Brazil faced one of the most extensive official slave trades in the world. This process forcibly brought around 5.8 million Africans to the country between 1500 and 1850. This historical trend has substantially impacted the Brazilian music scene, especially in the context of musical expressions created and performed by Black communities (Lucas, 2002; Queiroz, 2023; Sandroni, 2001). However, although structural racism is still intense in Brazil, the fight against the oppression of black people and their culture have increased considerably over the last two decades. Considering both the reality of the exclusion that characterizes Afro-Brazilian culture and the reaction of these people to this reality around the country, this paper analyzes how Black communities have promoted music performances focused on activism and social awareness to surpass racism in Brazil (Moraes, 2024; Santos, 2022). This research project encompasses a qualitative four-year ethnographic study (2020-2024) in four Black communities in Northeastern Brazil, highly immersed in diverse Black music culture expressions. The results show how these people live in a vulnerable social situation and have historically faced a trajectory of inequality and exclusion. However, their music practices and critical performance initiatives have expanded enormously over the last two decades, incorporating awareness and strategies of resistance, antiracist attitudes, and the construction of collective Black identities in contemporary society. The paper brings out some essential ideas and propositions to reflect on how ethnomusicology can create dialogues among these musical actions built outside the universities and the academic initiatives focused on combating racism, prejudice, and exclusion.

Irish music festivals in the Midwestern United States are a key component of the annual migrations of touring musicians in the Irish traditional music scene. Oftentimes, outside of the official time-space of the festival and after paid duties are completed, musicians gather, away from larger audiences, and play in “sessions” late into the night. Against a backdrop of more commercialized and commodified performances of traditional music on festival stages, I suggest that these afterparty sessions deliberately foreground a sociality and being-in commune. In particular, audience-performer boundaries are blurred, and melodies are heterophonically sounded in productive dissonance with the commercialized ideals of polished unison and harmony (Taylor 2024; Kaul 2013). In a musical tradition where a loss of the principles of collective stewardship and common ownership are lamented by practitioners and scholars alike (Ó hAllmhuráin 2017), I draw on extensive ethnographic fieldwork to argue that the afterparty session re-asserts a communitarian orientation—“reclaiming the commons" (Smith 2006)—in an environment where it is most roundly criticized for ignoring such values—the highly-commodified US Irish festival. This paper underscores the importance of recognizing how musicians' public performances and more privately facing musical practices can sound in mutually constitutive ways, in turn leading to richer ethnographic data. Further, drawing on Cashman (2016), this study explores how some of the wider conventions and norms of a collectively maintained musical genre can potentially impact one’s way of being in the world.

Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Within months, Repair Together was founded, a grassroots organization that mobilizes volunteers to rebuild areas impacted by the ongoing military conflict. One of their signature work programs, Project Toloka, shuttles 150-300 volunteers each weekend to affected areas, where they collectively clean up rubble from homes, cultural buildings, and youth centers while deejays spin electronic dance music. Donating their time and services, the deejays sustain the volunteers through two days of back-breaking work with the energizing beats of Ukrainian techno.

This presentation explores the impact of the ongoing military conflict on the Ukrainian rave scene and the ravers’ impact on restoration efforts. As a scholar of electronic dance music (EDM) scenes, I consider how this commitment to volunteerism manifests the EDM community’s values of peace, love, unity, and respect. Drawing on Jill Dolan’s theory of utopian performances, I suggest that these clean-up raves are important ways of imagining and actively working towards a better world, even in the midst of a dystopian present. While volunteers have been criticized for raving in a war-torn country, I argue that these embodied responses to the ongoing violence are meaningful cathartic experiences during which participants celebrate life, recovering a small sense of normalcy, enjoyment, and fulfillment. With evidence from interviews with Project Toloka volunteer workers and deejays, I demonstrate how raving is helping Ukrainians restore their homes, their culture, and themselves during this crisis.

On December 17, 1970, shipyard workers from Gdynia, Poland, demonstrated against the Communist government to protest food shortages and price increases. In response, government militiamen opened fire, killing perhaps three dozen workers, one of whom was 18-year-old Zbigniew Godlewski. Protestors carried Godlewski’s blood-stained body through the streets of Gdynia on a wooden door covered with a Polish flag—an image that immediately inspired Krzysztof Dowigałło to write a stirring poem, “Ballada o Janku Wiśniewskim” (“The Ballad of Janek Wiśniewski”), using a generic Polish name because authorities had not yet identified the victim as Godlewski. Ten years later, during the August 1980 strike at the nearby Gdańsk Shipyard, Dowigałło’s poem reached the singer Mieczysław Cholewa, who composed accompanying music and reproduced the song on bootleg cassettes. In July 1981—during a brief thaw in Communist censorship—filmmaker Andrzej Wajda released Człowiek z żelaza (Man of Iron), which concludes with a rousing rendition of the song by Polish actress-singer Krystyna Janda. The Communists imposed martial law in Poland on December 13, 1981, and banned Man of Iron, but Janda’s version of “The Ballad of Janek Wiśniewski” continued to circulate surreptitiously throughout Poland, serving as a symbol of democratic resistance, particularly its final stanza that Wiśniewski fell for bread and freedom, and for a new Poland. The song’s fascinating history notwithstanding, its significance remains little known outside Poland—a lacuna which this paper seeks to correct, thanks to selected secondary sources and thanks also to interviews with Poles who remember the song’s inspiring words and music.