Ian Woodward has a strong international track-record of publication, collaboration and completion of collaborative research grant projects. His publications include a range of leading empirical and conceptual contributions to the research fields of cosmopolitanism, materiality, and consumption studies. He has published many papers, chapters, monographs and edited collections (with Palgrave, Bloomsbury, and Sage/TCS) on these topics. Woodward has also recently published an edited collections on ‘festivalisation’ (2014, Ashgate, with Andy Bennett and Jodie Taylor) and on ‘cosmopolitanism and consumption’ (2018, Palgrave, with Julie Emontspool).
Woodward’s recent research, evidenced in the co-authored books Vinyl, The Analogue Record in the Digital Age, and Labels, Making Independent Music (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015, and 2019, respectively), use ethnographic and qualitative methods to explore music industry dynamics, especially in the context of DIY and small to medium small music business enterprises. Vinyl uses material theories to understand the vinyl record as a vibrant and energising object within scenes, urban communities, and music networks. It addresses the question of ‘who’ and ‘how’ vinyl becomes a vibrant object replete with socio-cultural efficacies and meanings, as well as the economic and technical aspects of the vinyl record production economy. In the book Labels, this perspective is broadened to address the symbolic, economic, and urban-networked dimensions of music making as DIY business. The study draws upon ethnographic and interview work with around 50 independent electronic and experimental record labels in Europe, USA, Asia, and Australia and reveals how music production works in the context of making an independent business in music scenes sand cultures.
Woodward has recent extensive experience in large-scale research project management and will work closely together with the other PIs and APs on all aspects of planning, conceptualisation, budget management, data collection, and dissemination. In 2019-2022, he is Project Leader on the Humanities in European Research Area (HERA) project ‘European Music Festivals, Public Spaces, and Cultural Diversity’. The project has 4 other European university-based research partners, alongside 7 associate partners in the festivals industry across Europe.
Research interests
His research interests are in cosmopolitan cultures and everyday cosmopolitanism; spaces of social belonging; materiality, community & affect; makers and making; and music production and consumption.
Publications
Bartmanski, D. & Woodward, I. (2015). The vinyl: The analogue medium in the age of digital reproduction. Journal of Consumer Culture, 15 (1), 3-27.
Bennett, A.; Woodward, I. & Taylor, J. (2014). The Festivalization of Culture. London: Ashgate Publishing.
Kendall, G.; Woodward, I. & Zlatko, S (2009). The sociology of cosmopolitanism: globalization, identity, culture and government. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Zlatko, S..; Kendall, G. & Woodward, I. (2004). Locating cosmopolitanism between humanist ideal and grounded social category. Theory, Culture & Society, 21 (6), 115-136.
Woodward, I. (2003). Divergent Narratives in the Imagining of the Home amongst Middle-Class Consumers Aesthetics, Comfort and the Symbolic Boundaries of Self and Home. Journal of Sociology, 39 (4), 391-412.
