“Dear SEM”

Identities at Play in Public Engagement Work

Dr. Katia Chornik

Kingston University

It is now some decades since researchers’ engagement with non-academic publics became valued in academia. In the U.K, where I am based, public engagement is often treated as a core part of impact strategies, alongside other activities like knowledge exchange and research commercialization. Research impact (understood in the U.K. as impact outside academia) has had increasing importance in the context of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the national research assessment, with vast implications for researchers and universities regarding careers, funding, and research culture.

In this column, I offer some thoughts on how in public engagement work, aspects of national identity might inform or stimulate aspects of professional identity, as well as the perception of professional identity from the views of others. I have dealt with public work from different perspectives in the last decade: as a music scholar working in academia, as a qualitative research officer working in the governmental sector, and as an impact manager working with researchers from music and many other disciplines across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and STEM.

My research sits within Latin American Studies and covers two main areas: music, memory, and human rights (focused on music in centers for political detention in Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship) and music and literature (music in the novels of Alejo Carpentier). My research on the first topic is ethnographic and has involved interviews with survivors and perpetrators of torture, and collaborative work and events with communities and museums. My work has been exhibited by the British Museum and Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights, and has had wide dissemination through media coverage and my own media work for media outlets, particularly regarding the Cantos Cautivos (Captive Songs) digital project, which I lead. The level of dissemination and public engagement I have achieved through my Carpentier research (based on published and archival sources) has been quite modest. This leads me to the obvious conclusion that certain topics and methodologies lend themselves better to public engagement.

There is another element—identity—that may explain why I have had uneven public engagement in my two research areas. While I have no personal connection with Carpentier’s country of self-identification (Cuba), I have strong personal links not only with Chile but also with the topic of political detention. In the past, unless I was asked directly, I would not disclose my positionality as a Chilean and the daughter of former political prisoners. (I shall clarify that identifying as Chilean is a simplification as I have two other nationalities—British and Venezuelan—and Ukrainian heritage). I gradually realized it was pointless to not address positionality from the start—research participants, media outlets, non-academic partners, and audiences of my work (and peers, to a lesser extent) very often ask where I am from and why I research such a topic. The challenge here is maintaining a healthy line between my personal life and work.

Professional identity plays a role in discussions of overlaps between people working in academia and those based outside, including those who do not identify as researchers. One example is music journalism. I have seen scholars anxious about those intersections and about the identity of those they share territory with. I have witnessed heated debates focusing on certain journalists’ lack of academic credentials. In such cases, the crux of the matter appears to be not the value of journalists’ contributions but the politics of knowledge production, which are often hierarchical and work by exclusion.

Knowledge production politics are not just about who produces knowledge but also about what knowledge and types of outputs are valued. Although national and institutional policies and support mechanisms place high value on outfacing and applied work, stories of researchers not being recognized, and even being discouraged, by peers and line managers for their work with non-academic publics exist. Ethnomusicology, with its long and well-established tradition of applied research, has an advocacy role in challenging these types of negative perceptions that still exist across disciplines.

Public engagement work can be hugely enriching. Sometimes, however, it requires the ability to respond to or ignore criticisms relating to professional backgrounds and trajectories that can feel like a frontal attack on identity(ies). Examples may include “this is too academic” (often meaning: “we want a quick and simple answer to this matter”) or “this isn’t sufficiently academic” (often meaning: “frameworks or sources not coming from academia aren’t as valuable as ours”). Othering statements also abound in researchers’ and research managers’ perspectives about each other, as ethnomusicologist and research manager Muriel Swijghuisen Reigersberg shows in her piece “The Academic Other in Research Management” (2022). As readers may guess, I have unrepentantly worn various hats in my career.

References

Swijghuisen Reigersberg, Muriel. 2022. “The Academic Other in Research Management.” Wonkhe. October 3, 2022. https://wonkhe.com/blogs/the-academic-other-in-research-management/.

