Kyra Gaunt

Kyra Danielle Gaunt is an American ethnomusicologist, social media researcher, social justice activist, and professor at the University of Albany. Gaunt's research focuses on the critical study and hidden musicianship in black girls' musical play at the intersections of race, gender, and the body in the age of hip-hop. Her current research focuses on the unintended consequences of gender, race, and technology from YouTube to Wikipedia.[1] She is a native of Rockville, Maryland.[1]

Kyra Danielle Gaunt
NationalityAmerican
Academic background
EducationSUNY Binghamton
The American University
Alma materUniversity of Michigan in Ann Arbor
InfluencesGeorge Shirley[1]
Academic work
DisciplineEthnomusicologist, social media researcher
Notable worksThe Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop

Education

Gaunt attended the School of Music at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor from 1988-1997, where she earned a Ph.D. in Musicology with a specialization in ethnomusicology. She also studied classical voice with operatic tenor George Shirley. She also holds a master's and associate degree in voice from SUNY Binghamton and The American University, respectively.[1]

Career

Gaunt began working in higher education as a professor of hip-hop at the University of Virginia in 1996.[2] She held appointments at NYU, Baruch College and [3] Hunter College in the CUNY system, and is currently a professor at The University at Albany-SUNY, where she teaches classes on topics such as music, gender sexuality, and other topics in her research area.[1] Gaunt has spoken about her research and the concepts that surround it in multiple platforms that include a 2018 appearance at Harvard Business School's Gender and Work Symposium, where she spoke about her research Race, Work and Leadership: Learning from and about Black experience.[4] Her research focuses on the musical play of black girls at the "intersections of race, gender, and the body in the age of hip-hop" and the "critical study of the unintended consequences of race, gender, and technology from YouTube to Wikipedia."[1][5]

According to Gaunt, double-dutch was innovated by young African American girls in urban areas after World War II.[6] In her book, The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop, Gaunt invites readers to "broaden their interpretation of black musical experience" to include race, gender and body, and the experience of double dutch can be a path to understanding hip hop culture through a black girl's perspective .[7] Gaunt wrote that double-dutch was an essential part of black girl culture in the U.S.: "If double-dutch dies in neighborhoods, that's bad news for black culture".[6] As the sport became incorporated into public schools, "casual interest in neighborhoods" saw a decline.[6]

Gaunt also compares the sport of double dutch to hip hop, citing "hip and pelvic thrusts" and "rhythmic complexity" as elements that are vital to both.[7] She emphasizes double-dutch is a way of "experiencing black feminism" through its connection to staying on time to keep the movements going.[7]

Gaunt is also a music artist she has performed live at many different campuses around the country. She typically performs yearly at University of Albany's Theater and Arts Center. Gaunt has a variety of songs and also has an album.[8]

Awards, honors, and projects

In 2007 Kyra Gaunt published The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop. Her book was awarded the Alan Merriam prize presented by the society for Ethnomusicology. It was also nominated as a pen/beyond margins book award finalist.[9] It inspired a work by fellow TED Fellow Camille A. Brown, BLACK GIRL: Linguistic Play, which was nominated for a 2016 Bessie Award for Outstanding Production.[10] Among other significant publications, her peer-reviewed articles appear in Musical Quarterly, Parcours anthropologiques, and The Journal for Popular Music Studies.[11]

In 2009 Gaunt was honored as one of the inaugural TED Fellows.[1] Gaunt spoke at the 2015 TEDx East in New York City about the challenges and misconceptions behind the net worth and value of young black and African American girls who twerk on YouTube.[12] In 2018, Kyra appeared in a video for the TED Design series Small Thing, Big Idea, where she used her research to discuss how the jump rope got its rhythm.[13][14]

Gaunt was featured in a short documentary ad by Nokia that showed the impact of TED Fellows on others. Gaunt went on a mission helping students throughout the world. She has an annual project called one laptop per child which was designed to encourage learning in developing countries by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child.[15] Dr. Gaunt's scholarship has been funded by the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Ford Foundation.[10] Her exploration centers around the basic examination and concealed musicianship in dark young ladies' melodic play at the crossing points of race, sexual orientation, and the body in the time of hip-bounce.

