with Jonathan Dueck.
Canadian Society for Traditional Music (blog), November 27.
This dialogic essay examines methodological and theoretical challenges of conducting public ethnomusicology in sports contexts, specifically examining basketball as a site of cultural performance and meaning-making. Through a conversational exchange between two ethnomusicologists, the piece addresses how professional basketball—particularly the Toronto Raptors and their “WE THE NORTH” campaign—functions as a platform for diverse social, political, and cultural phenomena including multiculturalism, national identity formation, community building, and collective experience.
Drawing on fieldwork in Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena and comparative insights from collegiate basketball research at the University of Maryland and Duke University, the authors interrogate the boundary between public and private experience in sports spectatorship. They examine how musical and sonic practices during basketball games create affective states and forge collective identity, positioning sports arenas as spaces comparable to—yet distinct from—religious worship sites in their capacity to generate intimate communal experience within public settings.
Methodologically, the essay advocates for innovative approaches to capturing the simultaneity and variety of experiences during sporting events, including the use of social media (Twitter feeds), multimedia field jottings, collaborative team-based ethnography, and attention to the relational, musical, and gestural dimensions of gameplay itself. The authors emphasize the “grandiloquence” of professional sports spectacle while questioning its implications for Canadian identity politics, settler-colonialism, and the construction of belonging.
The piece ultimately argues for ethnomusicology’s capacity to effect change through public scholarship, positioning sports as crucial sites for understanding contemporary collective experience, musical meaning, and the performance of national and cultural identity.
Keywords: public ethnomusicology, basketball, sports and music, Toronto Raptors, national identity, methodology, collective experience, platforming, fieldwork methods