Hardcore Music Festivals and DIY Music Scenes: Community, Belongingness, and Amplifying Resilience

Food for Thought

CAMD, Boston, Massachusetts, April 24, 2025.

Abstract

I gave a talk on my two major research projects-in-progress, drawing from two recent conference papers delivered at the Punk Scholars Network and the British Forum for Ethnomusicology.

In this talk, delivered to an interdisciplinary audience of faculty and students at Northeastern University’s College for Arts, Media, and Design, I provided an overview of my own research, methods, and outputs. I discussed the Furnace Fest project, sharing the festival’s background, our longitudinal collaborative research (ongoing since 2021), some of our research instruments, selected findings on community belongingness, and the next steps for our research team.

I also discussed the DIY music scenes project and the challenges my research collaborators/team and I are addressing. A foundational characteristic of this project is the precarity of DIY music scenes, which I illustrated with the impact of the Boston Globe’s article in late 2023 exposing the local DIY scene to outsiders (and, particularly, law enforcement). Key outputs of this project have been public events in the Boston and Dublin areas, as well as our public facing media content (including the Live Free or DIY podcast).

CAMD’s Food for Thought series brings together two faculty to share overviews of their work for the benefit of the Northeastern community. My co-presenter at this event was Ilya Vidrin, a colleague in the Department of Theatre.