Séminaire "Artistry@work" (07/04/2026)

Pour la deuxième année, Raphaël Blanchier et Trevor Marchand organisent un cycle de séminaires en ligne "Artistry@work", dédié au travail, aux carrières et valeurs artistiques des artistes et artisans, co-porté par le Royal Anthropological Institute et la MSH-Clermont-Ferrand.
Plus d'informations ici. 

Le prochain séminaire aura lieu le 7 avril 2026 de 17h à 19h, en ligne, avec l'intervention de Robert Simpkins intitulée "Between Notes: sound, self, and the unfolding present in the careers of Tokyo’s independent musicians". Christine Guillebaud sera la discutante. 
L'inscription est gratuite mais obligatoire : https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_SQ38aYNZStiWN28Czjw0Zw#/registration
 

Résumé

This talk explores the working lives of independent musicians in Tokyo who navigate artistic careers outside of formalised institutional structures – neither embedded in the music industry nor integrated into Japan’s canonical employment system. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Robert’s research considers how these musicians negotiate recognition, legitimacy and self-worth in the absence of conventional scripts. The practices of his interlocutors often reflect ambivalent forms of moral positioning and aspiration, and contain moments of tension and creativity that speak to how artistic careers are sustained in the gaps between legitimacy and marginality, hope and cynicism. Increasingly, his research also asks what role sound itself – not merely as representational layer, but as generative medium – might play in shaping the narrative processes through which these artists make sense of their lives.

Robert Simpkins is a social anthropologist interested in how we engage with the world through creative practices. His passion for music and sound shapes his research on performance and the relational life of sound in public space. His ethnographic work, conducted primarily in Tokyo, explores sound and self, the dynamics of urban space, and the role of the body, gender, affect and wellbeing. He co-founded the Sound Loss Collective and co-produces Artery, an AHRC-supported podcast on art, authorship, and anthropology. He is currently developing new projects on sound as method, including a short film about unhoused music.

Christine Guillebaud, an anthropologist and an ethnomusicologist, is a Research Fellow at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and former Director of the Centre for Research in Ethnomusicology (CREM-LESC) located at the University of Paris-Nanterre. She also teaches in the Department of Musicology at the University of Geneva. Her academic interests include anthropology of sound, the study of urban ambiances, and the ethnography of local noise management politics in India, where she has conducted long-term fieldwork. She is currently leading the MILSON research program (milson.fr), dedicated to the study of sound environments in their sociocultural context of production and perception. She has edited the book Toward an Anthropology of Ambient Sound (Routledge, 2017), co-edited Worship Sound Spaces. Architecture, Acoustics and Anthropology (Routledge, 2020), and Singing the Past (Nanterre University Press, 2023). Previously, she published numerous volumes and articles on musical creation, multimodality, danced knowledges, cultural policies, sound humour and intellectual property. She has also coproduced sound creations for radio, including the series Écouter le monde (Radio France Internationale).
 

Plus d'informations sur ce séminaire : https://therai.org.uk/events/artistrywork-robert-simpkins/.