Join us to celebrate the launch of Tami Gadir's Dance Music: A Feminst Account of an Ordinary Culture.

For some people, at some times, in some places, dance music can be a gateway to transformative, even transcendent experiences. With the help of skilled DJs, dancers can reach euphoric states, discard their egos, and feel social barriers dissolve. At its best, dance music offers glimpses of better worlds. Yet even where dance music communities are built on principles of resistance and liberation, they nevertheless share the grittier realities of the rest of the world. Dance Music makes the case that dance music is ordinary, and that something exceeding the social bounds of the dance floor is required for the transformative promise of dance music to be realised.

About Tami Gadir

Tami Gadir is a Lecturer in Music Industry at the School of Media and Communication, RMIT University. Her research addresses the social and political mechanisms of musical life, and to date, has focused on the sounds, cultures, politics, and technologies of electronic dance music and DJ cultures. Gadir also DJs as 'Tami Sounds.'

Panel chair: Jacinta Parsons

Jacinta Parsons is a broadcaster, radio maker, writer, and public speaker. She currently co-hosts The Friday Revue with Brian Nankervis on ABC Melbourne. She is the author of two books, Unseen(Affirm Press, 2020) and A Question of Age (Harper Collins/ABC Books, 2022), which she has toured nationally at author events and festivals. Parsons tutors at RMIT’s School of Media and Communication as well as at the University of Melbourne.

Industry panelist: MzRizk

MzRizk is a renowned radio broadcaster (Boogie Beat Suite, PBS) and prolific DJ (winner, “Best DJ” category, Music Victoria Awards 2022). Using genres such as house, jazz, soul, disco, hip-hop, and Arabic music, MzRizk fosters community and cultural connection wherever she plays, from Melbourne to New York to Beirut and beyond.

Academic panelist: Nicholas Tochka

Nick Tochka is Associate Professor in Music (Ethnomusicology) at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. He is a historian, ethnographer, and the author of two books published by Oxford University Press, Rocking in the Free World: Popular Music and the Politics of Freedom in Postwar America (2023) and Audible States: Socialist Politics and Popular Music in Albania (2016). He plays bass, ukulele, and guitar.

Free, but bookings are essential.

Please book here.