Javier Rivas

Research

Javier Rivas’s research is grounded in a fascination with the structures that shape institutional and intellectual life, with a particular focus on the role of music and sound. As an anthropologist, he investigates how “sound” and “listening” carry widely different meanings across communities of practice within academic, corporate, and political institutions. This question forms the core of his PhD thesis, an ethnographic study of ESMUC (Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, Barcelona), Catalonia’s foremost music conservatoire.

Institutional ethnography has been a defining feature of Javier’s work. He has conducted fieldwork in the music departments of King’s College London and SOAS (Rivas 2021), as well as in KCL’s outreach project, the King’s Music Academy (Rivas et al. 2022; Rivas and Cavett 2025). A major thread across all these projects is the impulse to interrogate how seemingly emancipatory and progressive institutional initiatives operate within unspoken rules, hierarchies, and boundaries.

Javier has been invited to present his research at KCL, the University of Oxford, and at conferences across Europe and the US. His work has been supported by competitive awards, including an AHRC scholarship (London Arts and Humanities Doctoral Training Programme), the Gerry Farrell Award (SEMPRE), and a British Forum for Ethnomusicology Fieldwork Grant.