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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Martha Councell-Vargas, Christine Lena Oct 2015

Martha Councell-Vargas, Christine Lena

International Faculty Researchers

Travelling to Central America in college is all it took to inspire Martha Councell-Vargas to begin a career of teaching, researching, and performing flute music of the Americas.


Ed Roth, Margaret Von Steinen Oct 2015

Ed Roth, Margaret Von Steinen

International Faculty Researchers

Can listening to and making music be effectively used in the treatment of people diagnosed with neurologic and psychiatric disorders? This is the primary question Professor Ed Roth, director of WMU’s music therapy program, is attempting to answer in collaboration with colleagues from around the world to improve treatment for people experiencing post-traumatic stress and other acute anxiety disorders. He is a co-founder and director of WMU’s Laboratory for Brain Research and Interdisciplinary Neurosciences (BRAIN) (article) and a Fellow in the Academy of Neurologic Music Therapists, who specializes in the application of music in the treatment of neurologic disorders and …


Performing Blackness In A Mulatto Society: Negotiating Racial Identity Through Music In The Dominican Republic, Angelina Maria Tallaj-García Feb 2015

Performing Blackness In A Mulatto Society: Negotiating Racial Identity Through Music In The Dominican Republic, Angelina Maria Tallaj-García

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation analyzes Dominican racial and ethnic identity through an examination of music and music cultures. Previous studies of Dominican identity have focused primarily on the racialized invention of the Dominican nation as white, or non-black, often centering on the building of Dominican identity in (sometimes violent) opposition to the Haitian nation and to Haitian racial identity. I argue that although Dominicans have not developed an explicit verbal discourse of black affirmation, blackness (albeit a contextually contingent articulation) is embedded in popular conceptions of dominicanidad ("Dominicanness") and is enacted through music. My dissertation explores ways in which popular notions of …


Review Of Jon Stratton And Nabeel Zuberi's Black Popular Music In Britain Since 1945 (2014), Tim Engles Jan 2015

Review Of Jon Stratton And Nabeel Zuberi's Black Popular Music In Britain Since 1945 (2014), Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

A review of Jon Stratton and Nabeel Zuberi's book Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945.


Beyond Exile: The Ramayana As A Living Narrative Among Indo-Fijians In Fiji And New Zealand, Kevin Miller Dec 2014

Beyond Exile: The Ramayana As A Living Narrative Among Indo-Fijians In Fiji And New Zealand, Kevin Miller

Kevin C. Miller

Drawing on the themes of collective memory, cultural ideologies, and narrative constructions, this chapter proposes to examine the narrative of the Ramayana epic, its exegesis through performance, and its continued relevance to identity formation among Indo-Fijian Hindus both within Fiji and its Pacific Rim diaspora. Based on the recasting of the “twice-migrated” Indo-Fijian as the “twice-banished” by certain observers, we might expect the meaning of the Ramayana in the lives of Indo-Fijian Hindus in New Zealand to shift towards the theme of Rama’s exile, just as it did for the indentured laborers who made the original journey to Fiji. Nevertheless, …