What does music tell us about the sustainability and precarity of publics? How can we use music—rehearsed, recorded, archived—to engage histories of erasure and displacement while imagining new forms of community and collaboration? Josh Kun’s talk will explore these ideas through his project Hit Parade: Live in San Francisco, which combines archival research, live performance, musical storytelling, and musical production to explore the politics of gentrification in contemporary San Francisco.

Josh Kun is a writer, curator, and professor of communication in the Annenberg School of Communication and the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His most recent book is the edited volume The Tide Was Always High: The Music of Latin America in Los Angeles (UC Press). He is the winner of a Berlin Prize and an American Book Award, and is a 2016 MacArthur Fellow.