Online Course: Origins of Underground Dance Music - Safe Spaces & Social Change
Adult learners, music enthusiasts, and students of urban culture will have a unique opportunity this spring to explore the deeper cultural history behind today’s global dance music scene through a new lecture series titled Origins of Underground Dance Music: Safe Spaces, Sound Systems and Social Change.
Offered through the Open University of Wellfleet, the four-week course examines the African American cultural traditions that laid the groundwork for modern Underground Dance Music. While mainstream narratives often begin the story with Disco-era nightclubs, this series reaches further back to uncover the community spaces and musical practices that shaped the culture long before commercial club culture emerged.
Drawing from early 20th-century Black urban social dance scenes, rent parties, juke joints, and emerging DJ sound system traditions, the lectures trace how these cultural spaces fostered collective identity, creativity, and resilience. Participants will explore how these traditions evolved into the underground dance cultures that produced Disco, House Music, Techno, and today’s global electronic dance music movement.
The course is taught by interdisciplinary scholar, performer, and cultural historian Mwalim (MJ Peters), MS, MFA, a tenured Associate Professor of English and Black Studies at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His teaching and scholarship focus on African Diasporic and Indigenous expressive traditions, folklore, oral history, and creative writing, with a particular interest in the cultural politics of sound, space, memory, and community.
Beyond academia, Mwalim is deeply engaged in the living culture of underground dance music. He is a founding member of WAMPTRONICA, a nine-member underground dance music collective blending Deep Afro Jazz House, soul, funk, and Indigenous musical traditions. As a DJ and producer, he helps curate immersive dance experiences rooted in the history of Black and Latino club culture, while also acknowledging the important role LGBTQ communities played in shaping the underground dance floor.
He also co-produces and co-hosts the radio show and podcast From the Underground with WAMPTRONICA, which highlights deep, soulful, and globally influenced house music while exploring the cultural history behind the sound.
Mwalim is also the Founding Artistic Director of Oversoul Theatre Collective, Inc., a nonprofit arts organization established in 1994 dedicated to expanding access to performance and media arts while amplifying Black and Indigenous voices through theatre and community-based creative work. A citizen and elder of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe, his work frequently bridges academic research with lived cultural practice.
Bringing together scholarship, artistic experience, and storytelling, Mwalim’s teaching style encourages thoughtful inquiry and lively discussion. Participants in the course will engage with music history not just as a timeline of genres, but as a cultural story about community, creativity, and social change.
Origins of Underground Dance Music: Safe Spaces, Sound Systems and Social Change will be held Thursdays, May 7 through May 28, from 3:00–5:00 PM. The course fee is $60, and registration is available online at https://www.openuniversityofwellfleet.org/current-courses/p/origins-of-underground-dance-music-safe-spaces-sound-systems-social-change
Ideal for adult learners, DJs, music fans, and anyone interested in African American cultural history, urban studies, and the social power of music, the series offers a rare opportunity to explore the deeper cultural foundations of the modern dance floor.
Event Links
Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/3533636-0
Inquiries: https://go.evvnt.com/3533636-2
