Awards

• Winner of Recipient of the 2021 Book Prize from the Canadian branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music.

Overview

Music Downtown Eastside draws on two decades of research in one of North America's poorest urban areas to illustrate how human rights can be promoted through music. Harrison's examination of how gentrification, grant funding, and community organizations affect the success or failure of human rights-focused musical initiatives offers insights into the complex relationship between culture, poverty, and human rights that have global implications and applicability. The book takes the reader into popular music jams and music therapy sessions offered to the poor in churches, community centers and health organizations. Harrison analyzes the capabilities music-making develops, and musical moments where human rights are respected, promoted, threatened, or violated. The book offers insights on the relationship between music and poverty, a social deprivation that diminishes capabilities and rights. It contributes to the human rights literature by examining critically how human rights can be strengthened in cultural practices and policy.

Full Product Details

9780197535073

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Reviews

Klisala Harrison's Music Downtown Eastside is a landmark ethnomusicological ethnography. Harrison blurs the distinction between applied and theoretical research, blends sensitive musical participant observation and rigorous policy analysis, and addresses, with a caring ear for diverse voices, urgent issues of social justice, human rights, gentrification, misogyny, and homelessness that transcend the study's particular ethnographic setting. Vigorously and accessibly written, bravely and humanely researched, this is an important book for ethnomusicologists and policy scholars alike. * Aaron A. Fox, Columbia University * Compassionate social programs often target the poor and supporting their daily survival needs - food, clothing, showers. Often forgotten is that which makes life most worth living: the sense of hope and the promise of human dignity we get from the arts, and of the most readily accessible art form to all of us, singing and music-making. With a scholar's sharp mind and a humanist's compassion, Klisala Harrison takes us inside life on the streets, and reveals the importance and power of music - to all of us. A brilliant exploration of enhancing human rights and capabilities of the poorest of the poor in our society. * Dr. Daniel J. Levitin, neuroscientist, and best-selling author of This Is Your Brain on Music *

Author Information

Klisala Harrison, Academy of Finland Research Scholar in ethnomusicology, University of Helsinki Klisala Harrison is Academy of Finland Research Scholar in ethnomusicology at the University of Helsinki. She has extensive research experience on music in relation to human rights, poverty and capability development; music, health and well-being; and musics of Indigenous peoples across the Arctic and of asylum seekers in Europe.

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