Sounding Good: Advancing Cultural Sustainability and Social Justice through Music [Hardcover]

InSounding Good, author Catherine Grant joins artist-researcher collaborators to explore the deep and sometimes surprising interplays between music, cultural sustainability, and matters of social justice, including those related to racial, cultural, educational, economic, refugee, and climate justice. Looking at six innovative and remarkable music-related initiatives in Cambodia, Australia, Western Sahara, India, Brazil, and Vanuatu, Grant and her collaborators highlight how social justice causes can both secure a future for a rich global diversity of cultural practices and encourage better prospects for an equitable world, now and in the future.Like biological species and languages, many musical and other cultural practices around the world are at risk. In some cases, the threat to their future is due to social inequalities or injustices that impinge upon people's capacity to engage in vibrant cultural lives of their choosing, such as assimilation policies, systemic land dispossession, forced displacement, or erasure of certain cultures in education. InSounding Good, author Catherine Grant joins artist-researcher collaborators from across five continents to explore the deep and sometimes surprising interplays between music, cultural sustainability, and matters of social justice.In Cambodia, a magic music bus chugs through rural provinces, joyfully returning traditional music to people and places from which it has nearly disappeared. In a refugee camp in the harsh Algerian desert, people come together to sing old and new songs about everyday life in the camps, their nostalgia for their Western Saharan homeland, and their hopes for the future. In a university class in Brazil, students learn songs, dances, and stories from a senior Indigenous culture-bearer--the first time these cultural practices have been welcomed into formal tertiary education. Through these cases, and others from Vanuatu, India, and Australia,Sounding Gooddemonstrates lSv