Read the Ting: Sonic-visual literary clash

Join Joy White B2B Elijah for a sonic-visual literary clash — a live exchange of theory and practice.

Black music sociologist and ethnographer Dr Joy White goes back-to-back with grime DJ, artist and lecturer Elijah in a live exchange on Black music ecosystems and cultural production as ecological and spatial practices in East London.

Framed through sonic, social and spatial ecologies, this event explores how sound shapes community, memory and collective futures in the city.

Drawing on their respective books — Terraformed (White, 2020) and Close the App, Make the Ting (Elijah, 2024) — the conversation moves between scholarship, sound and visual culture to explore how Black music cultures build worlds, produce spatial imaginaries and sonic architectures that shape the cultural geographies of the city.

Expect:

• Books as bars.
• Music videos read as spatial theory.
• Critical reflections on memory and spatial justice — where sound, the built environment and ecology meet.

Hosted by Dr Janine Francois, Mobile Agencies/Pedagogies (Just Environments Cluster, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL).

Please note: this is a seated talk and screening, not a club night (it’s a Tuesday!). Registration is essential. Attendees will be admitted entry into the cinema from 18:30.

Elijah (Creative Consultant, DJ & artist). Elijah is an artist redefining how culture is made and moved in real time. Based in London, his work bounces between writing, lecturing and DJing, anchored in his questioning of artistic production and cultural policy both in his immediate context, Black British music and in global electronic music at large. He develops these ideas through books, records, podcasts, articles and installations, as well as his widely shared, often-cited social project the ‘Yellow Square’.

Website: https://elijahcore.com/ | Instagram: @eli1ah

Dr. Joy White (Academic). Dr Joy White is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Social Sciences at the University of Bedfordshire and the author of Like Lockdown Never Happened: Music and Culture during Covid and Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City. Joy has presented her work at a number of UK and international institutions including: The Post-Windrush Generation: Black British Voices of Resistance, University of Cambridge, Subcultures Network Conference Panel, University of Reading, The Place of Music, Loughborough University, Annual Black Studies Lecture, University of Nottingham, Stanford University Forum for African Studies, Urban Culture and Political Engagement, Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, 3rd International Research Conference on Cultural and Creative Industries University of Antwerp, Eastern Sociological Society, 5th International Digital Storytelling Conference, Hacettepe University. Her previous work includes Urban Music and Entrepreneurship: Beats, Rhymes and Young People’s Enterprise, one of the first books to foreground the socio-economic significance of grime music. Recent publications include Growing up under the influence: A sonic genealogy of Grime, and (with Jonathan Ilan) Ethnographer Soundclash: A UK rap and grime story. Joy has also written for The Quietus, The Conversation, Trench, Google Arts + Culture, Red Pepper and Prospect.

Website:https://joywhite.co.uk/ | Instagram: @drjoywhite

Dr. Janine Francois (Academic, Writer, Curator). Dr. Janine Francois is a Black British feminist scholar whose work interrogates climate justice via ancestral, anti-colonial theory and feminist ethics of care. She is Associate Professor and Director of Climate Justice at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where her interdisciplinary practice bridges research, curatorial inquiry and public engagement. She is the founder of Sacred Black Ecologies, an evolving research and curatorial platform that centres Black spiritual and ecological knowledge as critical sites of resistance, memory and world-building and has presented this work in both national and international contexts. Francois has held curatorial residencies at LCC Studios, Guest Projects Africa and Hackney Museum, and is an alumna of Asiko Art School. Her programmes and collaborations span major cultural institutions including Tate Britain, Victoria and Albert Museum, INIVA, Autograph, Barbican Centre, National Portrait Gallery and 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, foregrounding community-rooted approaches to cultural memory and knowledge production. Her writing has appeared in The Independent, Architectural Review, VICE, Huffington Post and the Journal of Visual Culture. She is completing her debut book, which repositions the Atlantic Ocean as a political and ontological geography shaped by colonial extractivism, climate crisis and Black futures.

Website: itsjaninebtw.com | Instagram: @itsjaninebtw

Image credits:

Elijah. Photograph by Osman Ahmed

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