My 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, I investigate how knowledge and artistic practice are embedded within institutional contexts, where “listening” carries widely different meanings across communities of practice. This question forms the core of my PhD thesis, an ethnographic study of ESMUC (Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, Barcelona), Catalonia’s foremost music conservatory.

Institutional ethnography has been a defining feature of my work. I have 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). The common threat across all these projects is the impulse to interrogate how seemingly emancipatory projects operate within unspoken rules, hierarchies, and boundaries.

I have been invited to present my research at KCL, the University of Oxford, and at conferences across Europe and the US. My 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.