Editor’s Introduction

Robbie Campbell, a Ph.D. graduate from SOAS, University of London, and William Cheng, Chair and Professor of Music at Dartmouth College, discuss Campbell’s web-based examination of musical practice. Campbell’s doctoral thesis draws provocative connections across dyslexia, embodied knowledge, and Chopi timbila xylophone music from Mozambique. Cheng, the author of Loving Music Till It Hurts (Oxford University Press, 2019) and Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (University of Michigan Press, 2016), brings his extensive interdisciplinary research and commitment to social justice issues to provide a critically informed, caring perspective on Campbell’s work.

Throughout the interview, Campbell and Cheng weigh the challenges and rewards of pursuing unconventional research methodologies and the need for academia to embrace neurodiversity and alternative epistemologies. They discuss the transformative potential of multimedia in creating more accessible forms of scholarship (a central aim for this journal) and the productive resonances between dyslexia and engaging with complex musical traditions.

Cheng’s focus on the theoretical and methodological aspects of Campbell’s thesis—particularly the use of multimedia to embrace neurodiversity—offers broader implications for inclusive scholarship and the future of academic knowledge production. This interview can help us consider the intersection of music, disability studies, and unconventional scholarly approaches, and it stresses the importance of cultivating more accessible and equitable spaces for impactful scholarly engagement.

In the spirit of Campbell’s advocacy of non-linear scholarship, feel free to use these links to jump around the interview, which I have organized by the following subtitles:

From London to Dyslexia and Timbila Music

Reframing Dyslexia: Intuition, Embodiment, and Celebration

Complementary Cognition: Moving Beyond the Exceptional

Navigating Academia: Alternative Approaches to Dyslexic Thesis Writing

Future Directions and Reflections

— Benjamin J. Harbert, Co-Editor in Chief

William Cheng:

Would you introduce yourself and your project?

Robbie Campbell:

Yes. I’m from London in the UK. I grew up in London and am very much based around the city. After completing my UK education, I went to art college for one year, but I didn’t continue. I then fell into a television career that didn’t really engage me. I was in that industry for over a decade, looking for something else, and I finally came back to the idea of re-engaging with higher education. There was something around dyslexia. I looked online, spoke to people, and felt something might be there. So I had an assessment, and I was given a diagnosis of dyslexia. This was in my mid-30s, long after I had finished my education.

Armed with this new knowledge about certain limitations and strengths I had, I returned to studying. Dyslexia assessments are based on academic skills, reading and writing, and organization, so I was already interested in that relationship.

I went straight into a master’s degree, which was very challenging. I was also learning what dyslexia meant and struggled quite a bit, but then got on top of it and went into a Ph.D. program at SOAS in London, with the same supervisor I’d done my master’s with. She was very, very central to the support that I had. I’m a musician, I should say. And I was doing photography as well. So, this project and this research emerged from those interests in music and in my learning process.

With SOAS being an ethnomusicology department, I was regionally focused on Africa through my master’s—a lot of West African music, and then later Southern African music. The project, the Ph.D. and the form that it took, emerged as a marriage between my research interests and my accessibility needs, my ways of creating ease around how I could engage with these concepts.

WC:

Can you remember first hearing the Chopi timbila music? What was your impression, and what curiosities bloomed from there?

RC:

Yeah, it was so nice. It was my supervisor who convened the master’s course I was on, and on that particular course, we were moving regionally around Africa, around the continent, but with a lot of time in West Africa. She specializes in Southern African music, and we had one class on Mozambique. Timbila music is one of the most iconic musics in Mozambique and Southern Africa. She showed a video clip on YouTube, and there was something about it. My research interests had already started to move towards cognition, collective experiences of complex music, of polyrhythmic music.

I didn’t think I was especially  interested in xylophone music until I saw this. I’d been playing in a Ghanaian drumming ensemble, so I was thinking more about that. But there was something about that short video clip of this tradition. I do remember being very intrigued initially. Visually, it’s stunning. It also looks like this wonderful beach, a very beautiful location. I was already thinking, wow, this is a really interesting form of music.

WC:

Do you remember when you began thinking about this music in relation to dyslexia?

RC:

My very first thoughts were already connected to my developing interests in the West African drumming ensemble I was playing in, and this very complex cognitive experience of mapping the sound environment, and how the body is responding to these rhythms and the specific stresses and strains—essentially, trying to process things and decode the environment.

