From Stage to Nation: York PhD student explores the cultural power of Canadian hometown concerts

Source: https://www.yorku.ca/gradstudies/2026/03/19/hometown-concerts-cultural-power/ Parent: https://www.yorku.ca/gradstudies/about-us/news/

Posted on 19 March 2026

As the lights dimmed over St. Catharines and the first chords filled the air, the crowd swayed in unison. Faces lifted, voices rose, and for a moment, music became something larger than entertainment. Christine Rose Cooling, a PhD student in the Joint Graduate Program in Communication & Culture at York University, was there—not as a fan, but as a scholar, watching, listening, and feeling the energy that rippled through the room.

“When a Canadian artist returns home, something powerful takes place,” she says. “Artists and audiences experience a sense of national pride and recognition that feels bigger than commercial entertainment.”

For Cooling, the question isn’t just how these musicians perform—it’s how audiences respond, how the room seems to hum with a shared history, a collective memory, a connection to place and identity. She studies that “charge” in the air, the unspoken bond between performer and hometown, and what it reveals about Canada itself.

Her curiosity comes not from theory alone but from lived experience. At events like the 2023 Born & Raised festival, she felt the energy move through her as she stood in the crowd, noting how music, memory, and emotion intertwined.

A photo of Christine Rose Cooling

Born & Raised festival

“If we see cultural policy only as bureaucratic protectionism, we miss how real experiences of attachment and collective memory are shaped,” she explains.

Indeed, Cooling’s research bridges the personal and the political. Hometown concerts are not just celebrations—they are shaped by Canada’s cultural policies, by the pressures of a globalized music industry, and by the historical influence of American media. They are moments where audiences negotiate their own sense of “Canadian-ness,” where national identity is performed as much as felt.

York’s interdisciplinary Communication & Culture program allows her to explore these moments from every angle: as economic events, as cultural rituals, and as mediated symbols. Under the guidance of Professor Anne MacLennan, Cooling connects the energy she observes in the crowd with a deeper understanding of media history and policy, showing how academic insight and human experience can inform one another.

“This project began from my own embodied experience in a crowd,” Cooling says. “I would very much like its insights to return, in some form, to those spaces.”

Her work reminds us that scholarship does not have to be distant or abstract. By following music into the towns that shaped it, by listening closely to audiences and performers, Cooling illuminates the cultural pulse of Canada. Through her research, the roar of a hometown crowd becomes more than applause—it becomes a story about memory, identity, and the enduring power of shared experience.