Empathetic Ethnomusicological Futures: Reflections on Fieldwork and Identity

Dr. Sidra Lawrence

Bowling Green State University

One of the best and most enduring lessons I learned as a graduate student came from performance studies scholar, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones. She said, “you never step in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river and you are not the same person.” Through this paraphrased quote by Heraclitus, she taught me to think about fieldwork as emergent, processual, and non-linear. As a result, I conducted research based on feminist ethnographic traditions that emphasize informal conversations, daily interactions, and everyday performativities. This early training instilled in me the importance of representation that allows for flux and contradiction between individuals, and within groups, so as to avoid dichotomous and harmful notions of difference, or entrenched and ahistoric portrayals of cultural identity.

The discipline of ethnomusicology is currently grappling with two problems that have returned my thinking to matters of representation and identity. The first is the need to reconcile that the practices, structures, methods, and theories of the discipline that were formulated within colonialist ideologies and processes continue to shape our ethnographic engagements, knowledge production, and literacies. The second is how to incorporate identity into research accounts in order to disclose bias, situate the researcher against the subject of their study, and in an attempt to address the first problem. Among the conversations that have been taking place, I have yearned to hear more thorough discussion about how decolonial futures require representations of ethnographic connections in attentive, complex, and fully human ways.

The identity of the researcher, which has long been discussed by feminist scholars,[1] has become an increasingly important focal point for thinking through matters of representation as related to the unvoiced power hierarchies that undergird the discipline and upon which ethnographic work often depends. Conversations about representation and the relevancy of identity intersect with concerns about acquisition, access, consumption, and circulation—all of which take place within histories of exploitation and violence. Behind many of these concerns are questions about how we come to know, how social location bears on knowledge claims, and how identity marks out privilege both in the field and as an authorized speaker.

Identity disclosure as a solution to these concerns is limited in my view; it serves as a means of sidestepping engaged, critical, analysis of how identity operates, creates meaningful experiences, is located culturally, geographically, and temporally, and emerges contextually. Naming identity categories does little to attend to bias, nor does it provide a meaningful critique or solution to power asymmetry. This type of identity disclosure oversimplifies, flattens, and fixes identity; in the context of ethnographic research, such iterations of identity prevent intersubjective, collaborative, exchange and foreclose the possibilities of meaningful encounter.

Our identities, and the identities of the people with whom we collaborate, are not fixed. A hyper-focus on the researcher as always occupying a privileged identity category reinforces presumptions about dichotomous and ahistoric power differentials, and over-privileges the field researcher’s position as the exclusive site of subjectivity. In an attempt to draw attention to identity as a meaningful aspect of fieldwork, we should avoid confining people’s lives to units of analysis. Identity categories such as gender, race, class, educational status, and citizenship status are not discrete, self-contained units—individual realties are marked by these and other categories, but they are created and maintained via agentive responses to cultural codes, to localized constructions of power and hierarchy, and to changing social ideas about the categories themselves. By examining how ideas about identity are negotiated, and shape people’s lives, we show that though individual identities are produced through social categorization, they defy simplistic logic about identity categories (Abu-Lughod 1993). In order to critique ethnographic authority and show the ways in which power is multi-directional, a focus on emergent knowledge, conflicting and contradictory experiences, non-linear evocations of human engagements, and exchanges between knowing subjects, brings identity more fully into ethnographic writing.

Rather than encouraging students to disclose identity, I prefer teaching them to think about how overlapping systems of oppression coalesce and mark our experiences; I think all graduate students should be trained in intersectional feminist theory[2] alongside field methods to provide interpretive and theoretical frameworks for complex identity categories within global power hierarchies. Too often those who foreground identity within the context of fieldwork are those who occupy a marginalized or minoritized social position or for whom identity shapes research for reasons of safety, legitimacy, or access. The dominant academy continues to devalue such work and the vulnerabilities implicit in having these conversations is not evenly felt.

