WHEN:
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
12:00PM
WHERE:
Room 111 (War Room), Gund Hall, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
EVENT DESCRIPTION:
Overflowing in the gutters and littering the streets, trash is an everyday reality for most of Haiti’s urban residents. Meanwhile, the country’s rural populations are finding that rapid deforestation and degradation of the land affect daily life to a startling degree. This talk presents two contrasting case studies, one concerning trash and the other about trees, that demonstrate grassroots reflections and responses to environmental challenges. Music is central to both studies as an essential cultural expression through which solutions are debated and enacted.
This event is hosted by MDes Risk & Resilience.
Pizza & refreshments will be provided.
Rebecca Dirksen
Rebecca Dirksen (PhD, UCLA) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University and a 2016-17 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard. Working across the spectrum of musical genres in Haiti and its diaspora, her research concerns cultural approaches to development, creative responses to crisis and disaster, dialogues of sustainability and diverse environmentalisms, intangible cultural heritage and cultural policy, and applied/engaged scholarship.
At the Radcliffe Institute, Dirksen is completing a book titled Un/Sound Music, Un/Stable Ground: Music, Disaster, and Development in Haiti, concerning musical models of grassroots development in Haiti before and after the earthquake of 2010. Her work has been published in the Yearbook for Traditional Music, the Ethnomusicology Review, the Bulletin du Bureau d’Ethnologie d’Haïti, the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, and elsewhere.
http://www.indiana.edu/~folklore/people/dirksen.shtml
http://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/people/rebecca-dirksen