In 2019, Gaunt was invited to speak at the university of Miami to present her research on the racial oppression and sexploitation of young, black girls who appear in YouTube videos[16]

Publications

Gaunt has published many works during her career. Her publications include:[17][18]

Books
  • The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop (2006, NYU Press)[19][20][21]

Chapters, volumes, and anthologies
  • "Dancin' in the Streets to a Black Girl's Beat: Music, Gender and the "Ins and Outs" of Double-Dutch", in Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America (1998, pages 272-292, NYU Press)[22]
  • "Translating Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop: The Musical Vernacular of Black Girls' Play", in That's the Joint! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (2004, pages 251-263, Routledge)[23]
  • "‘One Time 4 Your Mind’: Embedding Nas and Hip-Hop into a Gendered State of Mind", Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’s “Illmatic,” (2010, pp. 151–78, 2010, Basic Civitas Books)
  • ""Double Forces Has Got the Beat": Reclaiming Girls' Music in the Sport of Double-Dutch", in The Girls' History and Culture Reader: The Twentieth Century (2011, pp. 279–299, University of Illinois Press)[24]
  • "Forward: Truly Professin' Hip-Hop and Black Girl 'Hood", in Wish to Live: A Hip Hop Feminist Pedagogy Reader (2012, pp ix-xv, Peter Lang)[25]
  • "YouTube, bad bitches and an MIC (mom-in-chief): On the digital seduction of Black girls in participatory hip-hop spaces", Remixing Change: Hip Hop & Obama, A Critical Reader (Oxford UP, 2015)
  • "Truly Professin' Hip-hop--The Rewind (1996): Makin' Black Girls Embodied Musical Play the Teacher", in Black Feminism in Education (2015, pp 103–118, Peter Lang)
  • "YouTube, Twerking, and You: Context Collapse and the Handheld Copresence of Black Girls and Miley Cyrus", in Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music (2016, pages 218-242, Routledge)[26]
  • "YouTube, Twerking, and You", in Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music: Performance, Authority, Authenticity (2016, Routledge)[26]

Select journal articles
  • Gaunt, Kyra D. (1995), "African American Women Between Hopscotch and Hip-Hop: "Must Be the Music (That's Turnin' Me On)"", Feminism, Multiculturalism, and the Media: Global Diversities, SAGE Publications, Inc., pp. 277–308, doi:10.4135/9781483345383.n13, ISBN 9780803957756
  • "The veneration of James Brown and George Clinton in hip-hop music: Is it live! Or is it re-memory", Popular Music: Style and Identity, pp. 117–122, 1995.
  • "Wade in the Water: African American Sacred Music Traditions", Yearbook for Traditional Music 30:189, January 1998.
  • "Plenty of Good Women Dancers: African American Women Hoofers from Philadelphia", Ethnomusicology 44:2, University of Illinois Press, pp. 359–361, 2000.
  • "Music and the Racial Imagination", Ethnomusicology 48:1, University of Illinois Press, pp. 127–131, 2004.
  • "Girls’ Game-Songs and Hip-Hop: Music Between the Sexes", Parcours anthropologiques 8, CREA, pp. 97–128, 2012.
  • "The Two O'Clock Vibe": Embodying the Jam of Musical Blackness in and out of Its Everyday Context", Musical Quarterly 86:3, Macmillan, pp. 372–397, Autumn 2002.
  • "Got Rhythm?: difficult encounters in theory and practice and other participatory discrepancies in music", City & Society 14:1, Blackwell Publishing, pp. 119–140, 2002.
  • "Roundtable: VH1's (White) Rapper Show: Intrusions, Sightlines, and Authority", Journal of Popular Music Studies 20:1, Blackwell Publishing, pp 44–78, 2008. (with Cheryl L Keyes, Timothy R Mangin, Wayne Marshall, Joe Schloss)
  • "Introduction: APES**T", Journal of Popular Music Studies 30:4, UoC Press Journals, 2018. (With Carol Vernallis, Jason King, Maeve Sterbenz, Gabriel Ellis, Gabrielle Lochard, Daniel Oore, Eric Lyon, Dale Chapman)
  • "The Disclosure, Disconnect, and Digital Sexploitation of Tween Girls' Aspirational YouTube Videos", Journal of Black Sexuality and Relationships 5:1, UoN Press, pp 91–132, 2018.

