Keynote 2026:
Professor Julian Henriques
BAFTSS is proud to announce Professor Julian Henriques as keynote speaker at the Association's thirteenth annual conference.
Professor Henriques is based at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he convenes MA Cultural Studies and MA Script Writing. His research takes a cultural studies approach rooted in a long-standing engagement with Jamaican reggae sound-system culture, driven by a passion for music and expressed through filmmaking. His work includes the short film We the Ragamuffin, and the feature reggae musical Babymother, set in Harlesden, West London. Grounded in UK and Jamaican sound-system technologies, his research explores broader cultural questions, particularly non-epistemic knowledge systems such as the embodied skills, technical expertise, and connoisseurship Jamaican audio engineers use to intensify the audience’s auditory experience. In addition to his practice, he is the author of the monograph Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing (Bloomsbury), as well as numerous articles.
Professor Henriques will deliver his keynote address at 11.45 on the first day of the conference (15 April 2026), in the Dorchester Suite. Read his abstract, below.
Professor Henriques is based at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he convenes MA Cultural Studies and MA Script Writing. His research takes a cultural studies approach rooted in a long-standing engagement with Jamaican reggae sound-system culture, driven by a passion for music and expressed through filmmaking. His work includes the short film We the Ragamuffin, and the feature reggae musical Babymother, set in Harlesden, West London. Grounded in UK and Jamaican sound-system technologies, his research explores broader cultural questions, particularly non-epistemic knowledge systems such as the embodied skills, technical expertise, and connoisseurship Jamaican audio engineers use to intensify the audience’s auditory experience. In addition to his practice, he is the author of the monograph Sonic Bodies: Reggae Sound Systems, Performance Techniques, and Ways of Knowing (Bloomsbury), as well as numerous articles.
Professor Henriques will deliver his keynote address at 11.45 on the first day of the conference (15 April 2026), in the Dorchester Suite. Read his abstract, below.
Film as Method and Theory: researching and knowledge-making with the sound system street cultures
This talk explores how filmmaking practice and film screening can be powerful research methods in a project where practice-based knowledge was a central topic. Sonic Street Technologies, a recently completed five-year ERC funded project, investigated sound system popular music cultures around the world. Large custom build speaker boxes playing recorded music to entertain large crowds out on the street are a central feature of many marginalised popular cultures across the Global South. Video is often a key feature of these music scenes, social media of course, but also specialist YouTube channels. For oral cultures, video-recording interviews is quite essential, not only as material for our own films, but as a sharable resource on the project’s website. Also, our filmmaking process brought practitioners together in unique peer-to-peer exchange of their knowledge and experience, the results shown back to them for feedback. One unanticipated use of filmmaking was responding to the sound systems’ requests to make films about them – by commissioning them to make these films themselves. This resulted in nine 10-minute films, jointly copyrighted, that the sounds used as leverage with the police and local authorities to recognise the social value of their sound system culture.
This talk explores how filmmaking practice and film screening can be powerful research methods in a project where practice-based knowledge was a central topic. Sonic Street Technologies, a recently completed five-year ERC funded project, investigated sound system popular music cultures around the world. Large custom build speaker boxes playing recorded music to entertain large crowds out on the street are a central feature of many marginalised popular cultures across the Global South. Video is often a key feature of these music scenes, social media of course, but also specialist YouTube channels. For oral cultures, video-recording interviews is quite essential, not only as material for our own films, but as a sharable resource on the project’s website. Also, our filmmaking process brought practitioners together in unique peer-to-peer exchange of their knowledge and experience, the results shown back to them for feedback. One unanticipated use of filmmaking was responding to the sound systems’ requests to make films about them – by commissioning them to make these films themselves. This resulted in nine 10-minute films, jointly copyrighted, that the sounds used as leverage with the police and local authorities to recognise the social value of their sound system culture.