Jessica Bissett Perea is a Dena'ina (Alaska Dena) scholar whose work intersects the larger fields of Native American & Indigenous studies (NAIS) and music & sound studies. She specializes in Critical NAIS approaches to performance, media, and improvisation studies, and histories of Indigenous arts and activism in North Pacific and Circumpolar Arctic communities. Dr. Bissett Perea earned a Bachelor of Music in Education from Central Washington University, an MA in Musicology at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a PhD in Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Bissett Perea currently works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis.
Sound Relations will transform our understanding of Inuit music and its engagement with shifting historical and political dynamics. A thoroughly researched and engaging book, this landmark contribution to Alaska Native Studies deserves a wide readership. * Shari Huhndorf, author of Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination and Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture * Sound Relations is a magnificent achievement, a profoundly path breaking and persuasive work of decolonial scholarship that enriches Indigenous studies, sound studies, and cultural studies by presenting original and generative new concepts, ideas, and terms. Through research conducted with, by, and for Inuit music makers in Alaska, Bissett Perea reveals how social identities are heard, how music contains dense, fluid, and grounded practices of identification, and how performance functions as a tool for resurgent world making. * George Lipsitz, author of Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music and Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place *