Josh Kun, Professor of Communication and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California

Thao Nguyen, Songwriter and Recording Artist, Thao and the Get Stay Down

What does music tell us about the sustainability and precarity of publics? How can we use music— rehearsed, recorded, archived-- to engage histories of erasure and displacement while imagining new forms of community and collaboration? In a hybrid talk that will incorporate live music by SF songwriter and recording artist Thao Nguyen, Kun and Nguyen will explore these ideas in dialogue with his project “Hit Parade: Live in San Francisco” (for the SFMOMA/SFPL Public Knowledge series) which combines archival research, live performance, musical storytelling, and musical production to explore the politics of gentrification in contemporary San Francisco.