Community Music in Canada
I am the principal investigator for this two-year pilot project supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The project explores how Canadian community musicians are using music-making for social impact, particularly given Canada’s context of colonization and its impacts on Indigenous communities, as well as intensified immigration through forced and voluntary migration. The study aims to identify key leadership competencies that Canadian community musicians perceive as necessary for leading music-making projects that have positive social impacts within complex cultural contexts. The study assumes that community music initiatives focusing on cultural differences will lead to an enhanced understanding of community music within Canada, which will in turn deepen theories and practices of community music to create stronger social impacts. The project is unfolding in three phases over two years:
Phase 1 (current phase) (6 months) involves a content analysis of provincial and municipal arts council grants that have funded community music initiatives in the previous 2 years. This will provide a general landscape of community music in Canada, and will also identify 10-12 projects to be profiled in phase 2.
Phase 2 (8 months) involves filmed interviews with 10-12 community music leaders and their projects, resulting in 4-minute videos profiling each musician as well as an 8-minute video on the cross-cutting themes and competencies identified in all interviews.
Phase 3 (6 months) involves 2 video elicitation focus group interviews (1 national and 1 international), in which key stakeholders will view the 8-minute video and explore what aspects of community music leadership might be transferrable globally and what aspects might be unique to Canada’s context.
RISE Project
Led by Dr. Eldad Tsabary (Concordia University, Montreal), Reflective Iterative Scenario Enactments (RISE) is a 5-year (2020-2025) research-creation project designed to enact and investigate cataclysmic scenarios in 10 mini-operas. The team collaboratively explores narratives from among humanity’s greatest fears (pandemics, ecological disasters, economic collapse, political strife and warfare, technological disasters, surveillance and loss of human rights, cosmic disasters, etc.) through the opera medium. I am part of the interdisciplinary team of research-creators, responsible for bringing non-professional musicians into the creative process. The project also features critical reflection sessions in which the research-creation team and members of the public discuss emergent themes related to the narrative of the mini-operas and their impact on humanity, challenges to the opera medium, collaborative strategies among researcher and creators from diverse fields and career stages, and production-centered topics. This project is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
The Gahu Project
The Gahu Project is a racial justice community music initiative in the Waterloo Region of Southwestern Ontario that brings together local youth, professional artists and arts organizations to explore and discover the music of Ghana and engage in participatory music making through a presentation of Gahu.
I am the principal investigator for the research component of this project. The research uses arts-based participatory action research to centre the voices of African, Caribbean, and Black identifying students in examining how The Gahu Project affects high school climates from a racial justice lens. The research component of the Gahu Project is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.