Laura Risk

Laura Risk is Assistant Professor of Music and Culture in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough, with a graduate cross-appointment at the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. Her research proactively builds out public archives in order to amplify unheard voices and critically interrogates the notion of tradition, with a focus on traditional music historiography in Quebec. She has published in the Journal of the Society for American Music, Ethnomusicology, MUSICultures, and Critical Studies in Improvisation, as well as The Globe and Mail, Le Devoir, The National Post, and Strings Magazine. She is also a fiddler and in 2024 her CD Traverse was awarded Quebec’s prestigious Opus Prize for Album of the Year in the category Traditional Québécois Music.

Focus of activities at CLCF

• Qualitative research on artists’ lives, with a focus on freelance musicians: how artists develop their practice and imagine creative futures despite/alongside precarious working conditions
• Creative labour and community-engaged music, including participatory music-making contexts, with a focus on community music-making in Scarborough and the Eastern GTA