Alejandro Miranda Nieto Wins IAG Postgradaute Presentation Award

Congratulations to ICS PhD student  Alejandro Miranda Nieto who has won the Institute of Australian Geographers Postgraduate Presentation Award for his recent presentation at the Institute's annual conference this month.

Alejandro's paper, 'A Moving Tradition: the Travels of Musical Instruments and the Circulation of Practice', examined how material entities are part of wider processes of mobility across networks of relationships. Alejandro studied the mobilities of cultural practice during his soon-to-be-completed PhD, focusing on a musical tradition from southeast Mexico. This way of making music has recently become appropriated and re-created by communities of practitioners that extend across Mexico and the United States. As his ethnographic work has several examples of how musical instruments and other artefacts circulate across these communities, Alejandro decided to write a paper that connects these forms of circulation with a series of themes in theories of social practice, such as habituated action, tacit knowledge and understandings, embodied dispositions, rules and routines.

In his presentation he argued that the circulation of artefacts is related to other forms of mobility, namely the flows of that musical tradition as a recognisable entity, the travels of practitioners, and the transmission and diffusion of know-how. In 'swaying' between the minute movements that occur during performances and the transnational/translocal flows across networks of relationships, he showed how cultural practices are reproduced and re-created through multilayered processes of mobility.

The Postgraduate Presentation Award recognises 'an outstanding presentation by a postgraduate student' at the Annual Conference of the Institute of Australian Geographers. The conference was held in Canberra from 1-3 July 2015.

Posted: 29 July 2015.