Dr Kayla Rush
More information
Dr Kayla Rush is an anthropologist of art, music, and performance. She earned her PhD in Social Anthropology from Queen's University Belfast in 2018. Before joining Mary Immaculate College in 2025, she held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellowship at Dublin City University (2019-2022) and an assistant lectureship in music at Dundalk Institute of Technology (2022-2025). She currently serves as blog editor for the Association for Popular Music Education and secretary for the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance - Ireland; she was previously editor-in-chief of the Irish Journal of Anthropology.
Kayla's current research examines private, extracurricular, fees-based rock and popular music schools in global perspective. Her broader research and teaching interests include cultural politics, arts and education policy, accessibility and inclusion in education, emotion, cultural labour, and globalization, decolonization, and recolonization in popular music education. She is also a recognized teacher and practitioner of creative ethnographic writing, with a particular interest in ethnographic science fiction.
Research Funding
- 2025: CREATE-DkIT Summer Undergraduate Research Programme (co-funded by the Government of Ireland and the European Union through the ERDF Southern, Eastern & Midland Regional Programme 2021-2027): €2,911.00; project: Enhancing Children’s Music Video Experiences in a Popular Music Education Summer Camp
- 2021-2022: Higher Education Authority and Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Cost Extensions for Research Disrupted by COVID-19: €52,964.82
- 2019-2021: Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship: €196,590.72; project: Rocking in the Midwest: Transmitting and Performing Social Class in Rock Music Education
- 2019: Irish Research Council, Government of Ireland New Foundations Scheme: €5,000.00; project: Science Fiction and Anthropology: Transgressive Imaginations and Genre Collaborations
Publications
- ‘Riff Culture: Spontaneous Solo Performances in Private Rock Music Schools’, 2025, Ethnomusicology 69(1), pp. 77-99.
- ‘Learning Strategies and Multimusicality in Ear-Learning Tasks: An Experimental Pilot Study’, 2025, International Journal of Music Education, https://doi.org/10.1177/02557614251339552.
- ‘Four Musicians and the Fates: A Fairy Tale’, 2024, in Eva van Roekel and Fiona Murphy (eds.), A Collection of Creative Anthropologies: Drowning in Blue Light and Other Stories, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 243-248.
- ‘Is “Watching and Copying” the New “Listening and Copying”? Situating YouTube in How Popular Musicians Learn’, 2023, IASPM Journal 13(3), pp. 76-88.
- ‘“As Long as It’s a Rock Guitar”: Sound, Materiality and Enskillment among Electric Guitar Learners’, 2023, Riffs 7(1), pp. 33-39.
- ‘Everyday Objects, Affect, and Embodied Policy: A Case Study of Popular Music Summer Camps during COVID-19’, 2023 Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy 10(1), pp. 25-38.
- The Cracked Art World: Conflict, Austerity, and Community Arts in Northern Ireland, 2022, New York: Berghahn.
- ‘Situating Discomfort in the Cracked Art World: Discomfort from Art, Discomfort about Art, and Discomfort with (Other) People’, 2022, Borderlands 21(2), pp. 118-142.
- ‘“They’re Performing Again”: Framing Moral Outrage in Arts Funding Protests’, 2022, Liminalities 18(1), pp. 176-206.
- ‘The Performance-Politics Nexus and the Double Helix: Locating Performance and Politics, Power and Protest’ (co-authored with Sonja Kleij), 2022, Liminalities 18(1), pp. 1-22.
- ‘How Do We Get Girls and Non-Binary Students to Play Guitar Solos?’, 2022, in Bryan Powell and Gareth Dylan Smith (eds.), Places and Purposes of Popular Music Education: Perspectives from the Field, Bristol: Intellect, pp. 79-84.
- ‘Locating the Role of Middle-Class Fathers in Popular Music Education’, 2022, in Ruth V. Brittin (ed.), International Vistas of Music Education Research: Proceedings of the 29th International Seminar of the ISME Research Commission, International Society for Music Education, pp. 155-162.
- ‘Riot Grrrls and Shredder Bros: Punk Ethics, Social Justice, and (Un)Popular Popular Music at School of Rock’, 2021, Journal of Popular Music Education 5(3), pp. 375-395.
- ‘“What Peace Means to Me”: Polyphonic Peace in Twenty-First-Century Belfast’, 2021, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies / Revue canadienne d’études irlandaises 44(1), pp. 39-60.
- ‘When Discomfort Enters Our Skin: Five Feminists in Conversation’ (co-authored with Andrea García González, Elona Marjory Hoover, Athanasia Francis, and Ana María Forero Angel), 2021 Feminist Anthropology 3, pp. 151-169.
- ‘“The Last Funded Artist”: Imagining Futures through Ethnographic Science Fiction, 2020, Etnofoor 32(1), pp. 109-121.
- ‘Value as Fiction: An Anthropological Perspective’, 2020, in Victoria Durrer and Raphaela Henze (eds.), Managing Culture: Reflecting on Exchange in Global Times. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 81-96.
- ‘Cross(ing) the Peace Walls in West Belfast: Imitation, Exemplarity, and Divine Power’, 2019, Religion 49(4), pp. 592-613.
- Policy Review: Creative Ireland, 2019, Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy 5, pp. 13-18.
- ‘“Lifting the Cross” in West Belfast: Enskilling Crucicentric Vision through Pedestrian Spatial Practice’, 2018, in Milena Komarova and Maruška Svašek (eds.), Ethnographies of Movement, Sociality and Space: Place-Making in the New Northern Ireland, New York: Berghahn, pp. 151-169.
