Jessica Bissett Perea, associate professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington and adjunct associate professor of Music History presents “Learning to Arrive”: Why Co-Creation and Worldmaking in Music Research Matters Now," in this installment of the THEME Lecture series.
Abstract
This talk explains the significance of convening art- and place-based community making sessions to densify music research in more relational ways for human and more-than-human Peoples. Focusing on North Pacific contexts generally, and Indigenous Peoples of what is now known as Washington more specifically, I draw from emerging work at the intersections of Music & Sound Studies and Native American & Indigenous Studies to offer possibilities for expanding available/existing epistemologies, analytics, and processes in music research. I offer three examples, which include: (1) reattuning with places/spaces through the UW "Indigenous Walking Tour"; (2) listening in time with Indigenous creations at the Burke Museum; and (3) preparing for The Healing Heart of the First People of This Land with the UW Orchestra (Feb 2026). These three examples detail processes that enable participants to “reclaim history, rethink [our] places in it, and reimagine a future” infused with new ways of being, thinking, and doing (Lipsitz and the Alliance for California Traditional Arts 2020).
Series Background
THEME, an annual colloquium of UW faculty and students of Theory, History, Ethnomusicology, and Music Education, is held on select Friday afternoons throughout the academic year. Talks are at 4 p.m in the School of Music Fishbowl unless otherwise noted. Admission is free.
Biography
Jessica Bissett Perea is a Dena’ina [Alaska Native] musicologist and associate professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. Her research centers critical Native American and Indigenous studies approaches to music, sound, and performance studies; Critical race, Indigeneity, gender, and feminist studies; Arts and activism in North Pacific and Circumpolar Arctic communities; and Relational studies of Indigenous and Black experiences in the Americas. Her first monograph Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing Music History in Alaska (forthcoming 2021) will appear in the “American Musicspheres” series published by Oxford University Press. In fall 2021 she will co-teach “Radical Storywork: Performing Food Sovereignty through Inuit Fermentation Culture” with Professor Maria Marco, which advances Inuit knowledges and performing arts processes as a means to unsettle and expand dominant modes of knowledge production in food science research.