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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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 26th Aug 2025, 07:04:46pm EDT

 
 
Session Overview
Session
01I: Music, Climate Change and Extractivism around the Arctic and Antarctic
Time:
Thursday, 23/Oct/2025:
8:00am - 10:00am

Location: M-303

Marquis Level 80

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Presentations

Music, Climate Change and Extractivism around the Arctic and Antarctic

Chair(s): Lonán Ó Briain (University of Nottingham)

By examining the interplay of social and environmental issues in different forms of music-making, this panel asks: What can we learn by attending to musical and sonic experiences at a time that increasingly feels like the end of the world? In answering that question, we explore musical mediations of environmental struggles within Earth’s north and south polar regions, focusing on how complexities of climate change and extractivism offer new but uncomfortable, emplaced cultural experiences that spur sonic actions and musicalized debates. In particular, this panel addresses how Greenland/Kalaallit Nunaat’s Inuit musical expressions contribute to public discourses of extractivism; how a goavddis (Sámi drum) created in the 1980s by Niillas Somby exemplifies resilience in the face of extractivism and climate change; how the figure of el petrolero (the petroleum worker) can reflect gendered and scalar value systems around weather sounding practices in Magallanes and Chilean Antarctica; and how Mapuche ül metal uses loudness, distortion and screaming as ways of resisting colonialism and extractivism in Chile. Through theories of extractivism and extrACTIVISM (Willow 2019), we delve into how histories of polar places and non-sustainable environmental practices inform musical aesthetics and activism as well as related experiences of the human and non-human (Moisala 2024) in contexts of popular music recordings and media, and Indigenous musical instruments. This panel thereby expands ethnomusicological studies of the entanglement of musical expressions in multiple environmental crises and provides the first instance in ecomusicology that case studies from the Arctic and Antarctic regions are put into dialogue.

 

Presentations in the Session

 

Mapping Extractivism, Divining the Present: Sámi More-than-Musical Instruments in a Changing Arctic

Nicola Renzi
University of Bologna/University of Helsinki

The goavddis is the oracular drum of the Sámi. More than a musical instrument, this membranophone encodes a cognitive map of the world, inscribed on its membrane as a complex figurative system. For centuries, its ritual percussion was suppressed by ecclesiastical forces across Fennoscandia. Few goavddis survived this colonial purge, their iconographic history mirroring the biocultural transformations of the European Arctic. This paper examines the iconographic and ecopolitical significance of a contemporary goavddis that – beyond current musical repurposing – has retained its ancestral role in divining the different turns and challenges that the present envisions for Sámi communities in a rapidly changing Arctic. The goavddis in question, crafted in the early 1980s by Sámi journalist and activist Niillas Somby, was built as a political statement against the Alta River hydroelectric project in the Norwegian Sápmi. Its membrane depicts the threats posed by this extractive industry on local ecosystems and Indigenous self-determination. Through dialogic analysis, this study presents an alternative ontology of Sámi drums, emphasizing their role as more-than-musical instruments, as defined by their crafters. Furthermore, the paper explores how – forty years after its construction – Niillas’ goavddis remains today an active site for consultation, comparison and reinterpretation of past and present crises, adapting ecological knowledge to the challenges posed by resource extraction and environmental degradation.

 

"Saca el petróleo pa' mi nación": Frontier Nostalgia and the Climate Hyperobject in Songs about the Patagonian Petroleum Industry

Lydia Wagenknecht
University of Colorado Boulder

Since the mid-20th century, the region of Magallanes and Chilean Antarctica in southern Chile has existed as a hotspot for the extraction and refinement of crude oil by the state-owned company ENAP (Empresa Nacional del Petróleo). As a result, the masculine-coded figure of el petrolero (the petroleum worker) has emerged in regional arts, including musical productions. In this presentation, I reflect on the disjunct and overlapping ways in which we might read el petrolero’s relation to climate within sonic contexts based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in southern Chile. First, I analyze the musical works al “Cantata al Petróleo” and “Petrolero” through a traditional, petrolero-centric lens. I demonstrate how, in an anthropocentric reading of the songs, the petrolero’s relationship to the climate serve as an embodiment of frontier nostalgia. I then place the first analysis in juxtaposition with an analysis that takes climate itself as a main actor, employing Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobject (2012, 2013) to highlight issues of scale beyond human conceptions of gender and place. By bringing these two perspectives into dialogue, I show how both gendered and scalar value systems are reflected in human acoustemological practices. These overlapping and contradictory interpretations of the songs also examine how decentering the human can reconfigure understandings of sonic phenomena to include massive space-time scales. This presentation contributes to current ethnomusicological discourse on acoustic ecologies and anthropocentrism, suggesting a novel frame for hearing climate change and extractivism.

 

Relistening to the Current Environmental Crises in Chile through Mapuche Ül Metal

Jan Koplow
Duke University

In a short documentary released in 2023, Mawiza, a Mapuche Ül metal band from Santiago, Chile, stated “If we are Mawiza (mountain/forest), we have to be more deafening than the noise of the city. There may be giant skyscrapers and constructions but always mountains and volcanoes will surpass them, resist to the end, and roar louder.” As the band highlights diverse contexts, activities, and ecosystems, such as subpolar and alpine regions, their statement conveys an intriguing conceptualization of nature’s identity and its sonic capabilities, one where metal music's transgressive sonic elements (i.e., loudness, distortion, and screaming) seem not only compatible, but emerge as guiding aesthetic features. Mapuche’s history in Chile has characterized itself with a continuous colonialism, one that has only worsened with the implementation of neoliberalism during the 1980s and the exacerbation of extractivism in the following decades (Cárcamo-Huechante 2019, Svampa 2019). Within this history, metal music gradually became a tool for facing settler-colonial dynamics, Chile's and Chilean Antarctica's ecological situations, and extractivism’s social impacts. Though ethnomusicologists concerned with the intersection between settler-colonial dynamics and environmental issues have studied how music mediates and informs connections to land and the manifestation of environmental resistance, there has been a tendency to focus on traditional, folk and acoustic musical genres. Consequently, this presentation aims to expand the scope by exploring how distortion, loudness and screaming can work as modes to think, listen and perform new senses of place, ways to relate to our surrounding environments, and paths to overcome socioecological issues. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEWQZxbrhms