question: what is the relationship between performance and discourse?