Simultaneously stimulating and challenging is teaching a course on music and social justice in Chicago, a city from which social fabric so much world impacting musics and soundscapes have emerged and in which took place so many decisive events regarding the struggles for more social participation, equity and justice affecting significantly local, national and international contexts.
Video: Samuel Araujo
Participating in the 2014 May Day Parade downtown, the celebration of an event of world repercussion, is one among many other ways one may come to locate, debate and appreciate as much instances as possible of when, where, why, among whom and how music, sound and social justice have been reciprocally implicated in Chicago’s past and ongoing history.
(General resource on the Haymarket Affair, 1886, after which May 1st was taken internationally as Worker´s Day:
http://www.chicagohistory.org/dramas/)
Along the parade among migrant workers denied legal documentation, diverse labor unions and political movements of clearly distinct origins and perspectives, I was reminded in both visual and sonic terms of U. California-Berkeley sociologist Michael Burawoy´s theorizing on what he terms the third wave of capitalism. In this stage, argues Burawoy, capital accumulation takes on new forms, both rescaling and reshaping the roles of its fundamental sources, i.e. land and real estate concentration, labor exploitation and financial speculation. It also leaves behind, without eliminating them completely, older historical forms (e..g., slave labor, industrial worker, 9-5 white-collar worker), generating a socialscape of juxtaposed differences similar to geological plateaus. (see also Araujo, Samuel. `Entre muros, cercas e blindados; trabalho acústico e práxis sonora no contexto pós-industrial´. El Oído Pensante 1, 2013, online peer-reviewed journal, Buenos Aires, Argentina)
http://ppct.caicyt.gov.ar/index.php/oidopensante/issue/view/152
Samuel
Video: Samuel Araujo
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