Hannah Fairlamb
PhD
Sociology
My PhD research focuses on the tensions between the values and practices of the DIY music field, specifically investigating gender equality activism in Australian DIY music during the period 2015-2020. Prior to my candidacy, I was co-director of youth music not-for-profit Girls Rock! Adelaide in South Australia from 2018-2022, and also spent 8 years working in women's policy for the South Australian government. With over 25 years of involvement in my local music scene as a musician and audience member, I am now also a feminist sociologist with a keen interest in gender relations in DIY music scenes.
Contact:
Thesis
Gender equality initiatives and DIY music scenes in Australia
Despite being seen as egalitarian, open and anti-establishment, the field of DIY music has been shown to reproduce wider societal gendered structures. In this thesis I explore how participants in Australian DIY music understand and respond to gender inequality within the field. Drawing on feminist sociology, organisational studies and popular music studies, I argue that participant definitions of DIY create and regulate boundaries that operate in exclusionary, gendered ways. Further, I argue that gender activists in DIY employ both separatism and reformism to prefigure feminist utopias and demonstrate the potential of re-imagining the boundaries of the field.