Author Archives: Kristina Jacobsen

Kristina Jacobsen is a cultural anthropologist, an ethnographer, and a singer-songwriter living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. An associate professor of music and of anthropology (ethnology) at the University of New Mexico (UNM), her research interests focus on language, identity and expressive culture. She is the author of The Sound of Navajo Country: Music, Language, and Diné Belonging. The book focuses on her time singing and playing with Navajo country-western bands on the Navajo Nation, and is the winner of the 2018 Woody Guthrie Award for an exceptional book about popular music. Jacobsen is a touring singer-songwriter, fronts the all-female honky-tonk band Merlettes, and is the founder and co-facilitator of the UNM Honky-Tonk Ensemble. For 2019–2020, she has been doing fieldwork, supported as a U.S. Fulbright Scholar and by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, for a new book project on songwriting, language reclamation, and Italian colonialism on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia.
A beige slide with a dark blue platypus on the left reads "COVID-19: Views from the Field" A Platypus roundtable with Ashley ThuthaoKeng Dam, Caitlyn Dye, Sonia Qadir, Rebekah Ciribassi, Kristina Jaconsen

Roundtable: “COVID-19: Views from the Field”

We’re wrapping up our five-part series, “COVID-19: Views from the Field,” with a pre-recorded roundtable. This roundtable brought our authors into conversation with each other, across continents and timezones, to discuss conducting—or not conducting—fieldwork in places not understood as COVID-19 “hotspots.” Check out the video here, and follow the links below to read the whole series, also available in the language of each field site. (read more...)

An emergency alert on a cell phone screen in Arabic and English reading "The national sertilization program will be in process from 8:00 PM today until 6:00 AM tomorrow for your safety, please comply with instructions to stay home. (AD Police)

Abu Dhabi Soundmarks: Building Community in the Midst of the Pandemic, One Voice at a Time

Editor’s note: This post is the fifth in our five-part series “COVID-19: Views from the Field.” Click here to read an introduction written by series organizer Rebekah Ciribassi. Editor’s note: Click the links throughout the article to experience the soundscape of Abu Dhabi under COVID-19 In March 2020, I arrived in Abu Dhabi from the island of Sardinia, Italy, to shelter in place with family members, here. As I recently documented elsewhere, after the lockdown was imposed in Italy, the soundscape of that place, and especially the culture of talking, physical contact and making face-to-face music, changed significantly. (read more...)