“Though he does have a beard, Professor MacDonald is not a tweed suit wearing dour academic, rather his passion for cinema and music has led him to the streets, showcasing the hardscrabble life of artists attempting to win fans one gig at a time.” CKUA radio, Alberta

Michael B. MacDonald is an award-winning filmmaker and associate professor of music at the MacEwan University Faculty of Fine Arts and Communications in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. His films have been screened in more than 40 film festivals and he has won documentary and experimental film awards. Michael has published three books on music and youth culture and his next two books will focus on cinematic research-creation: CineWorlding: scenes of cinematic research-creation  (Bloomsbury) and Make your own damn film! [diwyf], Free Radicals & Posthumanography’s poetics: improvising and anarchiving in minor cinema (in development). 

 

 

 

 

Research interests

Music scenes, DIY music scenes, cine-ethnomusicology, cine-ethnography, cinemusicking, music pedagogy in Higher Education, ways of knowing (epistemology) in settler culture and Traditional Ecological Knowledge systems.

 

Publications

MacDonald, M. (2020). Thanks for Being Local: Cinemusicology as a critical pedagogy of music. Sage Handbook on Critical Pedagogy.

MacDonald, M. (2020). Critical Community Education (Section Editor Introduction). Sage Handbook on Critical Pedagogy.

MacDonald, M. (2020). Hiphop Kulture Warriors: Decolonial culture workers and the sacred. In A. Hudson, A. Ibrahim & K. Recollet (Eds.). This Together: Blackness, Indigeneity and Hip Hop (Hip-Hop, Culture, and Education). New York: Springe.

MacDonald, M. (2019). CineMusicking: Ecological ethnographic film as critical pedagogy. Cutter-Mackenzie (Ed.). Research Handbook on Childhoodnature (pp. 1-17). New York: Springer.

MacDonald, M. (Ed.) (2018). PHISH: Youth education in the counterculture. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

MacDonald, M. (Ed.) (2017). Sounding the Sacred Headwaters: Applied ecomusicology as a critical pedagogy of music. International Journal for Critical Pedagogy, Vol 8, No.1, pp. 213-236.

MacDonald, M. (2016). Playing for change: music festivals as arts-based community learning and development. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.

MacDonald, M. (2016). Remix and LifeHack in HipHop: Towards a critical pedagogy of music. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

MacDonald, M. (2015). MusiCultures: Journal of the Canadian Society for Traditional Music. Community-engaged research special edition, pp. 34-53.

MacDonald, M. B. (2016b). Cipher 5 as method. In S. Steinberg & A. Ibrahim (Eds.), Critically researching youth. New York, NY: Peter Lang.