This event will take place on February 19, 2021, 3-4:30pm EST.

As university departments and professional societies respond to renewed calls for decolonization and recognition of systemic racism perpetuated within academia, one frequent measure taken is the adoption and creation of committees on race and ethnicity. However, the mere implementation of these so-called “diversity committees” is not in itself a solution to the issues of inequity they seek to address. As Sara Ahmed has argued, invoking the term “diversity” reinscribes the same power structures that first created its need; she writes that “diversity becomes something to be managed and valued as a human resource… and might even allow organizations such as universities to conceal the operation of systemic inequalities.” The GHS invites you to attend a panel discussion about the roles diversity committees have played in our academic societies, as well as what potentials these diversity committees could have moving forward.

Our panel will consist of three scholars who have served on the diversity committees for the academic societies in our discipline: Cynthia Gonzales (SMT), Austin Okigbo (SEM), and M. Leslie Santana (AMS). We envision this event as a space to consider how effective diversity committees can be, if and how people of color should serve on these committees, and what steps these committees could take to create meaningful change. We also will discuss the “invisible labor” of service, and the positions that scholars of color are relegated to when taking on these service roles. We invite you to register for the event at this link.

Panelists

Moderators: Clifton Boyd, Aditya Chander

M. Leslie Santana is an interdisciplinary writer, teacher, and performer from Miami, Florida. They are primarily interested in the relationship between performance and racial, sexual, and economic transformations in the Americas. Prof. Leslie Santana is currently at work on an ethnography of gender performance in Cuba which explores how racialized trans and queer cultural workers on the island are using art as a means of living with dignity in a context of social and material precarity. Their writing also appears in the edited collections Queering the Field: Sounding Out Ethnomusicology (Oxford, 2019) and Queer Nightlife (Michigan, 2021). At UC San Diego, Prof. Leslie Santana teaches classes on expressive culture in the Americas, the social and political contexts of musical art worlds, and critical and creative approaches to music scholarship. As a violinist, they have frequently performed and taught in various contexts related to the Sphinx Organization and the Tanglewood Music Center. They received a PhD in music from Harvard University in 2019 and a DMA in violin performance, with a graduate certificate in women’s studies, from the University of Michigan in 2015.

Austin Okigbo is an associate professor in the College of Music, and affiliate faculty in Ethnic Studies, and Global Health at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his PhD in Ethnomusicology and African Studies from Indiana University, Bloomington, a Master of Music degree in Sacred Music and Music Education from Westminster Choir College, and degrees in philosophy and theology from the Pontifical Urban University, Rome. His research focuses on religious music, musical diasporas, global health, inter-religious and inter-cultural dialogues. Prior to joining CU Boulder, Prof. Okigbo taught at Williams College, MA as the Sterling Brown Visiting Professor, Harvard University, and the University of Notre Dame. Prof. Okigbo has featured in a number of local and international radio and television programs in the US, UK and Nigeria. He is the author of Music, Culture, and the Politics of Health: Ethnography of a South African AIDS Choir (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). He has published articles in Africa Today, Du Bois Review, Ethnomusicology, Journal of Folklore Research, and The Journal of the International Library of African Music. He served as the co-chair of the African Music Section of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) between 2014 and 2017 in addition to serving on several committees in the organization and the African Studies Association.

Cynthia Gonzales is an Associate Professor in the School of Music at Texas State University. She has earned three graduate degrees in music theory (Ph.D. and A.M., Harvard University; M.M., University of North Texas). Her primary research area is text-music relationships in the early (tonal) Lieder of Arnold Schoenberg, and she is currently writing a book about Schoenberg’s eight songs in op. 6 that were published in 1907. Prof. Gonzales was honored in 2019 as a Texas State University System Regents’ Teacher and received the 2018 Texas State Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching. She has delivered almost 20 presentations about SmartMusic® as an aural skills “tutor,” and she maintains a website with theory and aural skills pedagogical resources at Listen-Sing.com. Prof. Gonzales currently serves on the Society for Music Theory’s executive board, as well as on the editorial board for the College Music Society’s Symposium and for the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy.