I authored a chapter entitled, “The Jazz of a Black Ethnographer: A Memoir of Pedagogy, Improvisation, and Reflexivity at a Liberal Arts College” for the edited volume, Teaching and Learning Difficult Topics in the Music Classroom, Eds. Laura Pruett and Olivia Lucas (University of Michigan Press, 2024).

The following is an excerpt from the text:

“This chapter considers how students’ engagement with reflexivity and impro- visation offer new pedagogies for ethnographic research within the liberal arts classroom and a graduate seminar. Improvisation, central to jazz per- formance, enables students to acknowledge their own being and becoming, amid their analyses of how people theorize the social contexts of music. To swing in such ways, to syncopate between times of studying oneself and others, suggests a paradigm of research that honors the social sciences of musicians, audiences, and their allies who have negotiated jazz in ways that have formed specific ontological, epistemological, and hegemonic under- standings and assertions. Through the example of leading the ethnomusicol- ogy program at Bard, the author details the curriculum, examples of student work, and the importance of the relationship between teaching and research when teaching difficult topics. This chapter calls for a disciplinary reawaken- ing, enabling music studies to respond to the contemporary moment through connecting ethnographic learning with student agency.”