Jake Nussbaum

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.

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.