This article contains content that is written like an advertisement .(March 2017) |
Women Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities Oral History Archive | |
---|---|
Housed at | University of Washington, Seattle University |
Women Who Rock is a discussion forum established in 2008 to encourage dialogue about the portrayal of women in popular music. The community is mostly based in the Seattle area, and its membership includes faculty, students, activists and academics from the University of Washington and Seattle University. The individuals involved in this group introduce and collaborate with artists, musicians, media channels, activists, scholars and students in order to research, discuss and understand the role of women and popular music throughout social scenes and movements. [1]
This forum serves as a way to connect the music community and give light to artists who have been lost to time. This community discusses the underlying social constraints that pave the way for some artists while limiting others. They also try to outline the roots of each sound in popular music and give its source recognition.
The University of Washington Libraries Digital Initiatives has hosted the Women Who Rock Digital Oral History Archive since April 2013. The University of Washington works with the Women Who Rock collective by supporting their digital archive and instituting classes on the Seattle campus that represent their ideals. They continue to grow their digital network and data by documentation of scenes collected at their events.
The Women Who Rock collective hosts concerts, interviews, and conferences. They hold an annual unConference & Film Festival that includes music, dance, art and media. They have had notable performers such as Alice Bag, Medusa, Star Evelyn Harris and Christa Bell were featured at their events. [2]
The Women Who Rock Archive is based on community outreach and involvement. Over the years the program has partnered with local Seattle communities, including students within and outside the University of Washington. The first collaborating students who helped co-found the project included graduate students from the GWSS Department of the University of Washington who were mentored by Michelle Habell-Pallan and Sonnet Retman, such as: Nicole Robert, Martha González, Rebecca Clark Mane, and Kim Carter Muñoz. [3] [4] [5] [6] Lulu (Luzviminda) Carpenter, an experienced Seattle organizer and head of Urzuri Productions, is a main organizer of the Women Who Rock annual unConference. [7] As a faculty member at Seattle University Mako Fitts Ward ensured that the unConference bridged with women musician, performers and activists in Seattle's hip scene.
Michelle Habell-Pallan and Sonnet Retman co-teach the class known as Rock the Archive: Hip Hop, Indie Rock & New Media, which allows students to study women and African-American involvement in popular music culture. [8] Assignments include blog posts, video critiques, and musical analysis. Each assignment is aimed at a key theme of the project: write to rock, reel rebels, making scenes and building communities. For example, students were able to gain admission to the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) and learn about the legacy of Seattle hip-hop. [9] The project has successfully built communities both at the undergraduate and graduate level. Graduate Mentor Workshops are also provided to allow graduate students to present their work in front of a distinguished audience within their respective field and gain critique and feedback.
Write to Rock is a subunit of the Women Who Rock organization, focusing on the written histories of popular music. It features many music writers, ranging from scholars and critics to journalists and bloggers. With music analysis also ranging across a wide spectrum of genres and music cultures, the group's focuses are to question and criticize previous music histories through a feminist lens, and to re-write these stories in order to include the erased contributions of women and women of color. [10]
The Write to Rock archive, which also contributes to the Women Who Rock's Digital Oral Archive, features biographies and interviews with a number of the individuals who participate with the organization as critical writers. [11] These individuals include: Daphne Brooks, Sherrie Tucker, Maylei Blackwell, María Elena Gaitán, and Deborah Wong.
The Women Who Rock Archive also features a number of filmmakers and producers who contribute to the archival and recognition of female artists. [1] The archive has worked with numerous filmmakers including Barni Qaasim, Sheila Jackson, and Karen Whitehead. Recently, they featured a screening of Her Aim Is True, a film biography of Jini Dellaccio, a famous rock photographer. [12] By highlighting media featuring women, the group attempts to promote greater documentation of the achievements made by female artists. In this, they hope to avoid the systemic under-representation of women in music that is historically pervasive. Videos, in the form of oral histories, are one of several methods the Women Who Rock Archive uses to digitally chronicles the stories of female performers, activists, and community leaders.
