Jennie Gubner is a socially engaged scholar, violinist, and visual ethnographer. In January 2020 she joined the faculty of the University of Arizona as Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the Fred Fox School of Music, and as Chair of an innovative new Graduate Interdisciplinary Program in Applied Intercultural Arts Research. In January 2022 she began a position as Film, Video and Multimedia Review Editor for the journal, Ethnomusicology.
Her research interests include Latin American popular music with a focus on intergenerational tango music scenes in Buenos Aires, creative approaches to the study of music and dementia and creative aging, ethnomusicological filmmaking and applied forms of visual/multimodal ethnography, and participatory music scenes as sites of social activism across the Americas and Europe. She holds a PhD from the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology.
While working at the Indiana University Bloomington Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology (2016-2018), Gubner designed and taught an innovative ethnomusicology and filmmaking course about music and dementia. In 2018 she moved to San Francisco to work in the UCSF Division of Geriatrics on a research study about music in dementia caregiving relationships. In 2019, she became an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute at UCSF Department of Neurology, where she trained alongside an international cohort of scholars, clinicians, artists and activists interested in dementia leadership.
In Tucson, Arizona she is currently building multiple intercultural applied research and outreach projects about creative aging with support from the Alzheimer’s Association, the Global Brain Health Institute, the UA Innovations in Healthy Aging Strategic Initiative, and the UA Center for Digital Humanities. These projects include The Serenata Project, an applied arts-based project dedicated to gathering stories of music and aging with Spanish-speaking community-dwelling adults in Tucson, and The Music and Creative Aging Story Lab, a community-engaged course and website project in development with the U Arizona Center for Digital Humanities. In Fall 2022, she was invited to be a curator at the Tucson Meet Yourself Festival to present her diverse research projects in the form of an interactive festival tent dedicated to Songs of Love and Aging.
Gubner is also a founding partner/faculty member of an Erasmus+ 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. As part of this project she has developed an ongoing engaged research project about using arts and creativity to promote awe walking for wellness across the lifespan. She has published her research and films internationally and across multiple disciplines, organized multiple international conferences and collaborations around audiovisual ethnomusicology, and presented her research at major music, humanities, and medical conferences. As a violinist she 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.
To learn more about my currently developing projects at the University of Arizona, see awe.arizona.edu and storylab.arizona.edu