I like to ask my graduate students, what would utopia look/sound like? I do so because I think it’s good to clarify our vision for a better future. In that spirit I offer some visions for our collective future. I believe that we need a sustained critique of the ways in which ethnography is intimately bound to colonialism; we must be willing to see and discuss the ways that imperialist, racist, and colonialist regimes live on in our institutions, methods, theories, literacies, and practices. To what have we failed to listen? Have we centered our own pursuits or intellectual authority, exploited knowledge, or silenced dissent? Have we failed to call attention to power hierarchies that have allowed for some to move seemingly unmarked through the field?

At the same time, I believe that we need to create the discipline to which we want to belong. Let us build upon local genealogies of thought to develop theory and methods drawn from multiple ways of knowing, being, and speaking. Let us emphasize fully human engagements born from empathetic, ethical, interconnected coalitions, grounded in accountability, vulnerability, and listening. And let us honor change, complexity, and movement in ourselves, and in others.

Notes

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1990. “The Romance of Resistance: Tracing Transformations of Power Through Bedouin Women.” American Ethnologist 17 (1): 41–55

———. 1993. “Islam and the Gendered Discourses of Death.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 25 (2): 187–205.

Babiracki, Carol M. 1997. “What’s the Difference?: Reflections on Gender and Research in Village India.” In Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, edited by Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, 167–182. New York: Oxford University Press.

Behar, Ruth, and Deborah A. Gordon, eds. 1995. Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge.

———. 2004. Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism. New York: Routledge.

hooks, bell. 1984. Feminist Theory from Margin to Center. Boston, MA: South End Press.

Hull, Akasha (Gloria T.), Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds. 1982. But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies. Second Edition. New York: Feminist Press.

Kisliuk, Michelle. 1998. Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance. New York: Oxford University Press.

Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth Edition: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Albany: SUNY Press.

Research, Pleasure, Liberation

Dr. M. Myrta Leslie Santana

University of California, San Diego

“Make justice and liberation feel good.”

- adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism (2019)

When I tell people that I do research on drag performance in Cuba, I can generally expect one of two reactions: Many people instinctively chuckle, bemused I suppose by the incongruity they perceive between research and trans/queer nightlife. Just as often, others will tell me how lucky I am, because my research must be so much fun to do. I don’t mean to complain here: my research is indeed often quite fun, and I understand that when most people hear the word “research” they probably don’t think of an ethnographer hanging out at a queer nightclub. I do, however, want to reflect briefly on how it actually feels to make scholarship out of experiences that are meant to be pleasurable and to trouble the distance some might perceive between the seriousness of “research” and the pleasures of something like drag performance. 

When someone describes my research as fun, I often think of Origen, a now defunct trans/queer party (the name of which I have altered) that used to take place weekly on the outskirts of Havana. My partner Kerry and I first attended after a stressful day spent negotiating the terms of our academic visa to do research in Cuba and being mildly harassed by a police officer in a trans/queer area of the city. We ran out of time to grab dinner before we had to catch a bus to meet our friends, two Black lesbian drag kings who would be performing that night. On our way, hungry and depleted, I told Kerry that I hoped we wouldn’t be out too late. As we got on a second bus to make it to the fairly remote party, our friends nonchalantly explained that the only way back home would be to wait up until the buses started up again the following morning. I can’t say that in that moment I would have characterized my research as “fun.” 

To be fair, however, what followed was one of the most pleasurable nights of my life. Our friends performed beautifully, offering drag renderings of the music of the folkloric ensemble Yoruba Andabo, and the mostly Black women in attendance danced so feverishly and close that the divide between performer and audience collapsed entirely. The pitch only increased when a few percussionists and a singer started performing Afro-religious music, with various dancers and drag queens affiliated with the party playing the roles of the orishas being conjured. Entranced by Yemayá, I emptied my pockets for her so that even if we could have found a car to take us home we would have had no way to pay for it. I didn’t wind up minding at all that we stayed dancing until a little after 4 a.m., catching a couple of buses and walking home to make it to bed, tired and satiated, a little before 6.

