Kheshgi to receive faculty Social Justice Award
The St. Olaf College Faculty Life Committee will present the 2024 Social Justice Award to Assistant Professor of Music Rehanna Kheshgi at an April 16 ceremony on campus. In accepting her award, Kheshgi will deliver a public lecture titled Creating Community through Sound: An Invitation to Pursue Social Justice Work Here and Now.
The Social Justice Award presentation will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Buntrock Commons Ballrooms. All are welcome to attend, and it will be streamed and archived online.
The annual Social Justice Award recognizes the hard work of faculty members in bringing needed change to the college and demonstrates St. Olaf’s commitment to developing a more inclusive environment that will better foster a sense of belonging in our campus community.
Kheshgi is an ethnomusicologist whose current research focuses on community engagement through music with Somali diaspora communities in the U.S. Her project, “Somali Songs: Building Community through Sound,” which seeks to empower Somali youth and foster sharing of intergenerational knowledge through listening, performing, and building public resources on Somali songs, has received support from the Southeastern Minnesota Arts Council.
In her lecture at the Social Justice Award presentation, Kheshgi will discuss some of the challenges and successes from her ongoing academic civic engagement work in collaboration with Somali community partners. Her presentation will also include practical tools to inspire, prepare, and invite faculty to shape their own curriculum in social justice work through community engagement from a variety of disciplinary approaches.
“As educators, we have not only an opportunity but a responsibility to pursue social justice in our work with students,” she says. “One strategy is to build mutually beneficial relationships with community partners. Somali diaspora communities have made important visible and audible contributions to the cultural landscape of Minnesota. Yet St. Olaf students rarely have the context and structure to learn about and connect with individuals, collectives, and organizations who are making these contributions.”
Kheshgi’s work aims to change that. At St. Olaf, she leads students in courses and research exploring music from around the world through a locally grounded approach centered on community building and social justice. Her research on gender, sexuality, and the body at the intersections of popular, folk, and sacred music and dance performance in India has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the American Association for University Women, the Fulbright Program, and the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale University.
“As educators, we have not only an opportunity but a responsibility to pursue social justice in our work with students. One strategy is to build mutually beneficial relationships with community partners.”
Assistant Professor of Music Rehanna Kheshgi
Born in Chicago with Indian Muslim and Jewish-American paternal grandparents and a long line of Swiss-German Mennonites on her mother’s side, Kheshgi explored music as a means of connection between her diverse roots from an early age. With her parents’ encouragement and a long list of close mentors, she studied piano, art song, opera, musical theater, and Hindustani classical singing before arriving at her disciplinary home, ethnomusicology.
Kheshgi followed her mother, cousins, and other extended family members to Goshen College, where she intended to double major in music and social work. Trips to El Salvador with her high school church youth group had opened her eyes to mutually beneficial methods of engagement that push back against a unidirectional charity mindset. She observed how the organizers consulted with local village leaders to pursue community development on their terms, sparking Kheshgi’s interest in grassroots organizing and community work. While Kheshgi ultimately decided to focus on music performance, the experiences in the social work program as well as studying abroad in Cote D’Ivoire deeply informed her approach to understanding songs as vehicles of history, identity, and community building.
After graduating from Goshen, Kheshgi traveled to India on a Fulbright fellowship to pursue a performance-based research project on Hindustani classical music. There she met her extended relatives for the first time. During that year she was invited to perform a collaborative show at the opening of a cafe in New Delhi and became good friends with the other musician, a singer from the northeastern Indian state of Assam called Angaraag “Papon” Mahanta. This musical friendship started Kheshgi down a path of performance and research that culminated in a Master of Music from SOAS University of London, a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of Chicago, and a series of publications exploring performances of gender and sexuality through Bihu, the springtime Assamese New Year’s festival.
In 2015, as Kheshgi completed ethnographic fieldwork in Assam, she joined Papon as co-vocalist for a two-month Bihu Festival tour and met the love of her life, Jeenti Dutta, who was lead guitarist of Papon’s band. Kheshgi and Dutta were married in Assam during Kheshgi’s second Fulbright grant period as a postdoctoral scholar in 2017, before Kheshgi joined St. Olaf as the first tenure- track ethnomusicologist.