DEI and Missing Social Protections: The Case of Borealis - A Festival for Experimental Music in Bergen, Norway

Borealis - a Festival for Experimental Music is a yearly 5-day New Music festival in Bergen, Norway that has implemented numerous DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives since 2015 in its programming and festival organisation. This 20-minute presentation will draw on the results of my institutional ethnographic analysis of the festival in order to analyse the work of its festival team. The presentation will show how specifically experimental music’s commitment to ‘pushing boundaries’ combines with a commitment to going ‘above and beyond’ to realise DEI initiatives within the case study. It will detail how workers negotiate these two ‘ruling relations’ (Smith 2005), producing working conditions that promote the affective, self-actualising, and precarious dimensions of labour in the creative industries. The observation that the continued implementation of DEI is being done by female-identifying workers with immigration backgrounds will then be used to connect these working conditions to a regime of visibility within a ‘neoliberalised’ feminism and post-colonialism produced by Norwegian cultural funding. The presentation will conclude by contrasting this case study with the literature on DEI within classical music in order to argue for the historical specificity of experimental music’s interaction with both neoliberal governance and DEI measures.

Works Cited
Smith, Dorothy E. 2005. Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People. The Gender Lens Series. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.