Project Areas
Dr. Golam Rabbani’s projects connect academic research, public humanities, creative industries, organizational research, and community engagement. His work focuses on five interconnected areas:
Creative Industries and Cultural Labour
Research on music industries, cultural work, creative-sector precarity, cultural entrepreneurship, platformization, AI, and the social conditions that shape artists’ participation in public and commercial cultural life.
Migration, Diaspora, and Newcomer Creativity
Community-based research on South Asian and Bangladeshi newcomers, refugee communities, immigrant artists, children, cultural belonging, intergenerational memory, and creative practice in Canada.
Ethnomusicology, Literature, and Public Humanities
Scholarly and public-facing work on Baul music, Bengali folk traditions, South Asian literature, lyric culture, devotional music, environmental humanities, and cultural memory.
EDI, Organizational Research, and Learning Design
Applied work on equity, diversity, inclusion, workplace belonging, intercultural communication, organizational behaviour, adult learning, curriculum design, and inclusive institutional practice.
AI, Cultural Representation, and Evaluation
Research and evaluation work on AI-generated content, bias-aware assessment, cultural fidelity, rubric design, educational review, and the representation of non-Western knowledge in digital systems.
Featured Projects
Music as Resistance: Creative Practices of Bangladeshi Refugee Newcomers and Children in Canada
Role: Principal Investigator / Research Lead
Fields: Migration, ethnomusicology, refugee studies, creative industries, EDI
Status: Ongoing
This project examines how Bangladeshi refugee newcomers, immigrant artists, youth, and children use music and creative practice to negotiate displacement, identity, belonging, memory, and cultural continuity in Canada. It approaches music not only as performance, but also as a social practice through which communities build care networks, recover cultural memory, and participate in public life.
The project explores family music-making, community performance, informal teaching, rehearsals, digital circulation, and children’s creative practices. It asks how racialization, language, class, religion, gender, and immigration status shape access to creative opportunities and community belonging.
Methods: Interviews, focus groups, participant observation, field notes, community conversations, performance observation, and public-facing knowledge mobilization.
Impact: The project contributes to scholarship on music, migration, refugee experience, South Asian diaspora, creative industries, and community belonging. It also offers practical insight for settlement agencies, cultural organizations, schools, community arts programs, and policymakers interested in newcomer inclusion and arts-based wellbeing.
South Asian Newcomer Music and Creative Belonging in Canada
Role: Principal Investigator
Fields: South Asian studies, music industries, diaspora, newcomer studies, cultural policy
Status: Ongoing / publication development
This project investigates how South Asian newcomer musicians and cultural workers build creative lives in Canada. It focuses on artists who perform in community events, small venues, religious gatherings, open-mic spaces, informal networks, digital platforms, and diasporic cultural circuits.
The project studies both possibility and precarity. While Canada offers newcomers opportunities to imagine new artistic identities, access to funding, audiences, institutions, and stable income remains uneven. The project considers how newcomer artists navigate authenticity, multicultural branding, racialized labour, community expectations, and digital visibility.
Key themes: Diasporic creativity, Bangladeshi and South Asian creative subcultures, cultural resilience, informal performance spaces, underpayment, visibility, hope, disappointment, and artistic persistence.
Impact: The project documents an underrepresented area of Canadian cultural life and offers a framework for understanding newcomer cultural labour beyond elite institutions.
Commodifying Baul Spirituality: Marginalized Communities, Agency, and Music Industries in Bangladesh
Role: Principal Researcher / Author
Fields: Ethnomusicology, cultural studies, South Asian studies, creative industries
Status: Monograph under contract with Routledge
This long-term project examines how Baul spirituality, music, and lyric literature are transformed through commodification, consumer capitalism, tourism, festival culture, recording industries, digital platforms, and popular media in Bangladesh. Based on SSHRC-funded doctoral research at Queen’s University, the project investigates how marginalized Baul communities negotiate agency, authenticity, spirituality, and survival within changing cultural markets.
The project asks whether creative industries provide Baul communities with visibility and income or produce new forms of dependency, symbolic exploitation, and spiritual dilution. It also examines how stage performance, corporate folk festivals, YouTube circulation, fusion music, and heritage discourse reshape the meaning of Baul practice.
