Projects & Arts-based Research

Using Music and Storytelling in Research

With a rich background in songwriting, singing, performance, education, and working with young people in a range of contexts, Kael does projects that use music and storytelling in a variety of ways. For many years, Kael has been using songs from their repertoire as teaching tools to open up dialogue with people about gender, sexuality, embodiment, and relationships. They also work with digital story-telling methods, combining narrative and music to document lived experiences. Most recently, Kael has been using a participatory research-creation method they developed called, “collaborative ethnographic songwriting” (CES). Kael uses CES to compose music for arts-based research projects using interview material from those projects and works directly with research participants to compose lyrics and music. CES is a robust method for analyzing, understanding, and disseminating people’s lived experiences, knowledge, beliefs, and perspectives about their social worlds.

Kael has composed and recorded songs for research-informed theatre productions, digital storytelling projects, and projects that support young people and adults in telling their own stories in song. Kael presents their music-based research at academic and community-based conferences, in university classrooms and public schools, and at professional development training events for teachers and teacher candidates. Highlighted on this page are some of the projects Kael has directed or taken part in.

If you would like to connect with Kael about incorporating music into your project, writing your own song, or having Kael deliver a presentation for your organization, please get in touch at kael@kaelreid.com.

The Love Booth and Six Companion Plays  

The Love Booth and Other Plays is a set of seven short, multi-media plays written by Tara Goldstein with contributions from Jenny Salisbury and Alec Butler about queer and trans activism in the early LGBTQ liberation movement.

The Newcomer Creative Voices Project

Making space for children to represent themselves, their own voices, and their own lives, on their own terms through collaborative ethnographic songwriting centers children as “competent social agents” (Mayall 2002) and focuses on children’s voice (both figurative and literal), children’s rights, as well as their musical agency and creative ...

Precarious Inclusion: Studying Ontarion LGBTQ+ Parents’ Experiences Childrearing in a Post-legal Parity Framework

Kael worked as a research assistant on a team of interdisciplinary researchers at the University of Guelph on a project entitled, “Precarious Inclusion: Studying Ontarian LGBTQ+ parents' experiences childrearing in a post-legal parity framework.” Precarious Inclusion was an arts-informed, qualitative study about the inclusion and exclusion ...

Somewhere in Between

Somewhere in Between is a digital story Kael created and produced at ReVision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice, a multi-media storytelling and research lab at the University of Guelph, in Guelph, Canada. Somewhere in Between tells the story of Kael's decision to undergo gender-affirming top surgery in 2018. Somewhere in Between was ...

Queer Across Canada Resource Kit

This free, downloadable kit accompanies the album Queer Across Canada, which was released in 2013 and is a collection of songs based on interviews Kael conducted with LGBTQ2S+ families in Canada and the USA from 2009-2012.

LGBTQ Families Speak Out and Out at School

While doing their doctorate at the University of Toronto, Kael was also an artist researcher on an interdisciplinary research team that investigated the public-school experiences of 2SLGBTQI+ families and youth across Ontario. The project was called, “LGBTQ Families Speak Out,” and as part of this project, the research team also developed ...

Breast Cancer Pink

Kael co-composed Breast Cancer Pink with Dr. Chelsey Hauge-Zavaleta while Chelsey was going through treatment for young adult breast cancer. Breast Cancer Pink represents the liberatory potential of expressing anger: it narrates Chelsey’s story as a form of defiant speech that reframes her breast cancer experience on her terms while resisting ...

fYreflies

Kael co-composed this song with Chase McKee when Kael was the artist-in-residence for a summer leadership camp for LGBTQ2SI+ and allied youth called, Camp fYrefly (the Institute for Sexual Minority Studies and Services, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB). Chase wanted to write a song about how important Camp fYrefly had been for him as a ...