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<p><b>Take This Refusal and Dance To It</b><br>
June 16th @ 7PM UK Time, <a
href="https://essex-university.zoom.us/j/95693363180">online</a><br>
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1934417497374853">Facebook
event page</a><br>
<br>
Join us for an online conversation and music listening session
with Paul Rekret, centered around his book <i>Take This Hammer:
Work, Song, Crisis</i> (2024). In this session, we’ll explore
the book’s key themes through both discussion and curated music
selections that speak to the intersections of labor, leisure, and
sound.<br>
<br>
<i>Take This Hammer</i> examines how shifts in work and the
economy – from the fragmentation of the working day to the rise of
precarious labor – have shaped and been reflected in the forms and
experiences of popular music. Rekret traces how the separation of
work and leisure, once central to industrial society, has become
increasingly blurred in the age of streaming, automation, and
remote labor, and considers how music both registers these changes
and imagines alternatives. Together, we’ll listen to tracks
connected to themes from the book, and discuss how musical forms –
across genres like trap rap, dance music, and field recordings –
respond to crises of work, economic instability, gentrification,
and ecological breakdown. This session is an invitation to think
with music: not just as entertainment, but as a way of sensing and
sounding out life under capitalism and beyond.<br>
<br>
<b>Bio:</b> Paul Rekret is the author of three books: <i>Down
With Childhood: Pop Music and the Crisis of Innocence</i>
(2017); <i>Derrida and Foucault: Philosophy, Politics, Polemics</i>
(2018); <i>Monopolated Light and Power</i> (with Edward George,
Louis Moreno, Ashwani Sharma (2024)), and editor of George
Caffentzis's Clipped Coins, Abused Words & Civil Government
(2021). He has published on political and cultural theory in
journals such as <i>Theory, Culture & Society</i>, <i>Constellations</i>,
<i>South Atlantic Quarterly</i> and his writing has appeared in <i>Frieze</i>,
<i>The Wire</i>, <i>Art Monthly</i>, <i>The New Inquiry</i>, and
elsewhere. He is a member of Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective
and works on sound and ecological crisis as part of
Amplification/Annihilation. He is a Lecturer in the School of
Media and Communications at the University of Westminster.<br>
<br>
Organized by Minor Compositions & COVER<br>
<br>
This event will be edited into an episode of the Minor
Compositions podcast.<br>
<br>
To register for this event:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/take-this-refusal-and-dance-to-it-tickets-1402470620379">https://www.eventbrite.com/e/take-this-refusal-and-dance-to-it-tickets-1402470620379</a><br>
<br>
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