Under direct orders from the President of the United States, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) intensified its raids and targeted deportations in 2025, terrorizing Mexican American communities in cities including Los Angeles. This wave of state violence ignited resistance within the local Chican@ ska scene. In response, bands like 8Kalacas have used their music and public presence to challenge these crackdowns. Through social media, musicians and fans situate themselves and the music within this resistance by posting images of their participation in protests while wearing band apparel alongside use of imagery signifying Mexico and Mexican social movements like the Zapatista uprising. Additionally, activists have incorporated lyrics by 8Kalacas into their signs and song recordings into videos posted from street demonstrations, using ska music as a visual and sonic declaration of defiance. My discussion engages with theories on music as a social movement tool (Manuel 2019), sonic activism in digital spaces (Danaher 2018), and the role of cultural memory in resistance (Melucci 1989, Eyerman and Jamison 1998). Drawing on digital ethnography and interviews with artists directly involved in social protests, I address the questions: how does the Chican@ ska scene frame its protest message through music and performance? How are these targeted political attacks directly felt within the Los Angeles ska community? In what ways does digital activism shape perceptions of artists’ political resistance? How are these current protest practices informed by other social justice movements in the United States and Mexico?

In this presentation, I explore the emergence of a novel performance space within the Islamic Noha (a ritual lament) tradition among Iranian Muslims, which I term “Islamic disco.” Traditionally, the combination of dynamic rhythmic elements and dancing is forbidden. However, to engage youth and attract them to Islamic ideology, the Islamic government inspired a new wave of Noha performances that have deviated from conventional forms by incorporating rhythmic patterns derived from EDM genres with other contemporary innovations, such as the release of professional music videos and the imitation of melodies of Tehrangelesi pop music (inspired by Iranian diaspora). I argue that this reconfiguration is not just a stylistic shift; it is a deliberate strategy aimed at engaging youth and recasting Islamic involvement. As an example of this, I will examine a Noha song, “Che Yali Bah Bah.” In January 2025, this performance drew significant online attention; while the state harnessed modern technology to promote its innovation, many young Iranians appropriated the performance on Instagram to mock the state-endorsed version, thereby transforming it into a tool of protest. Drawing on Homi J. Bhabha’s scholarship on cultural hybridity, I examine how the interplay of religious ritual, popular music, and social media disrupts established norms and exposes deeper tensions between state power and youth dissent. My analysis reveals how a totalitarian regime, in its fervor to promote a narrow religious ideology, oversteps the very red lines it has drawn on Iranian music.

As South Korean youth confront new formations of musical pasts through the ongoing newtro (new retro) trend, the popular emergence of City Pop destabilizes genre boundaries (Bauman & Briggs 1990), not merely reviving but actively reconfiguring musical categories through listening, (re)historicization, and material circulation (Bitter 2023, Feld 2012, Ochoa Gautier 2014). Initially associated with 1980s Japanese pop music and retroactively codified online (Sommet 2020, Wajima 2022), City Pop gained popularity among Koreans in the late 2010s. This revival became politically charged during Seoul’s 2019 Japanese Product Boycott demonstrations, where anti-Japanese sentiment (Ching 2019) spurred a reimagined “Korean City Pop,” crafting a post-authoritarian music history independent from Japanese influence. Yet, the continued appeal of intersecting “City Pop” variants amid this politicized sentiment unsettles nationalist listening frameworks. Drawing from fieldwork across Seoul’s LP bars, I foreground how aural relations between vinyl DJs and precariously employed Koreans foster the generative formation of personal playlists, which become an aural practice to navigate (un)belonging amid their broader alienation from the politics of everyday life in Seoul (Berardi 2015). Eschewing organizational—and national—constraints of City Pop-as-genre, I examine how everyday acts of playlisting, as both an analog archival practice and smartphone-based digital extraction, underscore relational intimacies that challenge reductive political narratives of contemporary Korean listening cultures—whether as national (anti)consumption (Kendall 2001) or an aural fetishization of the colonial Other (Robinson 2021). Writing through the (dis)organizational and (non)relational form of the playlist, I trace throughlines illustrating how these listening practices rework frameworks of sonic belonging in Korea.