Location: Boren Hall 172
E-mail: amandaminks@ou.edu
Phone: 405-325-5291
Amanda Minks is an anthropologist and ethnomusicologist whose research has focused on the social and aesthetic practices of communication across cultures. Dr. Minks conducted long-term ethnographic and sociolinguistic research for her first book, Voices of Play: Miskitu Children's Speech and Song on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua (University of Arizona Press, 2013). Studying vocal play revealed how Indigenous children used creative forms, multilingualism, and media to stake claims of belonging in a multiethnic community on the fringes of the nation-state. Dr. Minks' second book is entitled Indigenous Audibilities: Music, Heritage, and Collections in the Americas (Oxford University Press, 2024). This historical work reconstructs the social relations and institutions that led to collections of Indigenous music and folklore in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Dr. Minks is also engaged in a collaborative, public-facing digital project, the Indigenous Media Portal, which will help make Indigenous collections at OU more accessible to heritage communities and others.
In teaching, Dr. Minks designs interdisciplinary courses that appeal to a broad range of students who study in the Honors College. Her courses build on students' existing interests in music and media and aim to increase their critical thinking about communication, media, cultural differences, and inequality. She teaches qualitative, ethnographic research methods as a complement to the quantitative methods that Honors students typically learn in their major fields of study. Qualitative research methods such as interviews, participant observation, and close analysis of everyday discourse are essential to understanding the constitution of culture, identity, and power—practices that shape our current world in many ways. Students develop a toolkit of analytical methods that enrich their everyday lives and add more cultural depth to research they carry out in other fields.
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