Jordan Zalis
SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow
Jordan Zalis is an artist and ethnomusicologist, currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada based at the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph. His interdisciplinary work examines the intersections of music, sound, sport, and society, with current research focused on sociocultural and political implications of basketball’s soundscape: “What does basketball sound like?”
His PhD work examined the musical and theatrical dimensions of the Toronto Raptors Basketball Club—the sport’s most corporate and most commercial property in Canada. His postdoctoral research investigates outdoor community courts and pickup basketball as sites of democratic participation and grassroots cultural expression, exploring how casual sport models improvisatory behaviours that transcend social difference and generate improvised communities.
He has contributed to the edited collections Poderes do som: Políticas, escutas e identidades (Insular Livros, 2020), Football and Popular Culture: Singing Out from the Stands (Routledge, 2021), and The Sound of Victory: Music, Sport, and Society (NYU Press, forthcoming 2026). His work was recently featured by the CBC.
