Chicago Public Schools (CPS) continues to frame arts education as “transformative”—a term whose ephemeral nature makes it appealing across policy, philanthropy, and nonprofit discourse. Yet the criteria for transformation often go un/under-examined: Who defines it? And Who benefits from its promise? What are the metrics for assessing student transformation? In this paper, I interrogate how “transformative” functions as a placeholder for structural change without addressing the material conditions of teaching artist labor, funding instability, or policy incoherence. Drawing from my work as School Partnerships Manager at the Beverly Arts Center, I introduce Critical Fusion Development (CFD), a framework for assessing how institutional mergers, pedagogical mandates, and labor models either sustain or exploit arts educators. I analyze current tensions between CPS’s move to make external vendors supplemental, rather than fundamental, to the arts education curriculum, and its shortage of certified arts teachers.

This study is situated within the broader context of what I term sociopolitical chaos: the 2024–25 school year alone saw a $500M CPS budget deficit, CTA service cuts, anti-DEI attacks on the Black Student Success Plan, and six changes to the CPS Board of Education. These conditions shape how, where, and whether transformation is even possible.

Using institutional ethnography and stakeholder interviews—including former BAC partnership managers, and teaching artists who’ve served as both internal and external educators—this paper urges ethnomusicologists to interrogate not only pedagogical content, but the labor infrastructures behind it, and examine the ways that teaching artists voices become siloed and silenced in systemic policy.

The Collected Podcast, a project from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History debuted with its first season on the history of Contemporary Black Feminism in 2022. Its second season on the Musical Genius of Black Women launched in February of 2025. In this paper, I discuss the making of the second season of the podcast: the struggles and choices in bringing it to air and the ultimate challenge of making nuanced content accessible to a general audience. Season two looks at the work of Black women in popular music, exploring the work of Ella Fitzgerald, Tina Turner, Donna Summer, Bernice Johnson Reagon, and Beyoncé Knowles Carter to understand what what we might take from their work and life stories to understand their genius. Using material from the National Collection as a way into their stories, each episode distills the life and work of these artists into easily consumable content, rigorously researched and rendered, with the help of scholars and writers in the field. The making of the podcast raises questions about how we might use the audio format to represent material culture and reach an audience outside of our classrooms and exhibit halls.

How did Harlem Renaissance intellectuals theorize Black music? In the 1910s and ‘20s US, Black intellectuals were engaged in a scholarly study of Black folksong (c.f. Work 1915; Dett 1918; Locke 1925). Now a few generations removed from emancipation, Black America faced a crisis of how to reckon with the folk music of enslavement: should this repertoire be left behind for the benefit of progress, revitalized out of racial pride, or developed into a new Black art music?

An influential thinker in this discourse was Thomas W. Talley, a chemistry professor at Fisk who exhaustively collected Black folksongs. Throughout his oeuvre, Talley argued that the racial uplift of the Black people was located in their folk music, which he read as a domain of both moral guidance and scientific theorization. By returning to the folksongs of the past, Black America could chart a progressive intellectual future.

In this paper I argue that Talley and his interlocuters spearheaded a reevaluation of Black folk music by Harlem Renaissance intellectuals, advancing a discourse that sought to locate the racial uplift of the New Negro in the folksong of the Old. Institutional musicology has long acknowledged its exclusion of scholars and musics on the basis of gender and race (Cusick 1999; Levitz 2018), but the time is ripe to critically evaluate the scholarship marginalized at the discipline’s founding. Involved yet ultimately excluded from the institutional formation of US musicology, Talley instead found widespread influence within a contemporaneous discourse from Black intellectuals—a Harlem Renaissance musicology.

In the West End, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Cincinnati, the sounds of gentrification portend new economic futures for some alongside further destruction of the community’s emotional ecosystem. Drawing from a digital humanities project produced by music graduate students at the University of Cincinnati, this presentation asks how ethnographic study in a minoritized neighborhood by a professor and students from privileged backgrounds risks replicating the power dynamics of gentrification that are being studied. Given these inequities, how might student and community participants co-create learning and growth rooted in ethical engagement? The project investigated four distinct types of aural events that carry a range of meanings for West End community members: 1) the noise pollution from interstate expansion, recalling a period of 1950s “urban renewal” that traumatically severed the neighborhood; 2) the juxtaposition of silence and gunfire on the streets, representing the destruction of all or part of the community’s ecosystem; 3) the construction of a new soccer stadium, signifying the formation of new communities even as it presages displacement; and 4) the rebuilding of an historic Black theater, bringing hope through sonic reclamation. Building upon analyses of sonic gentrification by Allie Martin and Andy McGraw, the presentation draws upon interview excerpts from a cross-section of residents and students, soundscape recordings, sound-mapping strategies, and video to tell a story about community collapse and resilience that centers mutual learning in the formation of student-community relationships.