This is a virtual seminar only. You can join the Zoom meeting here.

Music, Health, and Power: Singing the Unsayable in The Gambia (Book Launch) 

Please join Dr Bonnie McConnell as she launches her book, Music, Health, and Power. The book offers an original, on-the-ground analysis of the role that music plays in promoting healthy communities. It brings the reader inside the world of kanyeleng fertility societies and HIV/AIDS support groups in The Gambia, where women use music to leverage stigma and marginality into new forms of power. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted over a period of 13 years (2006–2019), the author articulates a strengths-based framework for research on music and health that pushes beyond deficit narratives to emphasize the creativity and resilience of Gambian performers in responding to health disparities.

Bonnie McConnell is Lecturer in Music at the Australian National University. Her research examines music in relation to issues of identity, social change, and wellbeing in West Africa and Australia.