The one-year project ‘Musical Geographies and the Greek Canadian Experience in Toronto. Places, Cultures, & Diasporic Identities’ will explore 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 will focus 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 is a Postdoctoral Researcher at York University, holding the Liberal Arts and Professional Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship, working on her project ‘Musical Geographies and the Greek Canadian Experience in Toronto. Places, Cultures, & Diasporic Identities’. Her research interests and publications focus mainly on urban, cultural, and historical geography, and more specifically on the interconnections between space and music. She received a joint Ph.D. degree in cultural geography at the National Technical University of Athens and University Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne (joint degree) in February 2022. She holds a master’s in architecture at the N.T.U.A. and a post-master’s degree in Urbanism at the Ecole Nationale Superieure d’ Architecture de Paris La Villette. In the past, she has participated in European and national research projects, in Greece and Turkey. Beyond the walls of academia, she has studied classical and traditional music and has participated in performances in Athens and Paris. Her involvement with musical performance has played a decisive role in her perspective on academic, theoretical, and methodological explorations.