As the Associate Professor of the Anthropology of Music at Aarhus University in Denmark, I research social aspects of music cultures vis-à-vis inequalities of health and well-being, climate change impacts, and poverty. I also teach courses on music and culture, music in society, and popular music in crises drawing on my research collaborations with multicultural populations, Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers and refugees in North America and the EU.
I think of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies as the place where I grew up intellectually. My three years as a Core Fellow (2012-15) laid the groundwork for my research becoming truly interdisciplinary. International academic collaborations, many of which I started at HCAS, led to new insights shared in my publications on music’s relationships to social determinants of health, the social potential of music for addiction recovery, and music-making as a response to trauma. I feel grateful to the HCAS community for nurturing scholarly skills that led to my securement of a five-year Academy of Finland Research Fellowship and several other research projects for which I served as PI, then my current research across Arctic Europe and Greenland.
Coming from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds, my co-fellows’ intellectual rigour, methodological acuity and research insights informed how I approached writing my book Music Downtown Eastside: Human Rights and Capability Development through Music in Urban Poverty (2020), which won the International Association for the Study of Popular Music-Canada Book Prize and the global IASPM Book Prize Special Mention. I have based this and other work, in part, on my theorization of applied or activist ethnomusicology as a field, especially in relation to values.
I am Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths University of London and visiting professor in the School of Social Science at the University of Auckland. My current research focuses on organisations, power, and systems of governance particularly in the context of higher education reform and the way managerialism, marketisation and metrics are transforming universities.
My latest book, with Susan Wright, Audit Culture. How Indicators and Rankings are Changing the World (Pluto Press, 2024) analyses how the principles and practices of modern accounting became central organising principles of contemporary society, the new forms of bureaucratic neoliberal governance these developments are producing, and the dangers they pose for democracy and individual freedom.
My time at HCAS was one of the best years in my professional life. The Collegium gave me the time and space not only to finish my Audit Culture book, but also to develop a new research project on academic capitalism and the capture of public universities by management consultants and predatory financial interests. I was also able to carry out some interviews and participant observation on the effects of recent university reforms in Finland. My latest article on ‘Management Consultants and University Futures’ (published July 2024) is part of a special issue of the journal Public Money and Management co-edited by Hanna Kuusela and colleagues from Helsinki and Tallinn. I also made some long-lasting collaborations with Finnish scholars and other HCAS fellows and am currently working on a new research project titled ‘Rethinking Corruption’ with HCAS fellow Adrian Blau.