Jacob Sunshine is a scholar of sound cultures in the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States, and a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Harvard. His current dissertation project, "Dejala Corre: A Sonic Infrastructure of Sociality on Colombia's Caribbean Coast," focuses on sound system (picó) culture in Barranquilla, Colombia and the multi-racial communities of the popular class barrios of the city that spearheaded this interlinked musical culture and technological form from the early-1970s and onwards. In it, Jacob explores how picós act as a vital form of social infrastructure, allowing members of popular class barrios to make technological advances in amplification and circuitry, develop transnational circulatory networks with European, African, and Caribbean nations, and above all, facilitate social spaces that are marked by communal memory and aesthetics. This sonic infrastructure is counterposed with popular barrios' lack of material infrastructure, caused by decades of adversarial relationships with the municipal government and political elites. He's broadly interested in the uses of technology to act on and transform urban space; the semiotics of class, race, and gender in the region and its manifestation in the practice and reception of African music; narratives of "progress" in histories of the city, and how those narratives reinforce or defy fundamental myths of class division; and histories of cross-racial political mobilization in the region. Jacob is also an active electric guitarist, composer, and producer and collaborates with an array of groups and solo artists including Pear Moth, Jazze Belle, Ghostpal, and EMEFE.