Jennie M Gubner

Jennie Gubner is a socially engaged interdisciplinary scholar, violinist, and visual ethnographer. She holds a PhD from the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology, and is a Senior Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health. Her research interests include applied approaches to the study of music and dementia and creative aging, intercultural perspectives in arts and health, participatory music scenes as vehicles for social activism in South America and Southern Italy, intergenerational tango bars as spaces of urban belonging in Buenos Aires, and ethnomusicological filmmaking and multimodal scholarship. She joined the University of Arizona in January 2020 as Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology in the School of Music, and Chair of the Applied Intercultural Arts Research Graduate Interdisciplinary Program. In addition to these roles she also holds affiliate faculty positions in Latin American Studies, The Center on Aging, Health Sciences Design, and The Innovations in Aging GIDP. Through her research, teaching, and mentorship, she works to promote intercultural and applied approaches to the study of arts and health, and to build collaborations across diverse fields at the University of Arizona and between the university and local communities. 

Gubner has held research and teaching positions in the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, in the Division of Geriatrics and Palliative Care and the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF, and the School of Music at Colby College. At Indiana University Bloomington, Gubner designed and taught an innovative applied ethnomusicology and filmmaking course and research project about music and dementia. In 2018 she was recruited to San Francisco to help lead a clinical study about music in dementia caregiving relationships in the UCSF Division of Geriatrics. In 2019, she became an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health at the Global Brain Health Institute at the UCSF Department of Neurology, where she trained alongside an international cohort of scholars, clinicians, artists and activists interested in dementia leadership. She is also a founding research partner and faculty member of an Erasmus+ European Union funded multi-year summer program (2020-2023) in innovative approaches to arts-based research called “Encounters between Arts, Ethnography, and Pedagogy” based in Lesvos, Greece. This project emerged from a pilot summer course in "Arts-Based Ethnography" that she helped design and teach from 2018-2019 in Lesvos in partnership with the Univesrity of Agder (Norway), and the University of the Aegean (Greece). This project culminated in a website called The Awe Collective, a publication on a UK based Arts Research platform, and 2-year workshop series called Creative Encounters in Awe Walking developed in collaboration with one of her doctoral students, Sydney Streightiff. 

At the University of Arizona she has built multiple research projects drawing on her expertise as a Latin American music specialist and an intercultural and applied arts and health scholar. One project, called Serenatas for Tucson, involved building and documenting a house-calls serenade program for Hispanic older adults in collaboration with students from the School of Music and the Pima Council on Aging Home Health Services Programs. Following this she built a Latin American Folk Music Gathering called La Peña del Surco, a thriving monthly event designed to promote intergenerational wellbeing and cultural belonging drawing on Latin American forms of participatory music making and cultural organizing. She has also developed multiple courses at the University of Arizona, including La Peña del Surco Intergenerational Latin American Music Ensemble, a Serenata Ensemble, a digital storytelling and community-engaged research course called The Music, Health and Wellness Story Lab (MUS429/529), and a course called Arts and Community Health: Intercultural Perspectives and Applications (FCM/AIAR/MUS 424/524a,b,c), co-taught with Dr. Yumi Shirai from Family and Community Medicine. She is also an active CO-PI and Director of an ongoing creative aging practicum on an NIH funded ACOA/ MSTEM THRIVE Program through the Center on Aging. MSTEM THRIVE is a longitudinal, mentored research education program targeting University of Arizona (UA) undergraduates (Freshman through Seniors) from groups underrepresented in the health sciences (URHS).  

She has published her research and films in premier research journals, organized multiple international conferences and collaborations around audiovisual ethnomusicology, and presented her research at major music, humanities, and medical conferences. In May 2019 she received the Best Education Paper Award at the American Geriatrics Society Annual Meeting. In November, she co-organized the Society for Ethnomusicology Annual Meeting Pre-conference entitled "Film as Ethnography, Activism, and Public Work in Ethnomusicology" with Rebecca Dirksen. More information about Gubner's research, performance background, and films and photography can be found on her website. In January 2022 she began a position as Film, Video and Multimedia Review Editor for the journal, Ethnomusicology. As a violinist, Gubner plays Argentine tango and folk music, bluegrass & old-time fiddle, and Sicilian popular music.

Select Publications: 

Allison TA, Gubner J, Harrison K, Barnes D, Covinsky K, Yaffe K, Johnson J, Smith, A. 2024. “Music Engagement as Part of Everyday Life in Dementia Caregiving Relationships at Home.” The Gerontologist. 

Gubner J. 2022. "Domingo en Plaza Almagro (Sunday in Plaza Almagro).” Journal for Audiovisual Ethnomusicology 1(1). URL: https://javem.org/1-1-domingo-en-plaza-almagro/

Gubner J. 2022. “A Week From Now, Will I Remember? Maybe…Maybe Not:”  Navigating Ethics in the Production of Student-Made Films about Music and  Dementia.” Routledge Companion to Ethics in Ethnomusicology, ed. Beverley Diamond and Jonathan P. J. Stock. London, Routledge: 312-325.

Gubner J, Streightiff S. 2021. “Creative Encounters in Awe Walking.” In the Encounters between Arts, Ethnography and Pedagogy Special Issue, Arts Cabinet, London.
URL: https://www.artscabinet.org/encounters/jennie-gubner-sydney-streightiff 

Gubner J, Smith A, Allison T. 2020. "Transforming undergraduate student perceptions of dementia through music and filmmaking.” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 68: 1083-1089

Gubner J. 2018. "The Music and Memory Project: Understanding Music and Dementia through Applied Ethnomusicology and Experiential Filmmaking." Yearbook for Traditional Music 50: 15-40.

Gubner J. 2018. “More than Fishnets & Fedoras: Filming Social Aesthetics in the Tango Scenes of Buenos Aires & The Making of A Common Place (2010).” Sound Ethnographies 1(1): 171-186. URL: http://www.soundethnographies.it  

Gubner J. 2016. “‘Yo Soy un Fenómeno, Pero Sin Ustedes No Soy Nada’: Intimidad pública y sentimentalismo tanguero a través de la vida y canto de Osvaldo Peredo." In Tango: Ventanas del   Presente II, edited by Mercedes Liska and Soledad Venegas, 163-193. Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural de la Cooperación.