Inspiring Minds: Challenging Canada’s Musical Mosaic
PhD candidate Duncan McCallum's (Musicology) research was recently featured as part of Western's Inspiring Minds series, a series which seeks to broaden awareness and impact of graduate student research, while enhancing transferrable skills. Duncan is supervised by Associate Professor Norma Coates.
Often described as a cultural mosaic, Canada is imagined as a nation of diverse yet coexisting identities. However, this mosaic metaphor often creates tensions and hierarchies within, while excluding some identities entirely. The 1990s saw a wave of Canadian popular music—known as the CanRock revival—gain national prominence and highlight the diversity of regional musical identities across the country. Still, this revival often reflected the same biases as the mosaic metaphor, favouring some regions and styles while ignoring others. This project examines how the CanRock revival constructed a musical mosaic of regional identities and interrogates how these representations and exclusions alike contributed to, complicated, or resisted dominant narratives of Canadian nationalism.
View the Inspiring Minds feature (via Western's School of Graduate and Post-doctoral Studies, October 2025)
