Dr. Kristina Jacobsen wins award for an article
The article ‘Don’t Even Talk to Me if You’re Kinya’áanii [Towering House]’: Adopted Clans, Kinship, and ‘Blood’ in Navajo Country” was awarded “the most thought-provoking article in Native American and Indigenous Studies of 2019” by the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.
“Kristina Jacobsen’s and Shirley Ann Bowman’s article offers an insightful view on the dynamic formation of the Diné/Navajo kinship system (k’é) through the practices of adopting and incorporating in clan formation in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, with some glances at the omnipresence of this history in present times. Moreover, this study throws light on how adoption became the terrain for multiform racial, cultural, and geographical crossings in Navajo Nation-building and permanence; as well as on the extent settler-colonial policies on citizenship and “ancestry” historically disrupted this extraordinarily dynamic clan formation process. As a publication authored by a non-Indigenous and a Diné scholar, this article is a sample of collaborative practice and reciprocity, materialized in a well-grounded ethnographic, archival, linguistic, and cultural research. In our view, this study suggests important ways to historically reflect on questions of tribal enrollment, citizenship, identity, belonging, incorporation, and movement of peoples in American Indian life.” ~NAISA Prize Committee, 2019
Dr. Kristina Jacobsen awarded The Fulbright Con Il Sud Award for Teaching and Research
Dr. Jacobsen, was recently awarded the Fulbright Con Il Sud Award for Teaching and Research to support her upcoming research during her sabbatical year on the Italian island of Sardinia [Sardigna].
Heterophony: Texture, Technique, and Social Commentary
This lecture is in two parts: the first draws from my research on the 1960s jazz avant-garde and musicians’ interests in heterophonic musical textures. For the second part, I perform original music that utilizes heterophony and “noise” in a solo electronic and improvised format.
The Gay West: From Drug Store Cowboys to Rodeo Queens
The masculine ideal represented by the American cowboy is variously interpreted by spectators, dancers, musicians, and contestants at gay rodeos and country western dances across the U.S. Examining embodied gender practices within these communities, this talk articulates the sonic, social, and geographical spaces of the gay American West.