Josh Brew is a postdoctoral research fellow at UVA’s Digital Technology for Democracy Lab. A social scientist and artist, his work sits at the intersection of music, technology, and sustainability, with a focus on Africa and the Black diasporas.
At the DTD Lab, Josh examines how music and media industries shape struggles over livelihood, resources, and political voice—making them audible and, at times, silenced.
His current project examines the politics of sustainability, tracing how efforts to protect the environment and cultural heritage can also render certain lives, cultures, and more-than-human worlds expendable. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Ghana with musicians, miners, and cultural workers, the project follows how communities sustain music and livelihoods amid capitalist and postcolonial pressures driving ecological devastation linked to galamsey (informal small-scale gold mining). The project offers a localized interpretation of struggles over land, labor, and cultural life in relation to Anthropocene discourse.
Josh earned a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in Music and Africana Studies, where he was a Mellon Scholar and later a fellow at UVA’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. Some of his writing appears in Ethnomusicology Forum, Riffs Journal, and public-facing outlets, including The Conversation and Songlines. When not researching, he composes and performs Afrobeats, highlife, jazz, and classical guitar.