Methods: Ethnography, interviews, lyric analysis, archival research, performance analysis, and creative-industries research.
Impact: The project contributes to ethnomusicology, South Asian studies, religious studies, cultural studies, and creative-industries scholarship. Its broader public importance lies in asking who benefits when folk traditions become marketable cultural products.
Soup Salon: AI, Decolonization, and Performance Spaces in Creativity
Role: Co-Investigator
Funding: New Collaboration Grant, The Creative School, Toronto Metropolitan University
Fields: AI, performance, decolonization, research-creation, creative industries
Status: Completed / ongoing development
Soup Salon is a collaborative research-creation project exploring the relationship between AI, decolonization, music, performance, food, space, and creative practice. It treats AI not only as a technical system, but also as a cultural and political force that shapes ideas of creativity, authorship, ownership, voice, and representation.
The project uses the salon format as a method of collective inquiry. Through performance, conversation, music, food, and embodied gathering, it creates a space for questioning dominant technological narratives and imagining more ethical creative futures.
Key themes: AI ethics, decolonial creativity, performance as research, cultural representation, algorithmic bias, community knowledge, consent, attribution, and creative ownership.
Impact: The project contributes to debates on responsible AI, inclusive innovation, public humanities, and culturally grounded technology critique.
Bhakti at Work: Lyric-Literature and Music-Led Practices for Wellbeing and Belonging in North American Organizations
Role: Principal Investigator
Fields: Workplace spirituality, organizational culture, music, wellbeing, EDI
Status: Research and publication development
Bhakti at Work examines how devotional music, lyric literature, and South Asian spiritual-cultural practices shape wellbeing, belonging, and emotional life in North American organizations. The project considers how immigrants, creative workers, and culturally diverse employees use music, memory, listening, informal singing, and devotional practice to manage stress and build meaning.
The project is not limited to formal religion. It focuses on everyday spiritual-cultural practices that shape workplace identity, psychological safety, and community.
Key questions: How can music support belonging and wellbeing? How do immigrant workers bring cultural memory into organizations? How can workplaces respect spiritual and cultural diversity without tokenizing it?
Impact: The project offers insight for organizations interested in culturally responsive wellbeing, inclusive leadership, and workplace belonging.
Ecocriticism and Baul Songs: Lalon and Radharaman as Eco-Poets
Role: Principal Investigator
Funding: Faculty of Arts and Humanities Research Project Grant, Jahangirnagar University
Fields: Environmental humanities, Baul studies, Bengali literature, ecocriticism
Status: Published and ongoing influence
This project examines the ecological imagination of Baul songs, especially the works of Lalon and Radharaman. It argues that Baul lyric traditions contain environmental, ethical, and philosophical insights that can contribute to environmental humanities and South Asian ecological thought.
Rather than reading Baul songs only as mystical texts, the project interprets them as ecological texts that imagine relationships among body, land, river, soil, non-human life, impermanence, and ethical restraint.
Impact: The project challenges Global North-centred environmental theory by foregrounding vernacular, spiritual, oral, and musical traditions from Bangladesh.
Tagore’s Formation of Cosmopolitanism: A Reconstruction of Literary and Cultural Concepts
Role: Principal Investigator
Funding: Faculty of Arts and Humanities Research Project Grant, Jahangirnagar University
Fields: Tagore studies, Bengali literature, music, cosmopolitanism, cultural theory
Status: Completed / ongoing influence
This project examines Rabindranath Tagore’s formation of cosmopolitan thought through literature, music, lyric culture, and cultural philosophy. It explores how Tagore’s work brings together local, national, regional, and global ideas without reducing culture to one identity or geography.
The project considers Tagore’s engagements with Bengali traditions, Baul thought, global humanism, education, artistic exchange, and ethical world citizenship.
Impact: The project contributes to literary studies, South Asian studies, music studies, and cultural theory, while informing Dr. Rabbani’s broader work on pluralism, spirituality, and cultural belonging.
ASLEC-Bangladesh Public Humanities and Cultural Content Project
Role: Research Lead, ASLEC-Bangladesh
Fields: Public humanities, environmental humanities, ethnomusicology, literature, culture
Status: Ongoing
As Research Lead at the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture-Bangladesh, Dr. Rabbani contributes to public humanities work that connects scholarship with broader audiences. His recent work involves content creation on ethnomusicology, literature, culture, environmental thought, and South Asian artistic traditions.
