“Oulala”: Identities, Language and Well-Being Inside Youth Recording Studios

“Oulala” is a musical collaboration between youth studio recording programs in Montreal and Paris. Groups of youth exchanged music, beats, and vocals, mixing varieties of French and other languages. In the process, they enact la francophonie des jeunes et de la rue.

What might “Oulala” mean for education? Drawing from 20 years of ethnographic research in schools and community centres, Bronwen Low will explore transnational youth identities and language practices, feelings of belonging and the role that recording programs can play in youth well-being.

About the speaker

Bronwen Low is committed to research that supports socially marginalized young people underserved by traditional schooling models and practices. This includes a multi-year community-school-university partnership that supported and documented a high-school’s transformation into an urban arts high school, an ethnography of a high-school Hip Hop and slam poetry class in the U.S., and community-based research on how youth recording studios can foster well-being.

She has also been developing pedagogies of listening in relation to oral histories of human rights violations within community media projects using digital storytelling and virtual reality. Her publications include Community-based Media Pedagogies: Listening in the Commons (Routledge, 2017), with Chloe Brushwood Rose and Paula Salvio and Slam school: Learning through conflict in the hip-hop and spoken word classroom (Stanford, 2011).

Presented as part of the Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Learning Speaker Series by Concordia University's Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (CSLP)