research overview
- I have continued to expand on my scholarship in ethnomusicology as an integrated and interdisciplinary field of academic music inquiry. Having now fully established my record internationally as a leading voice in the ethnomusicological study of music and health through publications, organizing of international symposiums, and international teaching, I am now working on two projects, Performing Ubuntu: African Musical Creativity for Community, Wellbeing, and Sustainability and Music and Culture in the African Church. The first builds upon the interdisciplinary book that I co-authored with a philosophy professor from the Massachusetts College of the Liberal Arts titled Ubuntu: A Comparative Study of an African Concept of Justice published by Leuven University Press and Cornell Press, February 2024. Performing Ubuntu is an exclusive focus on four musical case studies. Ubuntu is an African concept of justice and a form of relational ethics that manifests in different spheres of human activities. The current ethnomusicological project examines the ways that ubuntu permeates processes of musical creativity, articulation, and spirituality and cultural meanings in the contexts of health, hydro-politics, and gender. Music and Culture in the African Church uses a combination of historical and ethnographic methods to examine the issues of culture in African Christianity in colonial, post-colonial, and post-Apartheid contexts.