I felt the ability to decode the environment within complex musical settings was already related to dyslexia. My first introduction to dyslexia was through what’s known as the “medical model.” It’s heavily based on cognition, neuroscience, the brain, and so on. One aspect of this, albeit relatively minor, is what’s called “speech-in-noise.” It’s about how dyslexics are typically identified as having difficulties identifying speech against background noise. Within that model it’s a kind of auditory processing deficit. Yet, musicians are also seen to be very, very good at this because they’re trained in picking out auditory cues and events and objects within this complex field, so my first thought was, wow, what a fascinating environment to be a dyslexic musician in, encountering both aspects in a far deeper way than current research was describing.

WC:

Dyslexia is most commonly framed as a reading difficulty. In recent centuries, the primacy of alphabetic literacy, reading, and writing has become, as you say, “a condition for economic power within the most influential and imposing societies,” and “such as the industrialized British Empire, especially within medicalized models of disability, dyslexia is, therefore, a problem.” But for you, dyslexia is not something to be cured or fixed. It is to be valued as part of the collective human experience.

You write beautifully, and I am sorry if it’s embarrassing that I’m just reading extensively from your writing. As you say in your amendments,

Can you speak to a few of the things mentioned above and some of the ones that I was curious about, such as dyslexia as intuition or imagination or celebration?

RC:

I remember when I wrote this. The inspiration was initially around not bounding or containing these ideas of dyslexia. It was a flow of, not random, but slightly directed free thinking. In terms of intuition, I think in some ways, so much of my thesis was driven by my own experience of intuition, and I was trying to reflect on, okay, what exactly does that mean, what is that? And research might relate it to brain hemispheres or various aspects of cognition. I think it’s really interesting to look at and think about how we experience the world as perceptual groupings, or gestalts, you know, these kinds of collective experiences. So, how do we experience the body? Is it in bits? Or do we experience it as a whole thing? We’re in constant relationship with both.

And I’ve always thought of intuition as a moving away from information and more towards embodied intelligences and understandings. There’s now a vast amount of research supporting how and why we have these embodied intelligences of, say, the guts, these gut feelings. We now know there are neurons in the gut. And on our heart-based, heart-sensitive intelligence, again, we know there are neurons in the heart. And, as I understand it, more information might go from the heart to the brain than the other way around. And so thinking of intuition as body-led, and in my experience, quite instant and certainly holistic, to arriving at understandings quickly, without the kind of intellectual thinking patterns that might come afterward.

WC:

And how does dyslexia relate to that?

RC:

In my experience, and also what I’ve understood from research, if there’s a barrier to organizing information into smaller chunks, particularly facts and figures, and the way memory can be impacted as well, it leads to these slightly woolly, blended, nonhierarchical, or less hierarchical, patterns of information.

I’ve always seen this in my own dominant visual preference, and of somehow fitting together visually-spatially, large wholesale shapes of information. And I can get very confused with lots of individual pieces of information, because there are just more and more shapes. I get very confused very quickly.

WC:

How about dyslexia celebration, since that brings us into other realms of dyslexic experience?

RC:

Yeah, celebration, that word, is a counter pose to how we’ve constructed so much difficulty and problematization around this large area of human experience. And the deficit model of dyslexia has so many co-related aspects within disability studies and our understanding of disability.

The deficit model has dominated our understanding of dyslexia. And so it’s important that the positive dyslexia movement, which relates more to the social model of disability, is having an impact, but it’s still very small. There are so many positive aspects of dyslexia – the creativity, the wonderful imagination and innovation, and so many forms of connection, of entering into relationship with the world, with spaces – that it needs to be celebrated.

WC:

I love how you share with us memories of your writing process and how, when you were faced, perhaps, with having to explain what dyslexia is to you, you turned to an abundance of what it can be so that you show that it can’t be contained as any one thing. You mentioned at some points in the thesis the many well-known historical figures and living people who were dyslexic or neurodivergent in some way. People like Picasso or Steve Jobs are among them, or you can help me . . .

RC:

I think there was Da Vinci . . . 

WC:

Yeah, a lot of people. You added that chart of architects and artists. It seems like sometimes, to me, like society is most accepting of dyslexic and neurodivergent people when they’re able to produce some aesthetic or technological object that is useful or somehow reminds people of something. But apart from those celebrations, it’s difficult for society to break away from biomedical models of deficit-oriented models of divergence. Do you think about how society views some people as useful rather than people belonging to the everyday fabric of neurodivergent populations?

RC:

Yeah, thank you. I love that reflection, and it’s so true that the exceptional are celebrated. I think I was talking about celebration that needs to go beyond the exceptional and through to how society can be more complementary.

