Taru Leppänen – författare

Politics of Feminist New Materialisms at Music Playschools: Musicking in the Middle examines how feminist new materialist politics unfold within diverse music playschool practices in Finland.Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across five distinct groups – including sessions for babies, asylum seekers, deaf and hard-of-hearing children, and children with disabilities – the book explores how affirmative politics intersect with restrictive forces of power. By analysing the simultaneity of limiting and empowering forces of power, it situates feminist new materialisms within ongoing conversations about intersectionalities, their dynamic transformations and mutual impact of human and more-than-human elements in the formation of differences. The study discusses the concepts of the middle and middling as methodological and political tools by attuning to human languages, movement, silence, vibrations, and rhythms within musical encounters.Politics of Feminist New Materialisms at Music Playschools: Musicking in the Middle is of interest for scholars and students in feminist theory, gender studies, new materialisms, (ethno)musicology, ethnographic methods, childhood studies, and early music education.

New Materialism and Intersectionality advances the interplay of intersectionality theories and feminist new materialisms, arguing that co-constitutive influences between these fields will provide feminist and gender studies scholars with improved tools to analyse markers of difference and identity in 21st-century realities. In exploring the intersection of new materialisms and intersectionality studies, this volume puts forward a concept of "the middle". It refers to the situation-bound mutual impact of material, social, human, and more-than-human elements in the formation of differences, identities, subject positions, and power relations. The chapters elaborate this understanding of the middle in empirical research concerned with the relational emergence of differences in various social, cultural, artistic, and ecological settings. The middle is also proposed as a verb, whereby researchers who practise "middling" cultivate a capacity to account for the open-ended processes and relationships through which intersectional and materially lived differences unfold and reconfigure in particular contexts.This concept of the middle enriches understandings of how intersectional differences exist and can be studied, and what ethical and political implications they involve. The volume will interest scholars and students working with intersectionality, feminist new materialist, and posthumanist theories across the humanities and the social sciences.

New Materialism and Intersectionality advances the interplay of intersectionality theories and feminist new materialisms, arguing that co-constitutive influences between these fields will provide feminist and gender studies scholars with improved tools to analyse markers of difference and identity in 21st-century realities. In exploring the intersection of new materialisms and intersectionality studies, this volume puts forward a concept of "the middle". It refers to the situation-bound mutual impact of material, social, human, and more-than-human elements in the formation of differences, identities, subject positions, and power relations. The chapters elaborate this understanding of the middle in empirical research concerned with the relational emergence of differences in various social, cultural, artistic, and ecological settings. The middle is also proposed as a verb, whereby researchers who practise "middling" cultivate a capacity to account for the open-ended processes and relationships through which intersectional and materially lived differences unfold and reconfigure in particular contexts.This concept of the middle enriches understandings of how intersectional differences exist and can be studied, and what ethical and political implications they involve. The volume will interest scholars and students working with intersectionality, feminist new materialist, and posthumanist theories across the humanities and the social sciences.

This is the first volume to mobilize encounters between the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the rich developments in cultural studies of music and sound. The book takes seriously the intellectual and political challenge that the process philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari poses for previous understandings of music as permanent objects and primarily discursive texts. By elaborating on the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari in innovative ways, the chapters of the book demonstrate how musical and sonic practices and expressions can be reconsidered as instances of becoming, actors in assemblages, and actualizations of virtual tendencies. The collection pushes notions of music and sound beyond such long-term paradigms as identity thinking, the privileging of signification, and the centrality of the human subject.The chapters of the volume bring a range of new topics and methodological approaches in contact with Deleuze and Guattari. These span from movement improvisation, jazz and western art music studies, sound and performance art and reality TV talent shows to deaf musicians and indigenous music. The book also highlights such fresh ways of doing analysis and shaping the methodological tools of music and sound studies that are enabled by Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. Their philosophy, too, gains renewed capacities and potential when responding to ethnographic, cultural, ethnomusicological, participatory, aesthetic, new materialist, feminist and queer perspectives to music and sound.