Dialogues of Courage, Wisdom, and Compassion with Olivier Urbain, Kevin Maher, and Anri Tanabe

This interview with Dr. Mica Estrada explores her work in researching belonging, social identity, and kindness. Beginning with an exploration of impostor phenomena, we first explore stories about Donna Hicks’s direct experience at being affirmed and welcomed. Returning to Estrada’s research, we examine the impact of Dr. Kellman and the development of a social integration model of self-efficacy, identity, and values. This model has been used to explore the experiences of minoritized students in STEM fields and community responses to climate change. The episode closes with examinations of belonging and stereotype threat and the power of kindness and accompaniment as dignity-affirming practices.

The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.

This is the first in a two-part series on dignity, belonging, awe, humility, kindness, and identity. In this first episode, we spend time with Dr. Donna Hicks to discuss the magic of dignity language, a South African heritage of Mandela Consciousness and Ubuntu, and expansions of the self through pathways of humility, vulnerability, and awe. 

The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.

Part two of the conversation with Dr. Nina Kraus examines how we find our sense of belonging within our sonic worlds. Speaking of how sound connects us, we enter dialogues about modulations of harmony, synchrony, the power of singing, and how musical training may make us more emotionally sensitive to harmonic cues within human voice. Turning to bilingualism, we examine gains of bilingual abilities, including the grouping of auditory objects, attention, and inhibitory control. The podcast concludes with an examination of the violence of noise, wartime sound and trauma, and the cumulative health effects upon communities.

The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.

In this two-part series with Dr. Nina Kraus we examine the neuroscience of our hearing brains, exploring how we make meaning from our sonic worlds. In episode 1, we look at the afferent and efferent journeys as our brains construct meaning from sonic experience. Examining reading, we understand how reading is powered by the strength of our recognition of frequency, harmonics, FM sweeps, and other ingredients. In Episode 2, we explore the impact of musical training and bilingual experience on comprehension, synchrony, abilities to hear sounds in noise, our belonging, and our empathetic capacities to respond to affect. The two-episode series concludes with an examination of the violence of noise and sound and resulting impacts on our health and wellbeing.

The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.

Exploring the research of Batja Mesquita and other cultural psychologists and social psychologists, this episode examines how emotions are enacted between humans. Challenging the US-centric worldview that emotions are only within an individual, Mesquita notes that emotions are continuously enacted within culture and relationships. Our podcast contrasts differences in Japanese orientations with amae, omoiyuri, and haji or shame. Drawing upon research on happiness, we examine how happiness has changed over time and how happiness differs across cultures. Within Latin American cultures, notions of simpatía and familísmo construct happiness as relational and go-with-the flow agreeableness. The episode concludes with an examination of the relevance of emotions to conflict transformation and the importance of approaching emotional disconnects with a spirit of empathy, perspective taking, and curiosity.

The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.

This episode explores the work of Taína Asili, her album Resiliencia, and the many voices that inspired her work in this album. As we understand notions of belonging, we explore Puerto Rican heritage, alternative voices of punk culture, language of re-membering, and the work of dismantling frameworks of scarcity to find deeper forms of belonging to the land and each other. Exploring the work of Sophia Smart, Leah Penniman, Sonia Renae Taylor, and others, we look at the role of the arts and an expansive sense of self in reclaiming our "own divine enoughness" (Renae Taylor).  Taína Asili is a Puerto Rican activist/musician who weaves a fusion of musical styles and roles the explore liberation themes from her work in racial, gender, and climate justice movements. Her newest album, Resiliencia and the accompanying documentary series is a profound exploration of the stories of women of color from the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico about their stories of resilience. 

The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.

What does it mean to belong? This question and other fascinating questions on belonging will be explored in season four of the music and peacebuilding podcast. Our topics will include musical reclamations, musical identities, the neuroscience of sound and belonging, the psychology of our emotional lives, belonging and refugee choirs, peacebuilding, and the reparative work of world music drumming. In studying belonging we might sing a sense of home within ourselves, our relationships, and our sense of rootedness in place. And in a world of uncertainty, loneliness, and disconnection, our work of peacebuilding might be artistic affirmations and expressions of generous relations.

The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.

This is the second in a two-episode series exploring the legacy of Daisaku Ikeda and the practice of dialogue. In this episode, we ask how wisdom, courage, and compassion is lived and practiced through music and dialogue. In particular, we look at how genuine dialogue might bring out the best in ourselves as we look to bring out the best in the other. Together with Olivier Urbain, Kevin Maher, and Anri Tanabe, we explore how this is lived out at the Min-on Music Research Institute and the Ikeda Center for Peace, Learning and Dialogue.

The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.

This is a two-episode series exploring the legacy of Daisaku Ikeda and the practice of dialogue through interconnectedness and a human revolution of courage, wisdom, and compassion. In this episode, we explore the legacy and history of Johan Galtung, Ikeda, Toda, Makiguchi, and Oliver Urbain’s groundbreaking work to explore music and peacebuilding. Exploring histories and models of violence, we come to a clearer, interdependent understanding of how direct, structural, and cultural violence are enacted within modern contexts.

The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.

This second episode of a two-part series with Kiku Day explores shakuhachi soundings of cultural translation and peacebuilding. With the famous honkyoku piece, Tamuke, we encounter the problems of cultural translation and how a piece about passages has been problematically recast as a requiem. The episode ends with a discussion of ryu or localized schools and the sounding of the robuki wave during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.