Award-winning ethnomusicologist Ailsa Lipscombe joins CCM’s faculty

Lipscombe holds a PhD in Music from the University of Chicago. Her primary research explores intersectional experiences of medicalization, with a focus on reimagining listening praxes through embodiment, relationality and trauma. Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Association, Te Tūapapa Mātauranga o Aotearoa me Amerika, the Society for Ethnomusicology and the Society for Music Theory.

Lipscombe regularly presents research at the nexus of ethnomusicology, sound studies and critical disability studies at conferences across North America and Australasia. She was awarded the 2021 Charles Seeger Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology for her paper "When Silence Is Heard: Embodied Listening in Medical Facilities' Competing Sonic Epistemes." Her first monograph—titled Listening Beyond Crisis: Disability and the Medicalization of Everyday Life—is under contract with the University of Michigan Press, to be published within their Music and Social Justice series.

In her current postdoctoral position at Te Herenga Waka, Lipscombe is building on her expertise in digital ethnography and the decolonization of research methodologies to explore ethical transformations of Indigenous archiving in Aotearoa New Zealand. In this work, she centers community engagement and an ethics of care, guided by her own intersectional positionality as a queer, disabled researcher whose family whakapapas (traces their genealogy to) the Māori iwi of Te Whakatōhea.