Jennie Gubner is a socially engaged interdisciplinary scholar, violinist, and visual ethnographer. She holds a PhD from the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology, and is a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health. Her research interests include applied approaches to the study of music and dementia and creative aging, intercultural perspectives in arts and health, participatory music scenes as vehicles for social activism in South America and Southern Italy, intergenerational tango bars as spaces of urban belonging in Buenos Aires, and ethnomusicological filmmaking and multimodal scholarship. She joined the University of Arizona in January 2020 as Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the School of Music, and Chair of the Applied Intercultural Arts Research Graduate Interdisciplinary Program. In addition to these roles she also holds affiliate faculty positions in Latin American Studies, The Center on Aging, Health Sciences Design, and The Innovations in Aging GIDP. Through her research, teaching, and mentorship, she works to promote intercultural and applied approaches to the study of arts and health, and to build collaborations across diverse fields at the University of Arizona and between the university and local communities.
Gubner has held research and teaching positions in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, in the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Care and the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF, and the School of Music at Colby College. At Indiana University Bloomington, Gubner designed and taught an innovative applied ethnomusicology and filmmaking course and research project about music and dementia. In 2018 she was recruited to San Francisco to help lead a clinical study about music in dementia caregiving relationships in the UCSF Division of Geriatrics. In 2019, she became an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute at the UCSF Department of Neurology, where she trained alongside an international cohort of scholars, clinicians, artists and activists interested in dementia leadership. She is also a founding research partner and faculty member of an Erasmus+ European Union funded multi-year summer program (2020-2023) in innovative approaches to arts-based research called “Encounters between Arts, Ethnography, and Pedagogy” based in Lesvos, Greece. This project emerged from a pilot summer course in "Arts-Based Ethnography" that she helped design and teach from 2018-2019 in Lesvos in partnership with the Univesrity of Agder (Norway), and the University of the Aegean (Greece). This project culminated in a website called The Awe Collective, a publication on a UK based Arts Research platform, and 2-year workshop series called Creative Encounters in Awe Walking developed in collaboration with one of her doctoral students, Sydney Streightiff.
At the University of Arizona she has built multiple research projects drawing on her expertise as a Latin American music specialist and an intercultural and applied arts and health scholar. One project, called Serenatas for Tucson, involved building and documenting a house-calls serenade program for Hispanic older adults in collaboration with students from the School of Music and the Pima Council on Aging Home Health Services Programs. Following this she built a Latin American Folk Music Gathering called La Peña del Surco, a thriving monthly event designed to promote intergenerational wellbeing and cultural belonging drawing on Latin American forms of participatory music making and cultural organizing. She has also developed multiple courses at the University of Arizona, including La Peña del Surco Intergenerational Latin American Music Ensemble, a Serenata Ensemble, a digital storytelling and community-engaged research course called The Music, Health and Wellness Story Lab (MUS429/529), and a course called Arts and Community Health: Intercultural Perspectives and Applications (FCM/AIAR/MUS 424/524a,b,c), co-taught with Dr. Yumi Shirai from Family and Community Medicine. She is also an active CO-PI and Director of an ongoing creative aging practicum on an NIH funded ACOA/ MSTEM THRIVE Program through the Center on Aging. MSTEM THRIVE is a longitudinal, mentored research education program targeting University of Arizona (UA) undergraduates (Freshman through Seniors) from groups underrepresented in the health sciences (UAHS).
She has published her research and films in premier research journals, organized multiple international conferences and collaborations around audiovisual ethnomusicology, and presented her research at major music, humanities, and medical conferences. In May 2019 she received the Best Education Paper Award at the American Geriatrics Society Annual Meeting. In November, she co-organized the Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting Pre-conference entitled "Film as Ethnography, Activism, and Public Work in Ethnomusicology" with Rebecca Dirksen. In January 2022 she began a position as Film, Video and Multimedia Review Editor for the journal, Ethnomusicology. As a violinist, Gubner plays Argentine tango and folk music, bluegrass & old-time fiddle, and Sicilian popular music.
Part of this website is devoted to my research on the politics of neighborhood tango music scenes in Buenos Aires, Argentina. For over a decade, I have studied tango music as a form of participatory urban socialization and as a form of urban activism. As a multimodal ethnographer, I use film, photography and writing to produce local visual and sensory understandings of tango as a live-music culture, not "for-export." I have been involved with tango music in Buenos Aires since 2005 as a violinist, filmmaker, photographer, community organizer and researcher.
Information about my research project about music and dementia is also featured on this site. This project involves a service-learning and filmmaking course I built at IU Bloomington called “Music and Memory: Studying music and Alzheimer’s through film” that explores the health and wellness benefits of personalized music for older adults living with Alzheimer’s and related dementias. My research on this topic involves the use of sensory filmmaking as a mode of teaching undergraduates about person-centered approaches to dementia-care as well as about how to use digital storytelling as a vehicle for public advocacy and education.
Other active project websites: awe.arizona.edu, elsurcotucson.com
