Dr. Line Grenier: "Moments of Music in Action: Exploring the Effectivity of Quebec's Etoile des Aines/Senior Stars."
MMaP Research Centre is pleased to welcome Dr. Line Grenier of the Université de Montréal who is the guest for the second installment of the Music, Media and Culture Lecture Series on Wednesday, Oct. 23, at 7:30 p.m. in the MMaP Gallery on the second floor of the Arts and Culture Centre in St. John’s.
Dr. Grenier will present her talk, "Moments of Music in Action: Exploring the Effectivity of Québec’s Étoile des Aînés/Senior Stars." She will explore intersections of aging and popular music in the context of a global demographic shift to “an aging society” and governmental discourses and policies around “active aging.”
She will do so by drawing on an ongoing collaborative, multi-sited, ethnography-based pilot project on Étoile des aînés/Senior Stars, an annual ‘music talent’ contest in Québec organized since 2008 by Chartwell-Reit, one of the most important investors in the seniors housing market in North America.
Dr. Grenier is associate professor at the Département de communication at Université de Montréal in Montréal, Qué. Director of the research group Popular Culture, Knowledge and Critique, she teaches predominantly in the areas of research methodology, social discourse, memory and media and popular culture.
A popular music studies scholar, her work on the history and politics of “chanson,” local music industries, broadcasting and cultural policies related to French-language vocal music, rites and processes of popularization and valorization in Québec, as well as the Céline Dion phenomenon and the figures of fame and celebrity it embodies, has been published in several journals, including Popular Music, Cultural Studies, Recherches féministes,Ethnomusicology, Recherches sociographiques and Musicultures.
Her research focuses on the business and politics of live music, especially on the role of small venues in Montreal, and the regimes of circulation of music. Her current recent project deals with aging musics and musicians in Québec. It involves a conjunctural analysis of the normativities of public discourses on “active” and “successfull aging,” and a multi-site ethnography of a music contest for seniors called Étoile des aînés/Senior Stars.