A wide shot of a ceramics studio, featuring students working with pottery wheels and other tools.
Jake Nussbaum, an adult person with a fair skin tone and short dark wavy hair.

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Jake Nussbaum

Lecturer

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Bio

Jake Nussbaum (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist, musician, and scholar. He works at the intersections of creative practice and the social sciences. He holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and a graduate certificate from the Center for Experimental Ethnography. In 2024–2025, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Library Company of Philadelphia. As a musician, he is deeply invested in improvisation and collaboration. He has studied in classical, jazz, experimental, Arabic, West African, and Afro-Caribbean traditions.

Jake's scholarly research engages a question central to the fields of cultural anthropology and performance: How do creative practices such as music and dance transform political life and contribute to a more just social world? His current book manuscript, Beyond Time: Experiments in Performance and Abolition, Philadelphia, is a multimodal ethnography of abolitionist social movements in Philadelphia building durable alternatives to police, prisons, and private property. From the city’s first Black mutual aid societies in the late 18th century to contemporary struggles for the decriminalization of homelessness, he studies how abolitionist social movements and Black performance traditions are co-constituted through embodied practices such as group improvisation, trauma-aware choreography, and transforming participants’ experiences of time.

Personal Statement

As an artist, the creative methods I use emerge from the questions I ask with my collaborators and my community. In the past I have made art books, pirate radio stations, costumes, card systems, zines, sound installations, drawings, archival exhibitions, and essay films. I am always experimenting in new modalities and asking more questions.

As an ethnographer, I use multimodal and experimental arts to build reparative and collaborative knowledge with my community. In addition to academic publication, I create experimental films, zines, participatory installations, audio documentaries, and other creative forms that advocate for justice and enact what Steven Feld calls a “politics of amplification” across differences in identity and privilege.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

Creative Ethnography is an artistic, scholarly, and experimental genre that situates creative practice within the social, political, and cultural contexts that give it meaning. Yet this genre, and the scholarship of music, dance, and performance more broadly, has also come under considerable criticism for the ways in which it can reproduce harmful power dynamics between researcher and subject. In this course we will consider these issues of knowledge, representation, and power as we make our own creative ethnographies of musicians, dancers, and performers in the SAIC community. Each week we will engage ethnographic texts, films, and audio projects that represent musicians, dancers, and creative practitioners. We will critically examine ¿classic¿ music and dance ethnographies, such as Maya Deren¿s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti and Steven Feld¿s Voices of the Rainforest, while also centering more recent examples from BIPOC and queer scholars who are pushing the boundaries and politics of the form. We will draw on supplementary readings from the fields of ethnomusicology, performance studies, anthropology, and dance studies in order to build a shared vocabulary for discussing these works. Students will create their own ethnographies of musicians and dancers in the SAIC community in the audiovisual medium of their choice.

Class Number

2192

Credits

3

Description

In this course, students will read anthropological writing on these radical social movements to understand how they are organized, their strategies and their demands, their successes and their failures, and their dreams for another world. We will focus on three areas of concern: abolition, or the struggle to dismantle prisons and policing; decolonization, or the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination; and anti-capitalism. We will also seek to understand how these movements intersect with others, including environmental justice, feminism, and anti-racism.

Class Number

1820

Credits

3

Description

Historically, the discipline of Art History has been the study of white men, whereas Anthropology has been the study of the creative practices of ¿others,¿ i.e., those subject to European imperialism and colonization. This has created a hidden dynamic in the ways we think about human creativity: ¿art¿ is understood to be the product of individual genius (i.e., whiteness and masculinity), whereas ¿culture¿ is the anonymous and traditional production of ¿a people.¿ And yet, all creative practice emerges within specific social and historical contexts and at the nexus of tradition and innovation, the individual and the collective. In this class we will salvage the tools of anthropological analysis from their colonial origins to radically transform our understanding of art and its place in the world. Drawing on theoretical and anthropological readings in three thematic areas¿Art, Property, and Museums¿we will critically examine the ways human creativity is valued and appreciated while also learning to refuse the racialized and gendered hierarchies that structure the category of ¿art.¿ At the same time, we will engage with artworks, films, and exhibitions that appropriate the ¿anthropological gaze¿ to further unsettle these hierarchies. Coursework will consist of weekly readings, critical responses to local exhibitions and performances, and independent research projects. In-class activities will draw us further into the contradictions and questions raised.

Class Number

2166

Credits

3