References
  1. Gaunt, Kyra. "University at Albany Music Department Faculty Kyra Gaunt". Albany.edu. Albany.edu. Retrieved 2 May 2019.
  2. "Meet A.D. Carson, UVA's Professor of Hip-Hop". UVA Today. 2017-06-22. Retrieved 2019-05-06.
  3. Gaunt, Kyra. "Kyra Gaunt is on a Mission". Baruch College. Retrieved 2 May 2019.
  4. Gaunt, Kyra. "Kyra Gaunt speaks at the 2018 Gender & Work Symposium". Youtube.come. Harvard Business School. Retrieved 3 May 2019.
  5. Bell, Maya. "Who Isn't Impacted by Social Media". news.miami.edu. University of Miami. Retrieved 2 May 2019.
  6. Moyer, Justin (October 18, 2017). "'Black girl magic': D.C. Retro Jumpers remind D.C. how to double Dutch". Washington Post.
  7. Gaunt, Kyra Danielle. (2006). The games black girls play learning the ropes from Double-dutch to Hip-hop. New York University Press. ISBN 978-0814731208. OCLC 704614113.
  8. "Kyra Gaunt UAlbany Music".
  9. Gaunt, Kyra D. (2006-02-06). The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-dutch to Hip-hop. NYU Press. ISBN 9780814731208.
  10. Gaunt, Kyra. "Kyra Gaunt | Speaker | TED". www.ted.com. Retrieved 2019-05-07.
  11. "Kyra Gaunt UAlbany Music". www.albany.edu. Retrieved 2019-05-07.
  12. "Broadcasting Black Girls' Net Worth". Youtube.com. TEDTalk. Retrieved 2 May 2019.
  13. Gaunt, Kyra, How the jump rope got its rhythm, retrieved 2019-05-06
  14. "Small Thing Big Idea". www.facebook.com. Retrieved 2019-05-06.
  15. "Kyra Gaunt Is on a Mission - Campus Stories - Baruch College". www.baruch.cuny.edu. Retrieved 2019-05-07.
  16. Bell, Maya. "'Who isn't impacted by social media?'". University of Miami News and Events. Retrieved 2019-05-07.
  17. "Kyra D. Gaunt, Ph.D. - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
  18. "Kyra Gaunt | SUNY: University at Albany - Academia.edu". albany.academia.edu. Retrieved 2019-05-05.
  19. Baitz, Dana (2008). "Review of The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop". Popular Music. 27 (1): 165–167. doi:10.1017/S0261143008008039. ISSN 0261-1430. JSTOR 40212454.
  20. Best, Amy L. (2007). "Review of The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop". Gender and Society. 21 (3): 447–449. doi:10.1177/0891243207299724. ISSN 0891-2432. JSTOR 27640981.
  21. Woodruff, Jennifer A. (2007). "Review of The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop". Ethnomusicology. 51 (2): 347–349. ISSN 0014-1836. JSTOR 20174530.
  22. Pedersen, BT (2001). "Joe Austin and Michael Nevin Willard, eds. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. (review)". ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature. 32 (4).
  23. Hall, Katori (October 7, 2004). "Scholars capture essence of hip-hop". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 2019-05-06.
  24. "Book reviews". Journal of Gender Studies. 21 (1): 107–120. 2012. doi:10.1080/09589236.2012.636644. ISSN 0958-9236.
  25. Love, Bettina L. (2013). "Chapter 6 Visionary Response: Biracial Identity, Spiritual Wholeness, and Black Girlhood". Counterpoints. 454: 167–173. ISSN 1058-1634. JSTOR 42982251.
  26. O'Meara, Jennifer (2017-10-20). "Voicing Girlhood in Popular Music: Performance, Authority, Authenticity ed. by Jacqueline Warwick, Allison Adrian (review)". Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. 21: 199–202. doi:10.1353/wam.2017.0012. ISSN 1553-0612.
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