Dance a yard before you dance abroad: reggae as a music production culture in Jamaica and Britain, 1968 – 1981
Benjamin’s ongoing doctoral research project employs an interdisciplinary methodology, incorporating ethnomusicology, historiography and his own professional experience and knowledge as a performer, into media and cultural studies. Benjamin applies this methodology to cultures of reggae production in Jamaica and Britain, contributing to discourses on reggae, and the internationalisation of popular music more generally. Benjamin’s work is a continuation of his master’s thesis, which involved musicological and cultural analyses of British and Jamaican reggae, completed during his MA at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, BCU. His cross-institutional supervision team is comprised of Prof Tim Wall and Dr Pedro Cravinho at BCU, and Dr Roger Fagge at the University of Warwick.
As part of his doctoral research, Benjamin is a member of BCU’s emerging Global Reggae Research Project. This will involve a four-month long stay in Jamaica to conduct fieldwork, as part of a bigger collaboration between BCU and the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica. It is anticipated that some of the outputs of Benjamin’s fieldwork will contribute to the reggae music archive, currently being produced at UWI in collaboration with the Global Reggae Research Project.
Alongside his doctoral work, Benjamin is currently working on research with the Popular Music Studies cluster at BCMCR, identifying and articulating how the Centre’s current them of ‘disruption’ aligns with his own work, and is also co-authoring an article with Prof Tim Wall which analyses reggae’s depiction in British documentaries.
‘Representing reggae: the depiction of Jamaican popular music on British television’ [with Tim Wall] (forthcoming, 2022).