This project supports cultural education beyond the university classroom through essays, digital materials, research summaries, talks, cultural commentary, and public-facing educational content.
Impact: The project strengthens public access to cultural knowledge and supports wider engagement with Bangladeshi literature, music, environmental humanities, and South Asian cultural traditions.
EDI, Intercultural Communication, and Organizational Inclusion Research
Role: Diversity and Inclusion Coach / Organizational Research Contributor
Fields: EDI, workplace culture, intercultural communication, organizational learning
Status: Ongoing
Dr. Rabbani’s organizational research and EDI work supports institutions, employers, and creative-sector organizations in understanding equity, inclusion, accessibility, cross-cultural communication, and workplace belonging. This work translates academic research into practical tools for organizational change.
Core activities: EDI toolkits, training resources, implementation strategies, cultural training modules, meeting agendas, action plans, employer guidance, and inclusive communication materials.
Impact: This work helps organizations move from abstract diversity statements toward practical and accountable inclusion strategies.
AI Evaluation, Cultural Representation, and Creative Labour
Role: AI Data Researcher / Evaluation Specialist
Fields: AI evaluation, education, cultural analysis, rubric design, creative industries
Status: Ongoing
Dr. Rabbani’s AI evaluation work examines how AI-generated content can be assessed for accuracy, reasoning, clarity, instruction-following, cultural context, bias, and user alignment. He applies expertise in research methods, teaching, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, and EDI to evaluate model outputs and improve rubrics, task criteria, and quality standards.
This work is especially relevant to education, creative labour, and the representation of non-Western knowledge in digital systems.
Impact: The project area brings humanities expertise into AI evaluation and foregrounds cultural nuance, fairness, context, and ethical representation.
Curriculum, Teaching, and Learning Design Projects
Role: University Educator / Curriculum Developer / Learning Designer
Fields: Higher education, adult learning, assessment, inclusive pedagogy
Status: Ongoing
Across more than sixteen years of university teaching, Dr. Rabbani has designed and delivered courses in creative industries, research methods, diversity, EDI, organizational behaviour, working across cultures, music and religion, film music, cultural studies, South Asian popular culture, postcolonial and decolonial studies, writing and rhetoric, sociology, literature, and English language teaching.
His teaching projects focus on translating complex theory into meaningful learning through lectures, rubrics, assignments, case studies, reflective writing, group work, online modules, and experiential activities.
Impact: His teaching has reached students across Canada, Belgium, and Bangladesh and supports learners in developing critical thinking, cultural literacy, communication skills, and ethical professional practice.
Impact Summary
Academic Impact
Dr. Rabbani’s scholarship contributes to creative industries, ethnomusicology, South Asian studies, literary studies, environmental humanities, cultural studies, religious studies, migration studies, and public humanities.
Community Impact
His projects document and support marginalized communities, newcomer artists, refugee-background families, Bangladeshi diasporic communities, and folk performers as knowledge producers.
Organizational Impact
His EDI, training, applied research, and organizational learning work supports institutions and employers in developing practical inclusion strategies.
Teaching Impact
His teaching and curriculum work support students across humanities, social sciences, creative industries, management, writing, music, media, and cultural studies.
Public Humanities Impact
Through ASLEC-Bangladesh, public writing, talks, performances, and digital content creation, he translates scholarly knowledge into accessible public resources.
Creative and Cultural Impact
As a vocal musician trained in Baul music and Indian classical music, he connects scholarship with performance, cultural memory, and public communication.
Collaboration Interests
Dr. Rabbani welcomes collaborations with universities, research centres, cultural organizations, public-sector institutions, nonprofits, arts organizations, settlement agencies, creative-sector employers, AI companies, and community groups.
He is especially interested in collaborations involving South Asian and Bangladeshi cultural communities, newcomer and refugee arts programming, creative industries, music and migration, EDI research, public humanities, AI evaluation, ethnomusicology, environmental humanities, curriculum design, organizational research, and community-based knowledge mobilization.