In the book I am writing about that time I spent in Cuba, I understand this party as an example of the kinds of pleasures Black trans and queer people are cultivating for themselves and their communities in a political economic context in which their well-being does not factor. In this way, I mean to say that pleasure is deadly serious. At a time when a growing tourism economy in Cuba was exacerbating racial, sexual, and economic inequality on the island, the host of Origen was providing vital social, aesthetic, and spiritual sustenance to his neighbors at a price that Cubans of typical means could afford. The focus on sacred and folkloric music alone fed attendants’ intergenerational relationships with their ancestors. It turned out that I, without knowing it, was inching closer and closer to my own, too. The next time I was in Miami I talked with my abuela—que en paz descanse—about the party, and we realized it was on the very same street as her mother’s house, just a block or two away. For me, too, then, the pleasures of trans/queer nightlife played the critical role that night of offering a pathway toward something precious, a fleeting and evasive rootedness.

The Pleasure of Children’s Musical Play

Dr. Patricia Campbell

Fulbright Distinguished Research Chair, Carleton University; Professor Emeritus, University of Washington

“We make songs, and we make beats. It’s just who we are. Sometimes.”

S., age 8

“S” is a child who takes great pleasure in her musical explorations. Music engages her and her friends, and they play musically, and with music, for the joy of it. They are drawn to vocalizing rhythmically, to singing snatches of familiar songs, to making up tunes and grooves as they go, to banging on cans (and boxes and plastic jugs). Of course, not all children are making songs and beats, and certainly not all of the time, but if only we would listen, we would hear children’s glee in a surprising spectrum of their playful melodies, rhythms, and timbres that clink and clack, and whisper and wail from their voices and the sound sources to which they have access. For children who may never-ever learn to play a musical instrument in a school band, they may nonetheless be singing, rapping, rhythmicking, and otherwise playfully musical—because that’s just who they are.

As children find that their music, expressed in their very own way, is enjoyable to them, so do those adult musicians find it gratifying to be around playful musical children, to recognize the imagination and inventiveness in children’s explorations, the snatches of music they already know from their home and family, the media, and school music experiences, the ways that they put sounds together. Children’s musical play has been followed by educators, ethnomusicologists, and folklorists as the singers, players, dancers, and rhythmickers that they are, at school and at home, on playgrounds and busses, at camps. John Blacking was collecting musical gems from children almost 70 years ago, giving analysis to their songs and singing games, revealing his own astonishment of their sonic structures and sociocultural meanings. More recently, research within and at the cusp of ethnomusicology—by Tyler Bickford, Andrea Emberly, Kyra Gaunt, Kathryn Marsh, Sally Treloyn, Trevor Wiggins, and others—have pointed out the sound-surrounds, musical engagements, and playful sociomusical inclinations of children. To their credit, today’s school music teachers are increasingly shifting to the facilitation of children’s creative musical expressions. They are giving children time and space in their music classrooms to “make songs and beats” that are meaningful to them, which is a far cry from the top-down musical education that was once thoroughly teacher-dominated and directed through a drill-for-skill regimen. The pleasure is there, then, in the music-making process, when children are offered opportunities to play with the music, to explore, sometimes with some adult facilitation, the sounds they wish to make.

To play is human, and it is one of children’s natural instincts. To play musically is key to children’s holistic development, as their musical “fun and games”, and explorations and experimentations, offer them independence and agency. When children are free to be, they meander into making their very own music, or re-working familiar music in their own particular ways. Play and learning are compatible, and whether children are building a fort, or play-acting with puppets, or dangling from the bar of a backyard playset, their gleeful expressions are frequently musical. Children know how to have fun, and their moments of genuine musical expression may be self-activating and reflexive as much as they can be deliberate and designed by children. Either way, the music children make gives pleasure to them and to those who listen.