Dr Kayla Rush

Research & Interests

Dr Kayla Rush's current research examines private, extracurricular, fees-based rock and popular music schools. She has conducted case studies with private rock schools in Ireland and the United States, including publishing the first English-language research on the multinational School of Rock franchise. Her doctoral research examined community arts under austerity policies in contemporary Northern Ireland.

Podcast Appearances
(2022) University of Malta Campus FM, Minn Kampus Għal Ieħor, series 2, episode 8.(2022) Artery. A Podcast on Art, Authorship and Anthropology’, series 1, episode 6.(2019) Ethnography as Creative Writing, Coffee and Cocktails podcast, episode 10.
Publications
MonographRush, K. (2022) The Cracked Art World: Conflict, Austerity, and Community Arts in Northern Ireland. New York: Berghahn.
Peer-Reviewed Journal ArticlesRush, K. (2025) ‘Riff Culture: Spontaneous Solo Performances in Private Rock Music Schools’. Ethnomusicology 69(1), pp. 77-99.Rush, K. (2023) ‘Is “Watching and Copying” the New “Listening and Copying”? Situating YouTube in How Popular Musicians Learn’. IASPM Journal 13(3), pp. 76-88.Rush, K. (2023) ‘“As Long as It’s a Rock Guitar”: Sound, Materiality and Enskillment among Electric Guitar Learners’. Riffs 7(1), pp. 33-39.Rush, K. (2023) ‘Everyday Objects, Affect, and Embodied Policy: A Case Study of Popular Music Summer Camps during COVID-19’. Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy 10(1): 25-38.Rush, K. (2022) ‘Situating Discomfort in the Cracked Art World: Discomfort from Art, Discomfort about Art, and Discomfort with (Other) People’. Borderlands 21(2), pp. 118-142.Rush, K. (2022) ‘“They’re Performing Again”: Framing Moral Outrage in Arts Funding Protests’. Liminalities 18(1), pp. 176-206.Rush, K., and Kleij, S. (2022) ‘The Performance-Politics Nexus and the Double Helix: Locating Performance and Politics, Power and Protest’. Liminalities 18(1), pp. 1-22.Rush, K. (2021) ‘Riot Grrrls and Shredder Bros: Punk Ethics, Social Justice, and (Un)Popular Popular Music at School of Rock’. Journal of Popular Music Education 5(3), pp. 375-395. Rush, K. (2021) ‘“What Peace Means to Me”: Polyphonic Peace in Twenty-First-Century Belfast’. Canadian Journal of Irish Studies / Revue canadienne d’études irlandaises 44(1), pp. 39-60.García González, A., Hoover, E.M., Francis, A., Rush, K., and Forero Angel, A.M. (2021) ‘When Discomfort Enters Our Skin: Five Feminists in Conversation’. Feminist Anthropology 3: 151-169.Rush, K. (2020) ‘“The Last Funded Artist”: Imagining Futures through Ethnographic Science Fiction’. Etnofoor, 32(1), pp. 109-121.Rush, K. (2019) ‘Cross(ing) the Peace Walls in West Belfast: Imitation, Exemplarity, and Divine Power’. Religion, 49(4), pp. 592-613.Rush, K. (2019) ‘Coconuts’. Irish Journal of Anthropology, 22(1), pp. 122-125.
Invited Chapters in Peer-Reviewed Edited CollectionsRush, K. (2024) ‘Four Musicians and the Fates: A Fairy Tale’. In Eva van Roekel and Fiona Murphy (eds.), A Collection of Creative Anthropologies: Drowning in Blue Light and Other Stories. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 243-248.
Rush, K. (2022) ‘How Do We Get Girls and Non-Binary Students to Play Guitar Solos?’. In Bryan Powell and Gareth Dylan Smith (eds.), Places and Purposes of Popular Music Education: Perspectives from the Field. Bristol: Intellect, pp. 79-84.Rush, K. (2020) ‘Value as Fiction: An Anthropological Perspective’. In Victoria Durrer and Raphaela Henze (eds.), Managing Culture: Reflecting on Exchange in Global Times. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 81-96.Rush, K. (2018) ‘“Lifting the Cross” in West Belfast: Enskilling Crucicentric Vision through Pedestrian Spatial Practice’. In Milena Komarova and Maruška Svašek (eds.), Ethnographies of Movement, Sociality and Space: Place-Making in the New Northern Ireland. New York: Berghahn, pp. 151-169.
Conference ProceedingsRush, K. (2022) ‘Locating the Role of Middle-Class Fathers in Popular Music Education’. In Ruth V. Brittin (ed.), International Vistas of Music Education Research: Proceedings of the 29th International Seminar of the ISME Research Commission. International Society for Music Education, pp. 155-162.
Policy ReviewRush, K. (2019) Policy Review: Creative Ireland. Irish Journal of Arts Management and Cultural Policy, 5, pp. 13-18.
Book ReviewsRush, K. (2019) Review of Aesthetics of Religion: A Connective Concept (2017), by Alexandra K. Grieser and Jay Johnston (eds.). Material Religion, 15(4), pp. 514-515.Rush, K. (2017) Review of Milanese Encounters: Public Space and Vision in Contemporary Urban Italy (2015), by Cristina Moretti. City & Society, 29(3).

