Living Room Revolutions: Black Women Collecting and Selecting Records in the 1960s and ’70s

The Media History Research Centre is hosting its first talk of the year as part of the Media History Seminar Series with a presentation by Jennifer Lynn Stoever.

ABOUT THE TALK:

Quiet as it’s been kept by music media and academia, from its start Hip Hop was never solely or even predominantly a masculine art. For so many of hip hop’s originators in 1970s New York City, it was the women in their lives who loved music, collected vinyl records, selected music to play at home and at house parties, and taught their children how to listen widely across genres and deeply into the new musical worlds being spun around them. Through the revolutions of their living room turntables, Bronx women used vinyl records as a form of sonic archiving, worldmaking, and radical mothering in the 1970s, bringing revolutionary selves into being along with life-sustaining visions of Black and Brown-centered worlds for their children. The way they curated, played, and talked about music in everyday life taught their children to hear cultural connections and family history within the grooves of vinyl records; without question this deeply impacted hip hop’s emergence as a DJ art. In turn, Black women left a still-audible material imprint on the sound itself: samples from their records have been used and re-used in hip hop songs, a traceable sonic lineage.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Jennifer Lynn Stoever is Associate Professor of English at Binghamton University and founding Editor-in-Chief of Sounding Out! She is author of The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening (NYU Press, 2016).  She has published in Social Text, Social Identities, Sound Effects, Modernist Cultures, American Quarterly, and Radical History Review among others, including Oxford Handbooks in both Sound Art and Hip Hop Studies.  Stoever’s  book-in-progress, Living Room Revolutions: Black and Latinx Women Collecting and Selecting Records in the 1960s and 1970s, is supported by National Endowment for the Humanities and Howard Foundation fellowships.

Media History Research Centre is an interdisciplinary research centre engaging with the historical development of media change and communication. The centre focuses on nascent, yet robust subfields such as media archaeology, variantology, new materialism, circulation theory, and technology writing. Through their research projects and publications, MHRC members have been celebrated for their innovative studies of many aspects of media history.

  January 22, 2026

4 -6 PM

EV 2.776

🎟️ Reserve your spot