Conference Agenda

The Online Program of events for the SEM 2025 Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early October.

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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).

Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 18th Oct 2025, 04:44:33pm EDT

 
 
Session Overview
Session
07A: The “Halfie’s” Mental Health: Recentering International Students in the US American Ethnomusicology
Time:
Friday, 24/Oct/2025:
1:45pm - 3:45pm

Session Chair: Chun-Chia Tai
Presenter: Ana Maria Diaz Pinto, University of California Diaz
Presenter: Diandian Zeng, University of California, Santa Barbara
Presenter: Chun-Chia Tai
Presenter: Mark Hsiang-Yu Feng
Location: M-301

Marquis Level

Sponsored by the International Student Network for Music and Sound Studies and the SEM Board


Session Abstract

In 1991, Lila Abu-Lughod used the term “halfies”—scholars whose national or cultural identities are mixed through migration, overseas education, and related experiences—to highlight the challenges they face in writing ethnography. Nearly twenty-five years later, while ethnomusicology has long acknowledged the contributions of such “in-betweenness” to the field, the struggles it creates in daily life are still too often treated as individual responsibilities. International students, for instance, arrive from abroad but are involuntarily drawn into the political turmoil of their host countries, where they lack the right to participate in politics. Since early 2025, ongoing unrest and shifting immigration policies have left international students with no option but to manage these uncertainties on their own. In this roundtable, the International Student Network invited four international students to share their struggles with mental health and suggest ways academia might better support them. They emphasized that while international students have become adept at navigating legal restrictions, the constant changes take a heavy toll on mental health, disrupting both knowledge production and the basic goal of graduating. Rigid academic timelines compound these pressures, while campus services often fail to address the anxieties rooted in state power. International students have long been celebrated for contributing to campus diversity and, in ethnomusicology, for connecting us to global music cultures while revealing shifting political landscapes that urge us to rethink and decolonize the field. Their struggles, we contend, are therefore not individual burdens but collective responsibilities of the ethnomusicology community.