Sean French (2020)

My PhD research project looks at Protestant marching bands and, among other things, the ways in which they come to be considered 'political' or 'apolitical' in Derry, Northern Ireland. I seek to explore senses of alienation and belonging along class and ethnoreligious lines, and how these are worked through in the marching bands. Part of this is how certain expressions of identity are evaluated and how different uses of sound in expressions of identity come to be considered more or less 'respectable'. These uses of sound are in both speech and music and so my research also looks at the interplay between certain styles of speech and certain styles of music in Derry.