Tami Gadir

Core Members

Dr Tami Gadir is a lecturer in Music Industry at RMIT. Her research addresses the mechanisms that promote or hinder participation in musical life, on the one hand, and music that promotes or hinder political imperatives, on the other. Gadir’s research traverses disciplinary boundaries in music studies to interrogate the sounds, cultures, and technologies of contemporary, electronically-produced dance music. Research methods include extensive ethnographic work over several years, including 80 interviews with dance music participants (virtually and in person) and ongoing participant observation, as both a DJ and clubber.

To date, Gadir’s work has been published in such venues as Popular Music, Contemporary Music Review, Music Theory Online, and Dancecult (including a multimedia “audio essay”), and the Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender. It will also soon appear in an Oxford Handbook and Cambridge Companion. The research culminates in her forthcoming book, Dance Music: A Critical Study of Ordinary Culture (Bloomsbury, in press). Her next project is about music and solidarity building, through a social history of the workers’ choir. Her critical approach to music studies is grounded in a commitment to empiricism, historicism, and a politics of feminist anticapitalism.