Jenna Marie Przybysz

My research examines how music and sound produce different social, political, and racial meanings for individuals and communities of listeners. In my project, I join methodologies from ethnomusicology, linguistic anthropology, and public policy to understand how cross-cultural musical collaborations can promote unlikely social solidarities across racial differences and political particularities by understanding the complex histories and narratives that are sounded in such encounters. I examine three music festivals where these exchanges take place between musicians from Poland, the United States, Jamaica, and the Republic of South Africa. As a performer-scholar, I center the musicians and their relationships to one another in order to explore the foundation upon which these exchanges are built. My project seeks to understand how musical communities challenge prevailing assumptions about racial and ethnic identities as well as the possibilities that may exist when we abandon static identity categories.