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Sounding Good: Advancing Cultural Sustainability and Social Justice through Music

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posted on 2024-07-30, 04:16 authored by Catherine GrantCatherine Grant

This is the website of a multi-year research project with a team spanning five continents. Sounding Good probes the deep and sometimes surprising interplays between music, cultural sustainability, and matters of social justice. Through six musical case studies, Sounding Good traverses pressing contemporary social concerns—from poverty, forced migration, and educational equity, to matters of racial, cultural, and climate justice. The project explores how strong, sustainable cultural practices can advance the cause of social justice, and vice versa. Music can help us better understand how cultural sustainability and social justice are entangled. Understanding that link has never been more urgent. In these uncertain times, it could help practitioners, communities, scholars, and cultural agencies protect and promote a continued rich global diversity of cultural expressions. Perhaps even more vitally, it could enhance our prospects of an equitable, thriving world, now and in the future.

Watch the film on YouTube

Project collaborators: Arn Chorn-Pond, José Bonifácio da Luz (Bengala), José Jorge de Carvalho, Jessie Lloyd, Saurav Moni, Violeta Ruano Posada, Mohamed Sleiman Labat, Sandy Sur, Thorn Seyma.


History

ERA Category

  • Recorded/Rendered Creative Work - Website/Web Exhibition

Funding type

  • Other

Eligible major research output?

  • Yes

If not major research

  • Major Research

Research Statement

Research Background: Building on around two decades of ethnomusicological scholarship on music sustainability (e.g. Titon 2009, Schippers and Grant 2016), this website documents and explores the grassroots efforts of musicians, cultural leaders, and their communities to keep musical practices strong, while advancing social outcomes too. The outcome of a multi-year collaborative project with a research team spanning five continents, the website examines intersections between music, cultural sustainability, and matters of social justice. Traversing pressing contemporary social concerns, this project seeks to understand how efforts to maintain strong, sustainable cultural practices can advance the cause of social justice, and vice versa. Research Contribution: Intended for a public audience, this multimedia website presents the first ethnomusicological research project to examine how cultural sustainability and social justice are entangled. Through text, image, and video—including an original 18-minute film presenting the six case studies, and a webpage mapping the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals against each one—it offers practitioners, communities, scholars, and cultural agencies new socially-oriented strategies to protect and promote a continued global diversity of cultural expressions. Research Significance: In serving public as well as academic interests, this website supplements an eponymous Oxford University Press monograph (2025). The project it presents—whose collaborative approach has been described as “groundbreaking” (OUP music editor, 2024)—has been featured in presentations at leading global ethnomusicology conferences (SEM 2024, ICTMD January 2025), and profiled in international public-facing online and print media including The Academic (Jan 2024), Yes! Magazine (May 2024), and UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage Courier (Jul 2024).

Confidential / Culturally sensitive

  • No

Copyright notes

© 2024 Catherine Grant

Was the work disseminated?

  • Yes

Form of dissemination

  • Published

Scope of dissemination

  • International