Sounds of Our Town: The Detroit Edition

Abstract

RESEARCH BACKGROUND: This creative output arises out of the SDVCR special research award "Popular music heritage and deindustrialising cities". This research presents a cultural justice approach to the understanding of popular music heritage initiatives in places of urban decline. The output focuses attention on one case study city, Detroit (USA). RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: The key content in this output is a translation of a scholarly peer reviewed article on the cultural justice approach to popular music heritage in deindustrialising cities (published in International Journal of Heritage Studies) into publicly accessible language for a broad audience. This also extends the peer reviewed article by way of the sole focus on Detroit, providing additional detail that wasn't in the scholarly version. This is accompanied by original photographs and mapping of heritage initiatives. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: As an arts-based method, the zine produced for this project acts as a tool of cultural justice as well as a form of public sociology. It's significance is in making the research, and the conceptual framework of cultural justice, more publicly accessible. The zine documents the research team's experiences and reflections on what we found in Detroit. The zine provides context about Detroit's deindustrialisation, racial injustices and cultural initiatives that exists and reflects on these aspects of the city's past and present. It outlines the role of popular music heritage for achieving cultural justice in Detroit by outlining the concept of cultural justice and speaking to the tools of cultural justice through illustrative examples of heritage initiatives in Detroit.