'Beyond Words' international conference, Plymouth Music Zone & Plymouth University

The conference has 5 main themes (strands) music and the arts, equality/inclusion, creativity/wellbeing, caring, and post-human theory. We are inviting academics, practitioners and students from across disciplines who want to share their experience on any of the above themes. 

Post-humanism is a theoretical framework initially explored in critical and cultural theory. Existing approaches to the non-verbal in inclusive music practice seem to be inadequate, based on deficit models which see silence as a problem to be overcome and the non-verbal person as someone who has not attained those elements that are considered essential to being a high-functioning human, namely articulacy and agency.  Rather than focusing on the inviolate individual who possesses a ‘self’ that s/he can communicate through words, post-human theory moves away from the articulate human to focus on acts and bodies, on materiality and the agency of things.  It validates and explores the significance of silence and focuses closely on space and the visual in its methodology.