Christabel Stirling is a doctoral student in music at Oxford University where she holds a three year Ertegun Graduate Scholarship in the Humanities, working under the supervision of Georgina Born. She completed an MA in Popular Music Studies at Oxford Brookes University in 2012 funded by an AHRC-BGP award, and prior to this, obtained a BMus from King's College London where she was awarded the Purcell Prize for Music. She also spent a foundation year at Camberwell College of Arts, London; and has been involved in a number of practice based projects, including the co-curation with Joe Snape of a three day post-digital music festival that took place at Modern Art Oxford in May 2013.
Chrissy's ethnographic research investigates social relations and spatial politics in contemporary London music and sound scenes. Her interest is in the micro-social affective and embodied experiences of what it feels like to be part of a musical crowd; and the macro-social identities and demographics that may be present or absent. Working across sound installation, classical, roots/dub/reggae, and electronic dance musics as they occur in various sites and neighbourhoods, she explores questions of access, social difference, subordination, mutability, and solidarity; and the extent to which social and spatial stratifications are re-configured or reproduced by music and sound events in the city. Chrissy is a tutor in music at Christ Church, Merton, University, and Keble Colleges, University of Oxford. She is also a member of the Lucky Cloud Sound System, and an external affiliate of the collaborative research group Recomposing the City at Queen's University Belfast.
