Performing and Writing Collegiate Basketball

The Music Scholars Lecture Series invites Jonathan Dueck, associate professor of anthropology (Ethnomusicology) and of writing at Canadian Mennonite University, to deliver a talk that asks: What if we were to imagine a collegiate basketball game as an occasion of music and dance? In this talk, he presents stories of sound and gesture, and the relationships they constitute and enable, in collegiate basketball in North Carolina and across the mid-Atlantic; sonic agency and flow on the court; relationships through practice in the pep band; and videogames (and YouTube videos) as forms of the sport and its musics. He argues that basketball, as field site, pushes us to see music not as set-apart, but instead as paradigmatic of the ways of sharing time, sound and gesture that are basic to human sociality.

Jonathan Dueck is Associate Professor of Anthropology (Ethnomusicology) and of Writing at Canadian Mennonite University, where he also served as Vice President Academic. He previously taught at George Washington University, Duke University, the University of Maryland and the University of Alberta. He is committed to working with students on knowledge-making in and out of the classroom. He was a founding coeditor of the journal Prompt; coeditor of the Oxford Handbook of Music and World Christianities (2016); and author of Congregational Music, Conflict, and Community (2017, Routledge), Performing Basketball (Oxford, under contract), and articles in Ethnomusicology, the Journal of American Folklore, and Popular Music and Society.