“Bodies in Digital Transition” conference organised by Music PhD Student
In September 2025, Music PhD student April Wei-West co-organised a graduate student research conference, "Bodies in Digital Transition: Transcultural Dialogues on Digital Intimacies and Artistic Practices." The conference was funded by the CHASE Doctoral Training Programme.
April is the network lead of the CHASE DiSCo network: a research network designed to provide critical thinking around the digitisation of everyday life. Her research examines creative practice in contemporary music-making through digital ethnography with "vocal synth" practitioners.
Together with Alessandro Caruana, a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, April organised the Bodies in Digital Transition conference with the aim of bringing together researchers and artists across disciplines to tackle issues addressing the thinning of digital and analogue boundaries.
34 presenters gave papers across three days, bringing together researchers from CHASE institutions (SOAS, Goldsmiths, Birkbeck, and University of East Anglia) as well as other international higher education institutions, through a hybrid format. Independent artists contributed perspectives on artistic practice as research, covering disciplines of textiles, dance, creative writing, documentary practice, and visual arts. The conference panels covered topics including heritage and ancestral knowledge, AI and machine subjects, gender and sexuality, screen and cinema, phenomenology from transnational philosophical perspectives, and displacement and resistance of global majority populations.
April says: “The most valuable outcome of the conference was the opportunity for researchers to meet new peers, expand their networks, and socialise. For future PhD students, I cannot recommend enough lending your enthusiasm towards projects like these which will not only become a source of organisational experience, but also form platforms for intellectual and social exchange amongst researchers.”
Conference programme
A second "Bodies in Digital Transition" conference is planned for 2026. All updates will be disseminated via the DiSCo mailing list
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A panel session at the Bodies in Digital Transition conference
