Displaced New Orleans Musicians
In 2006, my two sisters and I created a collaborative ethnographic project on displaced New Orleans musicians. During a cross-country trip in August of that year, I conducted interviews with four musicians in Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Texas: Jeremy Lyons, Lee Quick, Little Freddie King, and Alabama Slim. My sister Jessica took portrait-quality photographs of the musicians, and my sister Jen provided general assistance. To make the work accessible to the public, we assembled selections from the interviews, photographic prints, information about the musicians, and samples of their music. For the month of February 2007, our work was installed at AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island.
 
Proposed Ph.D. Dissertation: Space, Place, and Music in New Orleans
To satisfy the requirements for a doctorate of philosophy in Ethnomusicology from the University of California Los Angeles, I propose a dissertation topic centered around space, place, and music in the city of New Orleans.  I wish to study how New Orleans musicians and community members understand and use spaces and places as they relate to music. 
I will complete a project, based in ethnographic and historical research, that not only connects space to music, but that also explores these issues from different perspectives.  The greater issues that I wish to address can be reduced to the following three questions:

1. How do individuals conceive of musical space?  Do these conceptions vary by age, class, race, gender, or profession?
2. Regarding individual spatial experiences versus forces that seek to define space: how and why do musicians and community members contest space against the constraints of imposed systems?
3. What is music’s role in the transformation of space into place?

I expect to break up these larger questions into more manageable topical areas, as follows: the city of New Orleans as branded and marketed space, imagined musical space within the city, how music helps define boundaries within New Orleans, how musicians and community members experience musical places in New Orleans, the tension between public space and private space in New Orleans, and how musicians and community members negotiate space in various parading traditions.