Playing Back: Musical Geographies in Toronto & the Greek Canadian Diasporic Experience
Funded by the MITACS Elevate Postdoctoral Fellowship & the Hellenic Heritage Foundation, April 2025- March 2027.
This two-year project explores the interrelations between space and music. Intending to depict the musical geographies of the Greek Canadian experience during the 1960s - 1980s, it seeks to create a permanent, publicly accessible digital platform using multimedia and incorporating audio and visual material. It involves a hybrid methodological approach, employing methods from critical and cultural geography, urban and cultural studies, oral history, anthropology, and ethnomusicology and incorporating the practice of both digital humanities and research creation. The implication of these methodologies is expected to mobilize creative, multimodal, and inventive practices. This proposal builds on previous research that has led to new insights. It is the first to investigate cultural and ethnomusicological aspects of the Greek diaspora in Toronto and seeks to further explore the socio-spatial processes occurring within the case study as well as to produce alternative readings of the various interpretations and representations of transnational identities and communities in the milieus of the Greek diaspora and articulated transnational networks. It seeks both to share and communicate the outcomes of academic research to wider, non-academic, community audiences and to provide an experimental approach that could be used in future research projects.
Musical Geographies and the Greek Canadian Experience in Toronto: Places, Cultures, & Diasporic Identities
Funded by the LAPS Postdoctoral Fellowship, September 2023- September 2024.
The one-year project ‘Musical Geographies and the Greek Canadian Experience in Toronto: Places, Cultures, & Diasporic Identities’ explores the multiple interrelations between space and music to achieve a socio-spatial interpretation of the transnational diasporic musical cultures in Toronto. On an empirical level, it focuses on the music places of the ‘Greektown on the Danforth’ during the 1960s and the 1970s to point out the emerging cultural, social, and political (non-politicized) identities, by connecting the urban space with the musical performances related to the Greek diaspora and by depicting musical geographies of the Greek Canadian experience. On a theoretical level, music, culture, identity, diaspora, community, and space are perceived through the socio-spatial processes occurring within the case study, elaborating on innovative approaches linking space with music. This consideration draws from a transdisciplinary view of space, based on the theoretical framework of critical geography. On a methodological level, a hybrid approach that draws from critical and cultural geography, oral history, anthropology, and ethnomusicology is proposed, combining research techniques from those disciplines.
Principal Investigator
Alexandra Mourgou Alexandra Mourgou is a postdoctoral researcher at York University, working on the interconnections between music and urban space, focusing on the music places which are related to the Greek Canadian experiences in Toronto. She is currently holding an MITACS Elevate postdoctoral fellowship, and previously, she was holding the Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Her research interests and publications focus mainly on urban, cultural, and historical geography, and more specifically on the interconnections between space, place and music.
She has a joint Ph.D. degree in cultural historical geography from Université Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne and the National Technical University of Athens. Her dissertation is about to be published as a monograph entitled: “Places of Rebetiko: From the Eastern Mediterranean to inter-war Piraeus”.
She also holds a master’s in architecture from the National Technical University of Athens and a post-masters degree in Urban Studies from the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’ Architecture de Paris La Villette and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales.
In the past, she has participated in European and national research projects in France, Greece and Turkey. Among other things, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Thessaly, Dept. of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology, Senior Associate Member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and Schwartz Fellow for research on Mediterranean Music. She was also a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Asia Minor Studies (Athens), at the Hrant Dink Foundation (Istanbul), at ELIAMEP (Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy – in Athens) and at the National Technical University of Athens.
Beyond the walls of academia, she has studied classical and traditional music and has worked as a musician in Athens and Paris. Her involvement with musical performance has played a decisive role in her perspectives on academic, theoretical, and methodological exploration.