Three days after the July 4th mass shooting in Chicago I woke up to a piece of news on the homepage of the World Journal, the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the United States. An elderly Korean American man in Flushing, Queens, was approached and shoved at a gas station by… Read More
What of music in the time of war? It is not a new question, but a question whose answers unfold along complex and specific paths. In the eighteen days since the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, music and musicians have been part of many of this… Read More
This essay is a contribution to the Musicology Now Roundtable, “Protest in Latin America: 2019 and Beyond.” “Si el río suena es porque agua lleva” (“If the river sounds, it is because it carries water”) is an old Spanish proverb broadly used in the Hispanic world. It metaphorically expresses that a… Read More
A note about Pandemic Piece (2020): Ethnography is a research method that involves deep human contact—studied, immersed involvement with communities over months, years, or even decades. Relationships with real people always involve give-and-take, so ethnographic research as a rule cannot be mapped in advance. Ethnographers know that they will experience… Read More
This recorded conversation is an audio contribution to Musicology Now’s Sounds of Social Justice Roundtable. Neil Verma speaks with Yvette Janine Jackson about her recent piece, The Coding (2021), and how it engages with problems of language, race, colonial thinking, and two phenomena that have a strange overlap… Read More
Since 2008, the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty at higher-education institutions has declined by 35%. The Delphi Project reports that contingent (adjunct) instructors now teach 73% of courses (AAUP Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, p. 3… Read More