I do love one theory presented by a friend and colleague, Helen Taylor, called “complementary cognition.” Although I’ve maybe overemphasized in my thesis this one part that touched me, we still speak in the language of convergence and divergence and normalcy and deviancy, and this is very much working with the medicalized, statistical approach to normativity and disability and so on. I love the idea, even if the theory may change and evolve and so on, but this idea that the human species may have come from a more singular kind of cognitive root that was then subdivided through environmental need, specializing in different directions. What this therefore means is that the group as a whole will always perform and function better when the full diverse spread of intelligence and ability is equally represented.

In my mind, I see a circular form, a bit like the legend of King Arthur and the Round Table, where the leadership, the hierarchy, is completely dismantled by the shape. So we need the non-exceptional and the exceptional together. All these different forms of thinking all have their turn to be exceptional and not exceptional.

I love this way of looking at cognition, shared cognition, and shared need. Also, as is my understanding of how it’s raised in disability studies, this idea that we should operate on our own and be self-sufficient, needs to be challenged, rather than saying, well, actually we should depend on each other. In reality, we should fill in the things that others can’t do. That’s part of a model of a cooperative society.

WC:

Yeah, thanks, Robbie. I will move to how you present your thesis in a way dyslexically. You present it on a website. You inform readers that they are free to explore the thesis contents. There is no correct place to begin nor the best path to seek out. Such agency and modularity reflexively embody dyslexic and neurodivergent ways of knowing, thinking, and sensing.

Yet you encountered pressures to conform to linear narratives throughout your thesis writing process. For example, during your oral defense or Viva, you were asked to begin with a short linear thesis summary to make non-dyslexic audience members more comfortable. How did you navigate these pressures?

RC:

I think specifically, if we’re referring to this idea of linearity, the methods I use within a thesis are very different from an oral examination process. What I describe in the thesis is this idea of how emphasizing long-standing methods around texture and shape can create more accessibility for myself and, hopefully, others. I use the word texture to describe different media, whether still images, audio, audiovisual, written text, etc. And I use shape to mean linearity, circularity, more complex forms, and so on.

One note on linearity. My writing and knowledge production are always subjectively linear. This idea was quite interesting for me to think through, check my assumptions about what I was calling linear and nonlinear, and move towards the idea of multi-linearity, rather than “non”-linearity. Single linearity is the first step of multi-linearity. It’s just about increasing the number of linear options, and yet our subjective experience is always linear when we pass through environments. That was something I was trying to come to terms with.

One example of both texture and shape would be how all the chapters are internally linear, whether written or not. Yet, my core chapter on dyslexia is split into two halves, one being a written narrative, the other a visual storyboard. So both linear, but with two different complementary ‘non-linear’ textured options. Additionally, my thesis amendments for the examiners, which was my final task, was essentially a PowerPoint presentation. I fell back on my visual narrative strengths to navigate a problem. So it’s a storyboard. It’s very, very linear, but it’s visual-based. And that, for me, already has a very different kind of linear quality than, say, the written narrative. And the “Experience” chapter, which is also very linear, was based on a conversation. So, it was a verbal auditory exchange, which I then set still images to afterwards.

Using variations of texture helped me navigate confusions of shape and deal with the constricting experience of academic linearity. But it also speaks to a real problem I had with time: that doing a written chapter took me months and months, and in one case, years. That “Experience” chapter was the last chapter I did before submitting the thesis. And I just thought, okay, I’m exhausted by this process and all this thinking, how can I create more ease for myself? My response was to reduce a process of several months to a couple of weeks by using a different information flow.

WC:

Among your thesis’s many remarkable and beautiful traits is its unflinching and honest reflection on the processes and ethics of pursuing knowledge. You write:

Doctoral research is effectively a training, a launchpad for further things, but what exactly are we being trained to do and who is it for? Should we be concerned if the format itself creates barriers for many people? Is academia more an expression of knowledge or an expression of form, of creating new ideas or replicating standardized ways to think? Any Ph.D. thesis, regardless of its topic and potential for insight, value, and beauty, is also a map of its own organization and patterning, a snapshot of how its own thinking was produced. This thesis is no different, also a map of its own thinking. Yet, if we try to locate the boundary between what is and what isn’t considered scholarship, is this thesis even an academic work at all? These questions, set paradoxically as they are within an academic study, have the potential to be both disorientating and confronting.

So, I do not doubt this is a Ph.D. thesis, yet you’ve encountered people who expressed doubts. We can probably think of people who adhere to normative models of scholarship and Ph.D. programs and consider this so outside the norm that it doesn’t merit a Ph.D. degree or fit a preconceived box. I wonder what your current feeling is about this thesis as a thesis, having now some distance from the grueling, very emotional, lengthy process?