Podcast Appearances
- Artery. A Podcast on Art, Authorship and Anthropology, season 3, episode 6 (2024)
- University of Malta Campus FM, Minn Kampus Għal Ieħor, series 2, episode 8 (2022)
- Artery. A Podcast on Art, Authorship and Anthropology, season 1, episode 6 (2022)
- ‘Ethnography as Creative Writing’, Coffee and Cocktails podcast, episode 10 (2019)
Invited Workshop Facilitation
- Forthcoming: ‘Speculative Fiction for Reproductive and Disability Justice (beyond The Handmaid’s Tale)’; ‘Cripping Reproductive Justice: Rethinking Reproductive Futures’ conference, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
- 2025: ‘Writing the Self in the Age of Generative AI’; ‘The Self Under Siege’ postgraduate conference, Queen’s University Belfast
- 2017: ‘Writing Multivocality’; Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Annual Postgraduate Conference, Queen’s University Belfast
Invited Talks
- 2023: ‘From Postdoc to Lecturer: A Transition without a Map’; Careers Forum presentation, Society for Musicology in Ireland (SMI)/International Council on Traditional Music (ICTM) Ireland Postgraduate Conference, University College Dublin
- 2022: ‘Communicating the Moving World to Audiences of Non-Anthropologists’, with Emily Sekine, Ricardo Fagoaga, Joy Hendry, and Bobby Luthra Sinha (roundtable discussion); Royal Anthropological Institute Virtual Conference
- 2021: ‘Riff Culture: Toward an Ethnomusicology of Fees-Based Rock Music Schools’; Anthropology Research Seminar Series, Queen’s University Belfast
- 2021: ‘An Alternate History of Headbanging’; Fragmentary Institute of Comparative Timelines (FICT) project, University College Cork and Free University of Bozen–Bolzano
- 2018: ‘Emotions and Transformation in Community Arts’ (keynote); ‘Love, Hate and Beyond: Affect and Emotions’ Student Conference, Queen’s University Belfast
- 2017: ‘What Is Art’s Role in Creating Liminal Space?’, with Carole Kane, Ellen Schultz and Suellen Semekoski (panel discussion); Hydrangea Project, EastSide Arts Festival, Belfast
- 2016: ‘Healing the Traumatised Social Body: Contemporary Art and Art’s Role in Social Change in Post-Conflict Belfast, Northern Ireland’, with Alastair MacLennan, Bronagh Lawson and Suellen Semekoski; Student Art Therapy Association, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Selected International Conference Presentations
- 2025: ‘Cultural Diversity (or Lack Thereof) in Student-Chosen Rock School Repertoire’; Cultural Diversity in Music Education (CDIME) Conference, Mary Immaculate College and Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick
- 2025: ‘“It’s a Real Life Boogie and a Real Life Hoedown”: How Adolescents Discover Music in Today’s World’ (with Jake Cassman); Association for Popular Music Education (APME) European Conference, Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts
- 2025: ‘Mapping the Private Popular Music School Sector in Ireland’; ‘Musik(schul)unterricht neu gestalten’ Conference, Gustav Mahler Privatuniversität für Musik
- 2024: ‘Learning Strategies, Multimusicality, and Phenomenologies in Ear-Learning Tasks: An Experimental Pilot Study’; International Society for Music Education (ISME) Research Commission Seminar, University of Jyväskylä
- 2024: ‘Haphazard Pathways to Teaching in Private Rock Music Schools’; International Society for Music Education (ISME) World Conference, UniArts Helsinki
- 2024: ‘Generating Mixcode Popular Songs with Artificial Intelligence: Concepts, Plans, and Speculations’ (with Abhishek Kaushik); International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Musical Creativity (AIMC), University of Oxford
- 2024: ‘Embedding Wellbeing into the Curriculum – An Idea Whose Time Has Come’ (with Paula Mullen); European Higher Education Society (EAIR) Forum, University College Cork
- 2023: ‘Locating Capitalism in the Field and the Field in Capitalism’; British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) Conference(online)
- 2022: ‘Dominating Technologies: Children’s Affective Discourses during COVID-19’; European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Biennial Conference, Queen’s University Belfast
- 2022: ‘“My Dad’s Been Pushing Me to Learn That Riff”: Locating Middle-Class Fathers in Popular Music Education’; International Society for Music Education (ISME) Research Commission Seminar, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (online)
- 2022: ‘“If You Want to Write It Down You Can”: Notational Ambivalence in Rock Music Camps’; International Society for Music Education (ISME) World Conference, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (online)
- 2022: ‘Fees-Based Rock Schools as Sites of Cultural Transmission’; International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) World Conference, Lisbon, Portugal
- 2022: ‘Riff Capital: Gendered and Racialized Knowledge in Spontaneous Riff-Playing’; Association for Popular Music Education (APME) Conference, Detroit Institute for Music Education
- 2021: ‘Imagining Post-Post-Conflict Community Arts in Twenty-First Century Northern Ireland’; Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) Annual Conference (online)
- 2020: ‘The (Un)Disciplined Body in Rock Music Education’; Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) Annual Conference (online)
- 2019: ‘The Cracked Art World: The Role of Discomfort in an Anthropology of Disconnection’; Asociación de Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red (AIBR) Annual Conference, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
- 2018: ‘Out of the Garage: Researching Formalised Rock Music Education in Mid-Sized Cities’; Urban Music Studies Network Conference, ‘Groove the City: Urban Music Policies Between Informal Networks and Institutional Governance’, Leuphana University of Lüneburg
