At a time when performative resistances to exploitative mainstream cultural practices are increasingly under attack, punk persists as an important space for cultivating and curating expressive means. Punk’s resistant literacies and performances are often in defiance of institutional rigors that carve exclusionary boundaries. Yet, as punk celebrates its long fortieth birthday, punk’s contested annals are increasingly not only part of but also help shape institutional efforts to exceed canonic representations. Bringing together scholars, musicians, fans, writers, and community members, including bands, public intellectuals, and workshops to augment the conventional structure of the academic panel, Curating Resistance: Punk as Archival Method is teaming up with the UCLA Library Special Collections “Punk Archive” for hands-on, thoughtful community building within, across, and beyond the university. This two-day event, hosted by the UCLA Center for Musical Humanities, focuses on the interstices of punk and archive, using both as method, so as to push the boundaries of these three terms and practices. The conference focuses on documenting punk musicality, how sound repertoires and archival practices can give shape to the lived contours of diversity across scale, from the local to transnational, and what this means in terms of empowerment for research and endeavors that destabilize this colonial history of the academy. Punk as archival method curates resistance by contributing to these larger conversations via the possibilities of musical subcultures’ collaborative systemic interruptions.

Curating Resistance: Punk as Archival Method will include speaker panels, punk performances, and renowned figures drawn from the gendered and politicized worlds of both musical and visual punk artistry.