Document Type

Honors Paper

Advisor

Afshan Jafar

Publication Date

2026

Comments

For the past six years I have been a practicing songwriter, composer, and record-producer. My artistic style and personal identities have transformed drastically through my engagement with recorded music as a medium of creative self-expression and storytelling over this period of time. My access to private spaces for contemplation and creative practice, creative technologies like journals, cell phones, microphones, audio interfaces, laptop computers, and digital audio workstations (DAWs), and educational resources and opportunities throughout this time have allowed me to develop a record-making practice as a way to try on new selves, imagine possible futures, communicate with others, and make sense of my lived experiences. Throughout my undergraduate studies of sociology and music, I began to view all of my written, recorded, and spoken work within this educational context as means of studying my own reflection in the landscapes of globalization, race and gender in mass media representations, and jazz harmony that I struggled to make sense of. This project is an autoethnographic inquiry into the ways I use music to understand my lived experience and the society I live within. In this study, I approach multi-media creative composition as a feminist engagement with the ‘sociological imagination,’ a way of thinking about social life described by Mills (1959:6) that explores “the problems of biography, of history, and of their intersections within a society.” By recording and analyzing stories about myself through the mediums of written word, sound, and video, I account for the particular ‘intersections’ of ‘biography’ and ‘history’ I embody and advocate for trans ways of being, seeing, and knowing in and beyond academic settings. 

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The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author.