Join Associate Dean Adriana Helbig for a discussion of her book ReSounding Poverty: Romani Music and Development Aid (Oxford University Press, 2023). Drawing on ethnographic research in development contexts, ReSounding Poverty asks who speaks for whom within the Romani rights movement today. Framing the critique of development aid in musical terms, it engages with Romani marginalization and economic deprivation through a closer listening to vocal inflections, physical vocalizations of health and disease, and emotional affect. ReSounding Poverty brings us into the back rooms of saman, mud and straw brick, houses not visited by media reporters and politicians, amplifying the cultural expressions of the Romani poor, silenced in the business of development.

Adriana N. Helbig is Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Pittsburgh's Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and the College of General Studies as well as Professor of Music and former Chair of the Department of Music (2020-2023). Professor Helbig has an international reputation as an applied ethnomusicologist and a scholar who advances discourses in Critical Race Studies, Critical Prison Studies (Pitt Prison Education Project), Development Studies, Minority and Migration Studies (Romani Music and Human Rights in Eastern Europe), Working-Class Studies, and Global Hip Hop Studies. Her books include Culture and Customs of Ukraine, co-authored with Oksana Buranbaeva and Vlada Madineo (Greenwood Press, 2009), Hip Hop Ukraine: Music, Race, and African Migration (Indiana University Press, 2014), Hip Hop at Europe’s Edge: Music, Agency, and Social Change, co-edited with Milosz Miszczynski (Indiana University Press, 2017), and ReSounding Poverty: Romani Music and Development Aid (Oxford University Press, 2023).