Dr. Marcia Ostashewski is a scholar, musician, teacher, administrator, and leader with a decades long career pioneering research through a commitment to relationship building, social justice, anti-racism, reconciliation and decolonization. Her work is based on an ethics of mutual care and support, and is dedicated to investigating and documenting the creative and cultural expressions of communities across Canada as well as their transnational aspects. She was Canada Research Chair in Communities and Cultures at Cape Breton University and is the Founding Director of the Centre for Sound Communities where she works with diverse artists, scholars, and traditional knowledge holders to create new knowledge and foster positive change on both an institutional and local level. Dr. Ostashewski’s collaborations connect her with an array of experts and laypeople on several continents and across various sectors with whom she conducts critical scholarly inquiry into music, dance, sound, movement, and their connection to community well-being. This work has been lauded as a model collaborative approach that opens new space to further decolonize institutions and to reimagine the roles of scholars within communities and practices.

Dr. Ostashewski’s work has been published in a number of national and international journals, including a co-authored article that was awarded both the 2020 International Council for Traditional Music Article Prize and the Society for Ethnomusicology’s 2021 Helen Roberts Prize. She has edited numerous books and journals—including a special issue of MUSICultures dedicated to “Anti-Racist Pedagogies” and the digital book DIALOGUES: Towards Decolonising Music and Dance Studies for the International Council for Traditional Music—and authored book chapters on topics ranging from Ukrainian music and dance to community engagement and reconciliation in Unama’ki. She also devises and co-produces digital media projects that address community issues and social challenges, including the “Sound Communities” initiatives done in cooperation with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Dr. Ostashewski and her work are regularly featured in a variety of institutions and media, ranging from Canadian public radio to the British Museum.

In addition to developing her own research, Dr. Ostashewski fosters student and colleague profiles and healthy communities. An innovative and passionate researcher and community advocate, Dr. Ostashewski is driven to seek resources and develop partnerships to make positive change in local communities, while honouring their connections with communities and industries around the world. To this end, Dr. Ostashewski has been awarded funding by major provincial, national, and international sponsors—including Nova Scotia’s Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the Fulbright Foundation—which has facilitated high-impact research, training for students and emerging scholars, and capacity building for local communities. By nurturing relationships with artists, practitioners, Elders and knowledge holders, scholars, performers, museums, curators, and cultural organizations across Canada, the U.S., Europe, Africa, South Asia, and Oceania, Dr. Ostashewski has mobilized resources, partners, and collaborators from diverse walks of life to cultivate spaces that integrate creative practice, ceremony, and knowledge exchange and facilitate critical public dialogue on topics such as reconciliation, migration, intercultural encounter, environmentalism, and the Indigenization and decolonization of academic institutions.

Marcia Ostashewski is the Director of the Centre for Sound Communities and Associate Professor in Ethnomusicology at
Cape Breton University. She completed her Ph.D. at York University in Toronto (2009), two postdoctoral fellowships with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and held the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Canadian Studies at the Henry M. Jackson School for International Studies at the University of Washington (2010-11).