Music and Social Movements in History - Detailseite

The first meeting of the seminar “Music and Social Movements in History” by Dr. Özgür Balkiliç will take place online via Zoom.

Time: Monday, Oct 20, 2025 04:00 PM Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna

Join Zoom Meeting
https://hu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/62339578314?pwd=pt6muinOWRzLkyYfo6HQYXUKvcNqz1.1

Meeting ID: 623 3957 8314
Password: 623975

This course examines the relationship between music and social movements in history by asking a very basic question: To what extent can the music impact social change? After drawing a very brief theoretical framework to understand the role of culture and music in recruiting, educating and mobilizing people for a political and social cause, it will proceed through several case studies from the different parts of the world and focus on the ways in which various musical genres, such as mainstream, folk music, or subcultures have influenced the different social movements in history. Over the course, we will examine several works of composers and lyricists as well as the historical events and dynamics that turned such songs or musicians to be a symbol of the social movements. Relying upon the assumption that the practice of music promotes social movements, we will also talk about why musicians preferred certain instruments rather than others in order to make music with a social cause, how particular performances facilitated social movements, in what ways musicians (re)produced and distributed their music to promote their political ideas, how the audiences received and adopted songs in social and political mobilization, etc. That being said, we’ll be analyzing how music and musicking as larger activities involving instrument preference, performance practices, and music (re)production, distribution and reception facilitated the social movements in history.

Derrick P. Alridge, “From Civil Rights to Hip Hop: Toward a Nexus of Ideas,” The Journal of African American History, vol. 90, no. 3 (2005): 226-252.

Mark Brill. Music of the Latin America and the Caribbean (London: Routledge, 2018).

William F. Danaher. “Music and Social Movements”, Sociology Compass 4/9 (2010): 811-823.

Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison. Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991).

Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison. Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the twentieth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Ron Eyerman. “The Art of Social Movement,” in the Oxford Handbook of Social Movements, eds.  Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2015): 549-556.

Ron Eyerman, “Music in Movement: Cultural Politics and Old and New Social Movements,” Qualitative Sociology, vol. 25, no. 3 (Fall 2002): 443-458.

Richard Harrington. “Facing the Music: Singing to Change the World,” Washington Post, September 14, 2000.

Stephen A. King. “Protest music as ‘ego-enhancement’: reggae music, the Rastafarian movement and the re-examination of race and identity in Jamaica” in The Resisting Muse: Popular Music and Social Protest, ed. Ian Peddie (London: Routledge, 2006): 105-118.

Nancy Morris. “New Song in Chile: Half a Century of Musical Activism,” in The Militant Song Movement in Latin America: Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, ed. Pablo Vila (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014): 19-44.

Verena Reckord. “Reggae, Rastafarianism, and Cultural Identity,” in Reggae, Rasta, Revolution: Jamaican Music from Ska to Dub, ed. Chris Potash (New York: Schirmer Books, 1997): 3-13.

Kerran L. Sanger. “Functions of Freedom Singing in the Civil Rights Movement: The Activists’ Implicit Rheoterical Theory,” Howard Journal of Communications, 8:2 (1997): 179-195.

Anton Shekhovtsov. “European Far-Right Music and Its Enemies” in Analysing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text, eds. Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson (London: Routledge, 2013):  277-296.

John Street. Politics and Popular Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997).

Kristal Brent Zook. “Reconstructions of Nationalist Thought in Black Music and Culture,” in Rockin’ the Boat: Mass Music and Mass Movements, ed. Reebee Garofalo (Boston: South End Press, 1992): 255-266.

Klausur am 09.02.2026