This site is under construction during the Spring 2019 semester. Stay tuned for frequent updates.

This site is part of the “Women Who Rock: The Archive, Popular Music and New Media” course held at Scripps College and taught by Assistant Professor Martha Gonzalez. This course introduces you to popular music studies through the practice of archive building, oral history analysis, and digital scholarship. We ask how race/ethnicity, gender, class and region fit into the stories we tell about particular genres of music. In our readings and discussions, we explore criticism that draws upon alternative archives to tell the story of popular music in innovative ways.

This course was developed in collaboration with the organizers of the Women Who Rock (Un)Conference held annually at the University of Washington, Seattle (UW).

A special shout out to Professors Michelle Habell-Pallan and Sonnet Retman and all of the Graduate Students who are part of this important collective including but not limited to: Gender Women and Sexuality Studies department, Angelica Macklin, Monica Torres, Carrie Lanza, Iris Viveros and the surrounding Seattle, community!

Women Who Rock organizers bring together scholars, musicians, media-makers, performers, artists, and activists to explore the role of women in popular music and in the creation of cultural scenes and social justice movements in the Americas and beyond. This multifaceted endeavor reshapes conventional understandings of music and cultural production by initiating collective methods of research, teaching, community and scholarly collaboration. WWR encompasses several interwoven components: an annual participant-driven, community engagement conference and film festival; project-based coursework at the graduate and undergraduate levels; and an oral history archive that ties the various components together. Scripps College and the Intercollegiate Department of Chicano Latino Studies has offered the WWR course several times since Spring 2015.

We align ourselves closely with the Women Who Rock Oral History archives housed at the University of Washington, Seattle, in order to gain hands-on experience working with popular music studies as a field of practice. The Women Who Rock Digital Oral History Archive fosters the development of participant-driven scholarship, on-line exhibits, curriculum, and media production. This collection will expand as the UW Graduate students and we, Scripps sister and partner in the lucha, continue to conduct oral histories, generate programming, and new narratives in order to create knowledge, media and scholarship in the coming years.

The WWR Oral History Archive features a diverse array of women from the U.S., Mexico and beyond who have made significant contributions to music scenes, social justice movements, public scholarship, and community life.