As of 2015 the Women Who Rock Archive has eleven oral histories, documenting stories by Martha Gonzalez (musician), Medusa, Onion Carillo and several others. [1] Two Women Who Rock media-makers and UW Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies Phd students, Angelica Macklin and Monica De La Torre worked with UW faculty Michelle Habell-Pallan and Sonnet Retman to design, curate, and produce the digital version of the Women Who Rock Archive. [13] [14] They partnered with UW Libraries Digital Initiative Team Ann Lally, Anne Graham, Angela Rosette-Tavares, and Rinna Rem. [14]
The Making Scenes aspect represents the Women Who Rock organization's outreach into the local community through events. This allows for community collaboration and dialogue about specific performers and bands. One of the main events this organization holds is an annual conference called the Women Who Rock unConference. Since 2011, this conference has been devoted to women, music, and community building. [13] It has featured various performers including Cholo en Cello, Alice Bag, Medusa, Nobuko Miyamoto, and Quetzal Flores. The conference has been digitally documented every year. [8]
In an article by the Stranger, a weekly alternative arts and culture newspaper, the Women Who Rock unConference in 2012 was compared to the Northwest Women's Show held in the Centurylink's Events Center near Centurylink Field. The two events were so widely distinct in that the “unConference” promoted conversation about the politics of gender, race, class, and sexuality generated by popular music while the Northwest Women's Show focused on dieting, Fitness, Fashion, Wine Tasting, and other aspects. [15] The author pointed out the disparity between the two events and talked about how fulfilling the unConference was and the triviality of the Northwest Women's Show.
Seattle University is a private Jesuit university in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the largest independent university in the Northwestern United States, with over 7,500 students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate programs within six schools.
The University of Washington is a public research university in Seattle, Washington, United States. Founded in 1861, the University of Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast of the United States.
The Houston Comets were a Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) team based in Houston. Formed in 1997, the team was one of the original eight WNBA teams and won the first four championships of the league's existence. They are one of two teams in the WNBA that are undefeated in the WNBA Finals; the Seattle Storm are the other. The Comets were the first dynasty of the WNBA and are tied with the Minnesota Lynx and Seattle Storm for the most championships of any WNBA franchise. Despite all of their success, the team was folded and disbanded by the league in 2008 during the height of the Great Recession because new ownership could not be found.
Western Washington University is a public university in Bellingham, Washington. The northernmost university in the contiguous United States, WWU was founded in 1893 as the state-funded New Whatcom Normal School, succeeding a private school of teaching for women founded in 1886. The university adopted its present name in 1977.
The Museum of History & Industry (MOHAI) is a history museum in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the largest private heritage organization in Washington state, maintaining a collection of nearly four million artifacts, photographs, and archival materials primarily focusing on Seattle and the greater Puget Sound region. A portion of this collection is on display in the museum's galleries at the historic Naval Reserve Armory in Lake Union Park.
James A. Garfield High School is a public high school in the Seattle Public Schools district of Seattle, Washington. It is named after James A. Garfield, the 20th President of the United States. The school is located at 400 23rd Avenue between E. Alder and E. Jefferson Streets in the Central District section of Seattle.
Blue Scholars is an American hip hop duo based in Seattle, Washington, created in 2002 while the members, DJ Sabzi and MC Geologic, were students at University of Washington.
Home Alive is a Seattle-based anti-violence organization that offers self-defense classes on a sliding scale payment system. Home Alive once operated as a non-profit organization and now continues to operate as a volunteer collective. Home Alive sees its work as integrated into larger social justice movements, recognizing how violence is often perpetuated through oppression and abuse. Home Alive classes included basic physical self-defense, boundary setting, and advanced multi-week courses.
The Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, one of the Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights History Projects, is dedicated to social movements and labor history in the Pacific Northwest. It is directed by Professor James N. Gregory of the University of Washington. The project represents a unique collaboration between community organizations and University faculty, as well as undergraduate and graduate students. It has become a model of public history across the US and has been credited with changing the discussion of race and civil rights in the Seattle area.
Quetzal is a bilingual (Spanish-English) Chicano rock band from East Los Angeles, California.
Northwest hip hop is hip hop or rap music that originates from the Pacific Northwest of North America, encompassing major cities such as Portland (Oregon), Seattle (Washington), and other towns. Northwest hip hop music mixes elements from various genres of music to form a sound different from its southern neighbor, West Coast hip hop. For many years the scene existed mainly as an underground genre, but recently Northwest hip-hop has seen more and more mainstream acceptance, with artists such as Macklemore gaining nationwide attention.
Alicia "Alice" Armendariz, also known as Alice Bag, is an American punk rock singer and author. She is the lead vocalist and co-founder of the Bags, one of the earliest punk bands to form in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s.
Stanford University has many centers and institutes dedicated to the study of various specific topics. These centers and institutes may be within a department, within a school but across departments, an independent laboratory, institute or center reporting directly to the dean of research and outside any school, or semi-independent of the university itself.
Joyce Kakariyil Paul is a Bharatanatyam dancer, exercise physiologist, and anthropologist from India. Classically trained in Bharatanatyam from Kalakshetra, she is known for her technical acumen, rigour, and precision. Paul had her initial dance training under Padmashri Leela Samson and further training under Prof C.V. Chandrasekhar and Janardhanan Sir among others. She has trained in Mohiniattam, the classical dance of Kerala. In 2003, she founded Arpan Performing Arts, an organization dedicated to promoting the folk and classical traditions of India, where she currently serves as its creative director.
Alfred John Young was a former World Champion Drag Racer and National Hot Rod Association Hall of Famer who competed in professional Bracket racing, and the heads-up categories from Super Street and Super Gas to Super Comp. He taught high school in Seattle, Washington, for 37 years, and is involved with the preparation of classic high performance race cars. After campaigning his 1970 Dodge Challenger for over 25 years, winning the American Hot Rod Association (AHRA) World Championship and numerous other National Hot Rod Association and AHRA titles, he donated his drag racing car to the Museum of History and Industry (MOHAI) in Seattle, Washington, in 2007. During the majority of his auto racing career, he was sponsored by Ole Bardahl of the Bardahl Company. In 2019, he was inducted into the National Hot Rod Association, Northwest Division, Hall of Fame. He was the first Asian American World Champion race car driver.
The Pacific Northwest Labor and Civil Rights History Projects are a series of multimedia public history initiatives. The projects cover a range of themes and subjects in the Northwest and Seattle, with a particular focus on working people and their movements. The effort, particularly the Seattle Civil Rights and Labor History Project, has garnered praise for the breadth of primary and secondary resources made available and its joint creation by academics, community members and hundreds of students. It has been recognized as a model of digital and publicly engaged scholarship.
The Association for Computing Machinery's Council on Women in Computing (ACM-W) supports, celebrates, and advocates internationally for the full engagement of women in all aspects of the computing field, providing a wide range of programs and services to ACM members and working in the larger community to advance the contributions of technical women. ACM-W is an active organization with over 36,000 members.
Broadway High School, originally known as Seattle High School, opened in Seattle, Washington in 1902 and was the first dedicated high school built in Seattle.
Antecedente is an album by the Panamanian musician Rubén Blades, released in 1988. The album was often reviewed with La Pistola y El Corazón, by Los Lobos, which also was a return-to-roots effort.
Juan “Juancito” Torres Velez, also known as "La Trompeta Nacional De Puerto Rico", was a Puerto Rican salsa and jazz trumpet player, composer, arranger, producer and musical director best known for his association with the Fania All-Stars from 1979 to 1985. He was known as a great soloist, specializing in upper register.