RC:

Thank you for this question. Yeah, this got me thinking. The simple answer is I do see it as a thesis. Maybe it’s a good moment to highlight one particular work I referenced several times—Nick Sousanis’ entirely graphic-novel Ph.D. thesis, “Unflattening.” That was mind-blowing, not only the skill he’d done it with but the brilliance in his thinking. It’s all about thinking. In many ways, I’ve tried to complement his work. If his thesis was accepted, and even won awards, then mine could at the very least functionally work. 

I had doubts, but I can see now that my thesis works marginally more so because of how I’ve had to conform rather than the ways I haven’t. It may also just be my doubts and anxieties that the skill in which I delivered it was lacking. However, I think the concept was powerful and appropriate enough to merit solid academic work.

One of the most challenging and confusing aspects for me was confusion itself—how much can I reasonably expect anyone to enter into my thesis and experience the incoherence I experience? How much confusion, of things pulling in different directions, is appropriate for me to replicate on a conceptual scale? What’s an appropriate level to say: this is one context of my dyslexic experience, and I want you to experience it too? And how much is it just because I haven’t done a good job? The most important point I wanted to make is that confusion has value, it has a purpose. And it’s a crucial process academic convention tends to sterilize.

These are the areas I was doubting, which I hear the examiners on. I understood they were trying to create more coherence. Then I felt perhaps they went too far asking me to reorganize because that experience of disorientation was too uncomfortable for them. So I came back to say, “Well, this is important for it to be experienced”. But that’s quite challenging to say—that I want this thesis to be disorganized because that replicates how I think, and how I think can be, and is, a robust academic method.

WC:

Yeah, throughout your thesis and insights about neurodivergence and dyslexia, repeatedly the paradox of this being effectively an individual venture, a Ph.D. thesis, and how you believe anything worth pursuing must be collective—whether knowledge, wisdom, or some common good. Part of the proof of the thesis and its non-linearity is that everyone will read it differently. They will tell you how they read it differently; there is no best way. This is a different norm, where we’re constantly trying to optimize our efficiency in consuming knowledge. 

You asked in one of our recent emails whether I had any particular experience with your thesis, and I’m happy to tell you very briefly because I don’t know who else to tell it to. So I landed on your website, saw the concentric circles and clickable links, and started in the center, the process, and then explored from there. What I very quickly ended up doing, because I knew I was going to interview you, was open a Word doc and start copying and pasting text from your non-linear sections into a linear document so I could return to the highlights later. Promptly, I realized the irony of it. 

I find your writing compelling and beautiful, so I ended up copying and pasting very large extended chunks of your reflections on fieldwork, ethics, and dyslexia—it ended up being a 15,000-word document I knew I wasn’t going to re-read. By habit, I copied and pasted sections into a document I never returned to except perhaps finding a quote to include here. The impression I was left with after experiencing your thesis, because I don’t want to say read as it’s not the sole or primary way was an intuition about timbila music, dyslexia, and how scholarly production can be more humanely diverse in the future. All the words I copied and pasted just became background because the experience of the thesis itself already embodied the knowledge you sought to impart.

I hope what people experience when they come across your thesis if it continues in a similar modular non-linear format, is that it’s a privilege to access this kind of project that seeks to represent a human perspective and embodiment that isn’t normative. Linear narratives and normative scholarship are common. That’s why they’re normative. But what if, as you say, without throwing it down as an explicit challenge, Ph.D. theses were required to generate new knowledge and innovate in form? It would get us out of the scriptocentric models of knowledge and wisdom—isn’t that what academia was supposed to be about, a search for impossible wisdoms?

WC:

What are your plans for this project going forward?

RC:

I’m very unsure. My doctoral experience was very challenging. I don’t feel like I’m going to thrive in an academic environment. Although, looking at your work reminds me of the possibilities, and that I have a very limited idea of what academia is.

My TV career cost me a lot. This academic career has also cost me a lot over the last decade. I feel more compelled and driven towards wanting to make a positive contribution to society than I ever have done. This research has allowed me to grow incredibly and learn much about myself, my values, and my processes. Because of the direction the research took me, I’m still moving more and more towards problems of ecology, climate, and social injustice, and the sidelining of human compassion and kindness. I don’t feel like academia will be the right space for me to be most effective.

I’m not sure whether there’s more I can contribute. I know that some people have been influenced by the thesis and I also know that SOAS had to adjust the regulations for me, so something positive has happened there. I know certain individuals shared that it’s changed the way they think, so a seed has been planted. I think it may have some impact, but I don’t know whether it will be identifiable as such. But I haven’t sought to stay involved with academia other than keeping in touch with friends and colleagues. There was an idea to rebuild the website the way I originally wanted it to. But I feel like I’ve just let go of that idea because of the emotional cost. The value of doing it probably isn’t enough.