Shuanise Ayopelu Efunwale Odunaiya

Shuanise Odunaiya is an ethnomusicology researcher in the Department of Music at SOAS University of London whose work focuses on music, space, and cultural production in contemporary Korea. Her research explores Seoul’s underground music cultures through the intersecting lenses of space, technology, and community, with particular attention to how artists and creative communities navigate urban change, digital environments, and shifting cultural infrastructures. In doing so, she engages broader questions of identity, belonging, precarity, and artistic practice.  

Her doctoral research examines the less visible currents of Korean musical life that exist alongside dominant narratives of the Korean Wave. Focusing on underground and alternative music in Seoul, she is interested in how creative communities form around particular places, infrastructures, and social relations, and in how music-making is sustained across both physical and virtual environments. Her work considers how artists respond to redevelopment, displacement, economic pressure, and technological change, paying close attention to the ways creative communities are sustained, reshaped, and negotiated over time.  More broadly, her research interests include popular music, urban cultural production, creative placemaking, digital culture, and the relationship between music and everyday life. 

She is particularly interested in the role of music in shaping forms of community and cultural meaning, as well as in the ways artists adapt and reimagine existing practices in response to changing social and material conditions. Her work brings together ethnomusicology, cultural analysis, and spatial approaches to understand music not only as sound, but as a social, technological, and place-based practice.  Alongside her doctoral research, Shuanise has developed practice-based expertise in traditional Korean music, particularly Pansori and Samulnori. Her training has included practical study in janggu performance and Pansori vocal technique, which has informed her understanding of Korean musical aesthetics, embodiment, and performance practice. This combination of critical and practice-led engagement shapes her wider approach to research, grounding her work in both scholarly inquiry and lived musical experience.

• Contemporary Korean music and cultural life
• Underground music cultures, creative communities, and musical resistance
• Music, urban space, and cultural transformation
• Music technologies and digital environments Identity, belonging, precarity, and artistic practice
• Traditional Korean music, including Pansori and Samulnori