Music for Global Human Development
This project, M4GHD, encompasses participatory action research projects in music & development, centered on collaborations between academics, NGOs, government organizations, musicians, and others, applying ethnomusicology to real-world social issues, focusing peoples who have been marginalized--socially, politically, economically--by colonialism and its aftermath, whether in the "developing" world or not.
M4GHD includes a number of overlapping categories:
- Giving voice to hope: Giving voice to hope is a rubric for musical participatory action research projects centered on development work in support of current and recent refugees and post-conflict societies, particularly in Liberia.
- Songs for sustainable peace and development: using local mass-mediated popular music styles to disseminate messages relevant to crucial development issues, especially public health, education, and tolerance, and especially to the youth, while building a culture of music. This project focuses on social weft, the horizontal threads the bind society today. Subprojects include, for instance, "Giving Voice to Health"; see Sanitation.
- Music for cultural continuity and civil society: supporting participatory musical continuity (not stasis) for intergenerational connectivity over time--the social "warp"--and hence social solidarity in the present. Ironically one of the most powerful 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, in Ghana: Kinka: Songs from Avenorpedo
Please follow the above links to learn more...
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For more information contact us: info@m4ghd.org.
--Michael Frishkopf
