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The New Inquiry is a space for discussion that aspires to enrich cultural and public life by putting all available resources—both digital and material—toward the promotion and exploration of ideas.

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Robin James

Robin James is an associate professor of philosophy at UNC Charlotte and coeditor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies. For the 2019–20 academic year, she is a visiting associate professor of music at Northeastern University. She is the author of three books: The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics (Duke University Press, 2019); Resilience & Melancholy: Pop music, Feminism, and Neoliberalism (Zero, 2015); and The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music (Lexington Books, 2010). Her work on feminism, race, contemporary continental philosophy, pop music, and sound studies has appeared in the Guardian, the LARB, Belt Magazine, the New Inquiry, Noisey, Popula, Sounding Out!, Hypatia, differences, Contemporary Aesthetics, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies.

Essays & Reviews

The Sonic Episteme

By Robin JamesOctober 23, 2019
To use sound as a tool for theorizing and realizing a more just world, we can’t merely reform Western modernity; we must do something else entirely
Essays & Reviews

Hello From the Same Side

By Robin JamesDecember 28, 2015
Adele’s single is the musical equivalent of the desire for experiential homogeneity that Trump satisfies.
Essays & Reviews

Cloudy Logic

By Robin JamesJanuary 27, 2015
Big data doesn’t forecast the future but remakes the present in the image of down-to-earth stereotypes.
Essays & Reviews

Wound Down Inside

By Robin JamesAugust 13, 2014
Ultraviolence’s suffocated soars frustrate critics’ attempts to feel good about Lana feeling bad
Essays & Reviews

Melancholic Damage

By Robin JamesMay 30, 2013
Why should we presume that the Rihanna performed on Unapologetic is more damaged and fucked up than any of the rest of us?
Essays & Reviews

Loving the Alien

By Robin JamesOctober 22, 2012
The mainstreaming of electronic dance music and the assimilation of non-Western music into hipster taste hierarchies owes more to biopolitics than beats
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