Conference Agenda

Ethnomusicologists have recently been called to recognize how our work reinforces raced and classed power differentials between institutionally located scholars and the community members upon whom our scholarship and livelihood depends (cf. Brown’s 2020 open letter, and Robinson, Reed, et al.’s 2023 SEM Seeger Lecture). This roundtable offers that community-engaged music scholarship can model the socialities and solidarities of a reimagined scholarly practice. Drawing from Moten and Harney’s The Undercommons (2013) and la paperson’s A Third University is Possible (2017), our roundtable participants – both institutionally located and community-based – will take turns storytelling about the radical potentials of community-engaged ethnomusicology. The roundtable’s first pair will discuss the evolution of their ethnomusicological partnership, and how it affects not only themselves but also their local Cape Verdean and Cape Verdean American communities. Its second duo will reflect on the challenges of working to empower Somali youth in southern Minnesota through creating intergenerational learning opportunities and building public-facing cultural resources. Our final pair will engage in an open and sincere conversation in Spanish around the question: whose community? Speaking critically about the negotiations that must be made in a transnational collaboration that intends to be horizontal. The second half of the roundtable, facilitated by our discussant, will provide an open-ended opportunity for our panelists to engage with one another, and with the audience; together, they will ask whether community-engaged practice can consist a “third” ethnomusicology “in the world with others and making the world anew” (Halberstam, in Moten and Harney 2013, 6).