Executive Committee
PRESIDENT
Alexandra Boutros is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and Cultural Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo). Her current research focuses on Canadian popular music with a particular focus on Canadian hip hop, it's role in public discourses, and its intersection with conceptualizations of the Black diaspora. Recent work in this field includes "The Impossibility of Being Drake: Or What it Means to be a Successful (Black) Canadian Rapper," (2020) in the inaugural issue of Global Hip Hop Studies and "Sounds Like Haiti: Haiti as Muse in Canadian Popular Music," (2021) in Popular Music and Society.
CONFERENCE/ELECTIONS COORDINATOR
Martin Lussier is professor of communication studies at UQAM. His research focuses on popular music and the practices of local cultural organizations that articulate politics, industries, artists, music genres, audiences and workers. Member of the laboratory Culture Populaire, connaissances et critique (CPCC) as well as the Centre de recherche interuniversitaire sur la communication, l’information et la société (CRICIS), he published “Les musiques émergentes. Le devenir-ensemble” (Éditions Nota-Bene), as well as “L’essor de la vie culturelle au XXIe siècle. Perspectives France-Québec” (Presses de l’Université de Montréal) with M. Paquin, J.-M. Lafortune and M. Lemonchois. With Anouk Bélanger, he is the co-director of Atelier de chronotopies urbaines, a mobile and collaborative research lab about popular culture.
TREASURER
Alyssa Woods is a popular music scholar whose work intersects the areas of music theory, gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, and religious discourse in hip-hop music and culture. Dr. Woods holds the position of Assistant Professor in the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph, where she is also a member of the research team and Site Coordinator for the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. Her research involves interdisciplinary approaches to music-analytic and socio-cultural analysis with recent work focusing on the concept of mythmaking, genealogy, and succession in hip-hop. She is currently working on a book length project, entitled Temptation and the God Flow: Sound and Signification in Pre- and Post-Conversion Hip-hop.
COMMUNICATIONS COORDINATOR
Shams Bin Quader is a popular music scholar whose interests are informed by intersectional, feminist, and qualitative approaches that draw from Gender, Media, and Cultural studies. Specifically, Dr. Quader is interested in such areas as creative labour, popular music industries, Indigenous musicians, intersectionality, equity, diversity, & inclusion in the music industries, sustainable independent cultural production, music ecology, music scenes, and transnational and intersectional feminisms. He currently teaches part-time in the areas of musicology, gender and women’s studies, communication, and anthropology across Dalhousie University, Saint Mary’s University, and Mount Saint Vincent University.
AWARDS COORDINATOR
Sadie Hochman-Ruiz (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the University of Victoria’s Chair in Transgender Studies where she leads the Trans+ People in Forced Labour in Canada project. She earned the PhD in Music from UCSD for her work as an artist-researcher and community organizer in San Diego’s drag and border art scenes. Her research is located at the intersection of popular music studies and queer ethno/musicology and she holds her methods accountable to trans and critical gender studies, critical race studies and migration/border studies. She is published in the journals Critical Studies in Media Communication and MUSICultures, and she performs as the drag queen Sadie Pins and with her art-punk duo masc4masc.
STUDENT REPRESENTATIVE
Sandy Larose is a former courtesy Faculty at the University of South Florida in the United States of America. He is a member of the Célat Research Center (Université Laval). He has been teaching since 2013 in the Psychology Department of the Faculty of Ethnology at the State University of Haiti where he is currently elected Dean of Academic Affairs. His research interests include hip-hop culture, popular music, feminism, identity, and the Haitian revolution. He works for the Risc Center of the Notre Dame de Foy Campus and the Carrefour Intercuturelle as the project officer for elder diversity.