Barson is publishing his most recent research as a book monograph titled Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons. This work explores the evolution of jazz aesthetics and their interaction with social movements in the Caribbean basin, employing theoretical frameworks from cultural studies such as those developed by Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and Paul Gilroy, as well as theorists from the global south and Latin America including Enrique Dussel, Jean Casimir, and Édouard Glissant. Barson thinks through jazz as a product of colonial social relations as well as a culture of afrodiasporic resistance. Consulting documents from the Freedman’s Bureau (a federal agency that “supervised” the abolition process) as well as nineteenth-century Black and white newspapers, Dr. Barson explores how Black activists in post-Civil War Louisiana developed a grassroots democratic culture through mass assembly and collective brass band music making—a configuration that he coins as “Brassroots Democracy.” Barson argues that practitioners of Brassroots Democracy expressed and developed “counter-plantation” and liberation theologies, powerfully altering the nature of both Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement. His work takes on pressing debates raised by musicologists of the African diaspora, historians of slavery, scholars in cultural studies, and religious studies scholars of the Black Atlantic. This manuscript is currently being prepared for publication with Wesleyan University Press’s Music/Culture series.