Congratulations to Cydonie Banting who has recently submitted her PhD thesis at King’s
‘I have recently submitted my doctoral thesis entitled ‘Learning to Compose as a Tool of Ethnographic Research in a Rural Ugandan Village’. The project has involved numerous periods of fieldwork supported by LAHP, where I studied music-making in Kanjobe, a rural village located near Kabale in Uganda, close to the Rwandan border. The community rallies around the performance activities of their local choir, with whom I interacted in various creative exchanges. Indeed, participation in performance during fieldwork research has been predominant in ethnomusicology since the 1980s, meanwhile opportunities for equivalent kinds of practice-led approaches through the act of musical composition have been overlooked. I consequently advance in my thesis ‘learning to compose’ as a crucial mode of communication and methodological approach for global music studies.
The highlights during my LAHP studentship have included speaking at the Society for Ethnomusicology annual conference in Bloomington, Indiana, USA, and the Akin Euba Symposium at the University of Lagos, Nigeria. I was a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, as part of the AHRC’s International Placement Scheme in 2019 and I undertook a month-long study visit at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in 2017. These formative experiences, in addition to other workshops, seminars and networking events facilitated by LAHP, have given me a flavour of entering academia as a professional and for living and studying abroad, so that I am now applying for postdoctoral placements at various American universities’.