Care Ethics and the Power of Bass Connections

Duke University's Bass Connections program stands out as a creative incubator for interdisciplinary cooperation across academia, where knowledge can be divided along disciplinary lines.

At its core, Bass Connections aims to break down conventional academic silos. Its fundamental tenet is that interdisciplinary research, involving faculty and students from various academic backgrounds, can produce answers to urgent societal problems.

One particular team's investigation into feminist jazz historian Rosetta Reitz and her groundbreaking record label, Rosetta Records, was presented as a panel, “The Challenges of Care in a Blues and Jazz Archive,” at the 3rd International Care Ethics Research Consortium (CERC) Conference in Utrecht, Netherlands, and profoundly embodied the program's explicit mission—to approach societal challenges through team-based research across fields.

This team embodied such a dynamic, combining researchers and practitioners from music, literature, archival science, and feminist ethics, all bound in their investigation of the junction between care ethics, aesthetics, and archival justice. The team's participation in the CERC Conference reflected their fundamental idea—care as a methodological tool rather than only an intellectual presentation. 

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Though each participant concentrated on their own work, they all collaborated under a collective ethos of extreme empathy, a strategy supporting the visibility and dignity of underrepresented voices—especially those historically disregarded in the spheres of music and culture. 

Lou Brown, Senior Research Scholar and Director of Programs, Forum for Scholars, and Publics (Forum @ FHI), and Tift Merritt, Grammy-nominated musician and practitioner-in-residence at FHI, emphasized the multifaceted nature of care ethics, and also highlighted how this principle informed the project's interdisciplinary nature. 

Through careful archival research and deliberate ethical reflection, they expressed how the team's combined efforts not only brought attention to historical erasures but also actively reinserted marginalized figures into contemporary cultural consciousness.

“The conference allowed our team to focus on these concerns about care,” Brown shared. “We were very deliberate about taking an approach that really centered artistic creativity and archives. Our team was deeply interdisciplinary in this way—our varied approaches brought deep insights and creative expertise that helped us interrogate those questions about women in the music industry being erased.”

“And care is not transactional,” Merritt added. “I’m not going into archives to extract whatever I can for my conclusions. I’m actually trying to build and cultivate a meaningful relationship, one I call ‘lyrical presences’, that recognizes the ways the archives resonate across time and teaches me about what’s happened in the past, as well as the world around us now.” 

‘Care’ as a team effort

For third-year PhD student Annie Koppes, the experience was important and necessary. Koppes’s research specifically focuses on women’s contributions to blues music from a feminist historical perspective.

“Much of what I learned about Reitz was discovered through working with my team,” she shared. “Through close readings on care ethics, we realized so much of the ideological and theoretical framework that was guiding our research was situated between feminist care ethics and the responsibility archivists took on in representing these figures through their preserved works.”

Koppes highlighted Reitz’s efforts to reposition the blues as rooted significantly in the vaudeville and cabaret traditions of the 1920s, which were predominantly feminine domains. Figures like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, who were celebrated yet controversial women artists of that era, significantly inspired Reitz.

For other team members, like Duke Library audiovisual archivist Craig Breaden, this approach was only amplified. Breaden initially understood his archival role as mechanical—focused on digitizing materials—but he soon found himself greatly inspired by talks with his team on feminism and empathy.

“Without the readings and discussions our team had on feminism, care ethics, and musicology—topics my colleagues were far more versed in than myself—I might not have had the impetus (or imagination) to take that on,” Breaden shared. “It was with their encouragement that I moved forward, and they illuminated my work, as I hope I contributed to theirs.”

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From a focus on simple preservation to a deeper interaction with the lives and identities of underrepresented singers highlighted on the Rosetta Records album, Jailhouse Blues, his archival practice changed dramatically.

Examining Reitz’s unfinished book’s thematic concentration on intergenerational and interracial relationships in mid-20th-century New York jazz culture brought PhD student Ethan Foote deeper into care ethics. 

Examining care ethics and challenging how archival materials—especially unfinished ones—may ethically be engaged, respected, and understood started from the inherent incompleteness of the book.

For Foote, who discovered fresh excitement and intellectual satisfaction in closely working with primary archival sources, this encounter was transformative.

“For my segment at the conference I covered the content of the novel and its connection to the responsible approach to care ethics,” Foote explained. “One of the biggest revelations for me during this project was that I discovered how enjoyable it was to engage with these historical documents and try to make sense of its many impacts.”

For undergraduate researcher Trisha Santanam, the CERC Conference was a turning point. Santanam's research combined Adrienne Rich's feminist theory with Duke and other archival materials to produce fresh, imaginative-critical narratives. 

In addition to confirming her desire to pursue interdisciplinary scholarship at the graduate level, this experience and her presentation at an international conference highlighted the importance and legitimacy of humanities research.

“This was the first time I’ve gotten to go abroad and present my work,” Santanam shared. “Research can be such an isolating practice sometimes, but it was refreshing to get to collaborate with such a talented team. This community embodied what Reitz was trying to accomplish in her own work, especially through this constant and thoughtful engagement with musicians, artists, and scholars.”

Looking beyond preservation 

As a form of resistance and preservation, the team's deliberate approach to the Rosetta Records archives sought to elevate voices that were frequently overlooked by traditional archival practices and correct historical erasures.

The Bass Connection team's universal resonance was amplified by the CERC Conference's international platform. The team was able to place their theoretical and archival investigations within larger discussions about social justice, aesthetics, and care ethics by presenting with international academics and artists. The significance of interdisciplinary and humanities-driven research in tackling societal issues was reaffirmed by this global exchange.

As a result, the team at Duke did more than just research Rosetta Reitz's archival materials; they actively brought them to life, highlighting the fact that archives are dynamic, living narratives that both influence and are influenced by current events. 

Through their rigorous, empathetic, and interdisciplinary approach, the team elevated what might otherwise have remained niche academic interest into a profound dialogue on memory, representation, and justice. 

Their involvement in the CERC Conference was more than a scholarly achievement; it was an affirmation of the humanities’ enduring power to catalyze thoughtful, meaningful change across global communities.