St Mary's Lecturer Delivers Keynote Lecture

Dr Victoria Armstrong, Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for Education and Social Science at St Mary’s University, Twickenham recently delivered a guest lecture at the Cultural practices, literacies and technological mediations conference at Örebro University in Sweden. Dr Armstrong’s lecture, entitled Challenging technological determinism in the music education classroom, examined how gender identities are constructed and reproduced in the contemporary music classroom. Drawing upon themes developed in her critically-acclaimed book Technology and the Gendering of Music Education (PDF). Dr Armstrong argued that digitally-mediated music composition has serious gendered implications whereby another layer of symbolic masculinity is added to an already gendered music classroom. During her week-long visit, Dr Armstrong also gave two graduate seminars which provided her with an opportunity to meet PhD students from the University’s School of Musicology. Dr Armstrong said, “I was delighted to be invited to speak at this new inter-disciplinary conference, which brought together distinguished international scholars working in the field of digital literacies and music. The range and diversity of interests amongst the PhD students made for stimulating and challenging discussions. We are now exploring the possibility of collaboration between St Mary's University and colleagues at Örebro University which I am very excited about.” Dr Armstrong’s research continues her long-standing interest in gender and music, and she is currently exploring the experiences of professional female classical musicians, which resulted in the publication of her paper ‘Women’s musical lives: self-managing a freelance music career’ in the November 2013 edition of Women: a Cultural Review. In addition, she will be presenting a paper entitled ‘Agency, autonomy and creative fulfilment in the lives of professional female musicians’ at the Classical music as contemporary socio-cultural practice: critical perspectives conference in May 2014.