Abstract: In recent years, Rising Voices has seen an increasing number of submissions from graduate student authors on topics relating to labor, music, and markets. Such conversations are happening parallel to the job market crisis in anglophone higher education, in which a vast pool of applicants compete for a handful of tenure-track positions each year. Given the significance of these topics to both students in ethnomusicology and to many of our research collaborators, the editors at Rising Voices have convened a round table of scholars representing diverse research areas and differing stages of their careers. Though questions surrounding public and applied ethnomusicology have produced a wealth of dialogue within our field, graduate students, particularly international students, face a particular set of challenges on the job market. Inspired by historian Erin Bartram’s (2018) “The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind,” we ask our participants: how do you understand the role of your labor in relation to collaborators, colleagues, and institutions? How can we retain community, support, and peer review with friends who ultimately leave academia? What has driven your motivations to stay in higher education? How do we define unpaid labor, and what are the reasons for participating (or not) in it? We are particularly interested in ways that ethnomusicology students who ultimately leave higher education might remain connected to our Society and contribute to networks of richly informed, mutually supportive, and academically engaged musicians in the broader world.

Presenters (alphabetical order by surname):

Kabelo Chirwa, University of Cincinnati
Mark Feng, University of California, Davis
Garrett Groesbeck, Wesleyan University, organizer
Abigail C. Lindo, The Ohio State University
Mark Lomanno, University of Miami
Marysol Quevedo, University of Miami