Music and Global Human Development

Music and Indigenous Development network.

Current project directions:

• Songs for sustainable peace and development: using local popular music styles to disseminate messages relevant to crucial development issues, especially public health, education, and tolerance. Most of our work thus far has been with Liberian musicians, dealing with post-civil war issues. See for instance http://bit.ly/sanitationliberia .

• Music for cultural continuity and civil society: supporting participatory musical continuity (not stasis) for intergenerational connectivity over time, and social solidarity in the present. Ironically one of the best ways to support musical continuity is by injecting "traditional" music into the local media space, which otherwise tends to become filled with global popular music. Projects include partnerships with culture organizations in Egypt, Lebanon, and elsewhere. See for instance http://kinkadrum.org.

We mean indigenous in the broadest possible sense, to mean peoples marginalized by forces of colonialism and post-colonialism, westernization and globalization, and overly rapid techno-economic change, whether in the Global South, or at the margins of the developed world.

Please follow the above links to read more...