Georgina Born

About:

Georgina Born is Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Music in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences. She trained in Anthropology at University College London and uses ethnography to study cultural production, particularly television, music and IT, and knowledge systems. Her books are Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (Vintage 2005), a study combining ethnography and history of the transformation of the BBC and of Britain’s public service broadcasting system in the past decade; Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (California 1995), a critical study, again combining ethnography and cultural history, of the musical avant-garde and of music-science collaborations at Pierre Boulez’s IRCAM in Paris; and Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music (California 2000, edited with David Hesmondhalgh).

Her most recent ESRC-funded research, ‘Interdisciplinarity and Society: A Critical Comparative Study’ (2004-6, with Andrew Barry, Geography, Oxford, and Marilyn Strathern, Social Anthropology, Cambridge), analyses the nature of interdisciplinary collaborations bridging the natural sciences and engineering, on the one hand, and the arts and social sciences, on the other. For a summary of this research see:

http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/research/technologies/projects/interdisciplinarity.html

Other ongoing research interests include a book in progress on cultural production, which brings into dialogue the anthropology and sociology of art, music and media; the normative dimensions of public service broadcasting, with a focus on how theories of democracy and difference can be brought to the analysis of the future of public media systems; how broadcast media are changing with digitization; music, mediation, technology and ontology, and the evolving modes of creativity attendant on music’s changing mediations; and music, sound, and the reconfiguration of public and private space – see the conference on this topic held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities in April 2008:

http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/page/236/aprilmusic-sound.htm

Professor Born is also engaged in cultural policy and media policy work on the BBC, public service broadcasting and the cultural sector in Britain and Europe, and gave evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on the future of the BBC. She is a member of the European Research Council’s Social Sciences and Humanities expert panels, and Chairs the Arts and Sciences Research Programme Committee of the Weiner Wissenschafts-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds (WWTF). She sits on the Advisory Board of the AHRC funded project, ‘Tuning In: Diasporic Contact Zones at BBC World Service’, in the AHRC Diasporas, Migration and Identities Research Programme; and is a research leader for the Canadian SSHRC-funded Major Collaborative Research Initiative, ‘Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice’.

Professor Born is Honorary Professor of Anthropology at University College London, a Fellow of Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology, an International Fellow of the Australian Sociological Association, and was a Fellow (and Director of Studies in Social and Political Sciences) of Emmanuel College Cambridge (1998-2006) and Senior Research Fellow of King’s College Cambridge (1997-8). In 2008 Professor Born was awarded the Dent Medal of the Royal Musical Association for her contributions to music research. She will hold the Bloch Professorship in Music at the University of California, Berkeley in 2011-12.