Thinking Spaces: The Reading Group and Speaker Series is pleased to present “Improvising Indigeneity,” a virtual talk by Jessica Bissett Perea.

The event will take place via Zoom. A moderated Q&A will follow the talk.

If you are interested in attending, please register online. The Zoom room link will be sent out a day before the event.

This talk will frame improvisation as a practice through which we can better understand the densities and significance of performing Indigeneity in its many forms, including is/as an idea, analytic and process. Bissett Perea will share examples from her in-press book Sound Relations: Native Ways of Doing Music History in Alaska (Oxford UP, Forthcoming 2021) to demonstrate how privileging the aesthetics and logics of tribal and intertribal musicians with whom she works develops a more Native music studies, and a more musical Native American studies. This work addresses a greater need to ask more Indigenous-led and Indigeneity-centered questions in arts and humanities research to generate transformative possibilities for more just futures locally and globally.

Jessica Bissett Perea is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work intersects the larger fields of Native American and Indigenous Studies and Music and Sound Studies. She specializes in Critical Indigenous Studies approaches to performance, media and improvisation studies; arts and activism in North Pacific and Circumpolar Arctic communities; and relational studies of Indigenous and Black experiences and creative expressions in the Americas. She is the founding director of the Indigeneity Collaboratory, an Indigenous-led and Indigeneity-centered research collective working to advance relational ways of being, knowing, and doing to generate more just futures for Indigenous communities.

This event is being co-presented with the University of Guelph’s Music Students’ Association during their 15th Annual Music Symposium.

As always, Thinking Spaces is free and open to all.