The Department of Musicology hosts a talk by guest scholar Yun Emily Wang (Duke University); free and open to the public.

Wang describes her lecture:

"This talk is an ethnography of listening in what I will call the Chinese Canadian Care Home for the Aged, a residential proto-medical institution in one of Toronto’s “ethnoburbs.” Established by and serving Chinese immigrants, the Care Home relies on liberal celebrations of “culturally appropriate care” to promise successful aging, and maintains funding by performing a Chineseness legible to the “cunning” of Canadian Multiculturalism (Povinelli 2002). Music shoulders the burden of “culture” across hundreds of residents, staff, and volunteers from across the diaspora: Karaoke Wednesdays and Opera Fridays punctuate the daily repetition of Cantopop broadcast, between live performances of recognizably traditional Chinese genres. In the Care Home, culturally appropriate music comes to signal life, against the hums and beeps of breathing machines foretelling death.

Drawing on fieldwork from 2014-2015, I juxtapose a diversity of ways in which members of the Care Home community have aurally engaged with (or refused) what amounts to a biopolitical regime of sound-as-life. I trace how an alternative conception of life – one that far exceeds heart beats and is grounded, always, in vitality and enjoyment – emerged in the social cultivation and circulation of these praxis of otherwise listening. In so doing, I hope to offer not answers but an open question about how the ear mediates possibilities for otherwise aliveness."