EMILIE AMREIN
EMILIE AMREIN
Biography
Emilie Amrein is a scholar, artist, educator, and activist whose professional activities resist and unsettle the boundaries of academic disciplines. They locate their work in community practice, drawing on the revolutionary wisdom of abolitionist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist organizers and freedom dreamers from the Majority World. Widely regarded as one of the nation’s most progressive thinkers in the arts and social justice, Amrein’s professional life traverses a number of disciplines, epistemologies, and fields. They position themselves in the confluence and trans spaces of arts education, community arts, community development, activism, and public practice in the arts.
Amrein's professional work has taken them to diverse settings, spanning professional arts ensembles, and engagement with incarcerated folx, refugees and asylum-seekers, LGBTQ+ communities, and justice-deprived locations. They have given numerous talks for national and international audiences and creative workshops with community groups. Their co-authored book, Empowering Song, is considered a ground-breaking pedagogical and epistemological frame. Amrein currently serves as Executive Director of UTSA Arts, Associate Dean for community engagement, and professor of community arts leadership, education, and practice at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Recent Publications
de Quadros, A. and Amrein, E. (2023). Empowering Song: Music Education from the Margins, Routledge.
Empowering Song: Music Education from the Margins (2023) weaves together subversive pedagogy and theories of resistance with community music education and choral music, inspiring professionals to revisit and reconsider their pedagogical practices and approaches. The authors’ unique insight into some of the most marginalized and justice-deprived contexts in the world — prisons, refugee shelters, detention facilities, and migrant encampments — breeds evocative and compassionate enquiry, laying the theoretical groundwork for pedagogical practices while detailing the many facets of equity-centered, musical leadership. Presenting an orientation to healing informed by theory, Empowering Song explores the ways in which music education might take on the challenging questions of cultural responsiveness within the context of justice, seeking to change not only how choral music is led but also our conceptions of why it should matter to all.
Amrein, E. & de Quadros, A. (2024). Border Transgressions: Song, Story, and Communal. In E. Morgan-Ellis & K. Norton, (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Community Singing. Oxford University Press.
Eurocentric choral practice represents a small slice of the 70,000-year-old phenomenon of communal singing, yet it dominates in the imagination of singing communities. This narrow paradigm of group singing persists within a series of interlocking ideologies—settler colonialism, racialized capitalism, white supremacy, and cisheteropatriarchy—that continue to cause harm to individuals and communities around the world. This chapter argues, therefore, that choral music’s white racial frame impoverishes the power and potential of choral musicking in the Western world. In this chapter, the authors present exemplars and experiences of community singing that depart from typical choral activity, arguing that when the performative is displaced in favor of the participatory, and the stage is replaced by communal spaces, the possibilities for expressive and empowering practice can be greater. They detail narrative work behind walls and borders, real and metaphoric, disciplinary and interdisciplinary, and geographic/demographic. Their narratives traverse communal practice in Islam, in prisons and detention centers, and with forced migrants on the Mexico–US border.
Amrein, E. and de Quadros, A. (2023). "Sounding In, Sounding Out: Remembrance and Resistance at the Border" in D. Pardue, A. Kenny, and K. Young, (Eds.), Sonic Signatures: Music, Migration, and the City at Night, University of Michigan Press.
