research

with Ishii Junko, Kobe-based jazz singer who launched her career performing on U.S. military bases in her teens.

Biting Down on a Double-Edged Promise of “Liberation”:
Musical Performance & Embodied Inflections of Agency in
the Allied Occupation of Japan 1945-53

Academic thesis advised by Dr. Kevin Fellezs, Dr. Aaron Fox, and Dr. Gillian Gualtieri. A sociological and ethnomusicological study examining musical performance and consumption as sites for enacting and negotiating agency in Japanese people's reimagining of their gendered and ethno-national identities under U.S. Occupation. Using lenses of social performativity, embodiment, colonial mimicry/hybridity, deviance, and historical materialism, I analyze seven in-depth interviews I conducted with Japanese cultural producers who facilitated musical performances on and surrounding U.S. military camps between 1945-53, finding that music imported from and inspired by the United States held a double-edged symbolism as a vector of both liberation from prewar and wartime repression and incurred alignment with a new, globalized patriarchy. Email me for a full copy of my thesis.

Study: How do public spaces cultivate belonging?

Contact me for access to my report on how blended reality public spaces can cultivate belonging: On Co-Creative Place-Making. This report shares best practices for fostering community and connection in public spaces, drawing from R&D, prototyping, and relationship-building through participatory, human-centered programming at a performance-based organization. I used a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to assess success, focusing on how participants experienced social trust and a sense of belonging.

RSC IF Fellowship: Learnings

As the first performing arts Independent Research Organisation (IRO), RSC-lead research brings together artists, researchers, and cultural and creative practitioners to explore practice-based inquiry centred on creative innovation and social impact. As IF Fellows and collaborators’ research develops over the fellowship year, they will detail their learnings and outcomes here.

Some current areas of RSC-led research with our fellows, artists, and partners explore areas such as the social impact of practice-based pedagogy in schools, emerging immersive technologies, motion and performance capture, game engine development, and virtual production.

A further AHRC grant to upgrade facilities for creative and cultural research (CResCa) will also allow access to state-of-the-art equipment as the RSC underscores its creative research capability. An expanded in-house scope includes new immersive technologies to explore virtual embodiment via motion capture, photogrammetry, and volumetric capture, and Lidar scanning to create 3D models, harnessing emerging technologies for storytelling.

Free-form personal essay. “I think about this night often, and I remember it in fragments. The rise and fall of a night out. A milestone. The comedown. The welcome touch of one warm pair of hands and the cold invasion of another. A new feeling. An old feeling. The freedom of young adulthood coupled with the helplessness of a small child. So many of us crave freedom, but we often aren't ready to shoulder the responsibility it portends.”

Personal essay. “Your story begins with the scratch on a record; an apostrophe in time...”

they never told us these things

Personal essay. “Remembering comes in waves until you stub your toe on yet another tiny big hypocrisy, then grief washes in in tsunami tides...”

an article for Remee