Selected Conference Presentations

• Forthcoming, 2025: ‘Cultural Diversity (or Lack Thereof) in Student-Chosen Rock School Repertoire’; Cultural Diversity in Music Education (CDIME) Conference, Mary Immaculate College and Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick
• 2025: ‘Mapping the Private Popular Music School Sector in Ireland’; ‘Musik(schul)unterricht neu gestalten’ Conference, Gustav Mahler Privatuniversität für Musik
• 2025: ‘Seizing the Means of (Audio) Production: The Economic Logics of 21st-Century Cassette Collectors’ (with Niall Coghlan); International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance (ICTMD) Ireland, Dublin City University
• 2024: ‘Learning Strategies, Multimusicality, and Phenomenologies in Ear-Learning Tasks: An Experimental Pilot Study’; International Society for Music Education (ISME) Research Commission Seminar, University of Jyväskylä
• 2024: ‘Haphazard Pathways to Teaching in Private Rock Music Schools’; International Society for Music Education (ISME) World Conference, UniArts Helsinki
• 2024: ‘Generating Mixcode Popular Songs with Artificial Intelligence: Concepts, Plans, and Speculations’ (with Abhishek Kaushik); International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Musical Creativity, University of Oxford
• 2024: ‘Embedding Wellbeing into the Curriculum – An Idea Whose Time Has Come’ (with Paula Mullen); European Higher Education Society (EAIR) Forum, University College Cork
• 2023: 'Locating Capitalism in the Field and the Field in Capitalism'; British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) Conference (online)
• 2023: 'Is "Watching and Copying" the New "Listening and Copying"?'; Society for Music Education in Ireland (SMEI) Annual Conference, Trinity College Dublin
• 2022: ‘Affect and the State in Times of Policy Disruption’; International Conference on Cultural Policy Research (ICCPR), University of Antwerp
• 2022: ‘Dominating Technologies: Children’s Affective Discourses during COVID-19’; European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) Biennial Conference, Queen’s University Belfast
• 2022: ‘“My Dad’s Been Pushing Me to Learn That Riff”: Locating Middle-Class Fathers in Popular Music Education’; International Society for Music Education (ISME) Research Commission Seminar, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (online)
• 2022: ‘“If You Want to Write It Down You Can”: Notational Ambivalence in Rock Music Camps’; International Society for Music Education (ISME) World Conference, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (online)
• 2022: ‘Riff Capital: Gendered and Racialized Knowledge in Spontaneous Riff-Playing’; Association for Popular Music Education (APME) Conference, Detroit Institute for Music Education
• 2021: ‘Imagining Post-Post-Conflict Community Arts in Twenty-First Century Northern Ireland’; Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) Annual Conference (online)
• 2020: ‘The (Un)Disciplined Body in Rock Music Education’; Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) Annual Conference (online)
• 2019: ‘Layers of the (Post-)Post-Conflict: Affective Street Art Encounters in Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter’; Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth (ASA) Annual Conference, University of East Anglia
• 2019: ‘The Cracked Art World: The Role of Discomfort in an Anthropology of Disconnection’; Asociación de Antropólogos Iberoamericanos en Red (AIBR) Annual Conference, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
• 2018: ‘Out of the Garage: Researching Formalised Rock Music Education in Mid-Sized Cities’; Urban Music Studies Network Conference, ‘Groove the City: Urban Music Policies Between Informal Networks and Institutional Governance’, Leuphana University of Lüneburg
• 2018: ‘Community Art and the State in the Cracked Art World: The Politics of Public Arts Funding in Contemporary Northern Ireland’. Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) Major Conference on ‘Art, Materiality and Representation’, Clore Centre, British Museum, London