Current Research Projects
Unwanted Sound? Contested Lake and Highway Noise in Okanagan Summer Tourism Funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Development Grant, this pilot project uses sonic ethnographic methodologies to explore how, why, and what sounds matter for people living in and/or vacationing in Kelowna and the surrounding Okanagan Lake region during the height of tourism in the summer months. Drawing from the anthropology in/with sound, critical sound studies, multisensory anthropology, as well as settler studies, critical tourism studies, the anthropology of roads, water studies, feminist and decolonial anti-black and Indigenous racism approaches to tourism, this project represents a new area of research for me and will eventually make connections between tourism, listening, sonic atmospheres, infrastructure, and climate change. For further information about the study, please go to this website. [hyperlink to the tourism sounds website] Public Scholarship On June 22, 2021, I hosted a public virtual webinar called Sound Dialogue: A Conversation about Sonic Ethnography that brought together four anthropologists with diverse backgrounds to share insights on sonic ethnography from fieldwork in Cuba, the U.S., Canada, and Italy: Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria), denielle Elliott (York University), Lorenzo Ferrarini (Granada Centre for Visual Anthropology, University of Manchester), and Marina Peterson (University of Texas, Austin). These four panelists discussed different approaches to sonic ethnography as well as methodological practices, critical praxis, and possibilities. If you are interested in hearing excerpts from the public webinar, two 45-minute podcasts are available on [link to the soundcloud page]. Collaborators This project is a collaboration with the Collaborative and Experimental Ethnography Lab at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, where Fiona McDonald is the Lab Director. The Sound Dialogue webinar was a collaboration with Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, director of the University of Victoria Visual Media Lab, who generously hosted the webinar.
Newcomer Youth, Urban Settlement, HIV, Sexuality From 2009 to 2017, a team, made up of university researchers, community researchers, non-governmental organizations, and youth from various African communities in Winnipeg, has been studying African youths’ experiences as newcomers to Canada and, specifically their experiences within downtown Winnipeg as they navigate sex, sexuality, and sexual health. While the members have changed over the course of the project, we provide a list below of the key members. While the overarching goal was to better understand the risks they faced of contracting HIV through ‘un-safe’ sexual relations, the project as an anthropological inquiry cast a wide net. We aimed to learn, through ethnographic research, about their settlement experiences as a whole and how many different kinds of risks affected their lives. While most of the youth are from lower income families, we did not focus on economic conditions so much as on social-spatial contexts, including the dynamics of a heterogeneous inner city, as factors that shaped sexuality.