British Forum for Ethnomusicology prize

Congratulations to doctoral students Rose Campion and Jim Hickson for their success at the British Forum for Ethnomusicology conference. Rose Campion, alongside Sheyda Ghavami, was awarded the BFE Student Prize for their paper ‘Whose Knowledge, Whose Production?: Experiences from Co-produced Research on Kurdish Singers in Europe’, while Jim Hickson was given an honourable mention for his paper ‘Micro-Organology of a One-String Fiddle’. Both students are supervised by Professor Jason Stanyek, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the Faculty.

The BFE Student Prize recognises the research and creativity of student scholars and is awarded at each BFE Annual Conference for the best student presentation. This year's conference took place in University College, Cork.

On Rose Campion and Sheyda Ghavami's paper, the prize panel commented:

This was a challenging and provocative paper on co-produced research that speaks to current attempts to decolonise ethnomusicology. The paper engages well with relevant scholarship and issues in ethnographic methods. The panel was particularly impressed by the creative presentation style and how it reified the complicated power dynamics between researcher and the researched. 

The panel, made up of Lyndsey Copeland, Áine Ryan Mangaoang and Stephen Millar, also praised Jim Hickson's work:

A stylishly written paper about a one-string fiddle that starts in the Pitt Rivers Museum, then takes the reader on a fascinating and tangled journey that crisscrosses colonial Africa and Europe. The panel was impressed by the paper’s wide-ranging source material and its interdisciplinary focus, combining instrument history and museum studies.