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

Keynote Speaker: Allie Martin (Dartmouth College)

Film Screening Organized by the Journal of Audiovisual Ethnomusicology

At this year’s SEM Annual Meeting in Atlanta, the Journal of Audiovisual Ethnomusicology (JAVEM) will host a special film screening at the Limelight Theatre. Two recent works will be featured:

• Mind, Hands Work: Fidel Sambou Builds an Ekonting (dir. Scott Linford) — A portrait of Senegalese musician-sculptor Fidel Sambou, exploring instrument making as a creative, embodied process and highlighting his innovations in crafting the Jola ekonting.

• Forbidden Sound (dir. Meng Ren) — A vivid documentary on Hip Hop in China, examining its history, underground scenes, and the cultural and political challenges faced by artists working under censorship and social constraint.

The Journal of Audiovisual Ethnomusicology (JAVEM) is a bi-annual, peer-reviewed streaming journal sponsored by the Society for Ethnomusicology. Dedicated to advancing the use of multimedia as both method and medium in ethnomusicology, JAVEM provides a vital public platform for ethnomusicological films. By hosting screenings and multimedia installations, the journal creates opportunities for scholar-filmmakers to reach broader audiences, engage diverse stakeholders, and foster dialogue across academic and public spheres.

Join us for an evening of music, film, and conversation that showcases cutting-edge work in audiovisual ethnomusicology and reflects the renewed energy surrounding film as an essential ethnomusicological practice.

This discussion centers on how academic institutions, including universities, museums, and public organizations, can work together to respond to increasing threats to academic freedom, which are becoming more widespread globally. As anti-intellectualism rises, research- and education- focused institutions face escalating pressures through attacks on funding, accreditation, research resources, and nonprofit status. The conversation explores how scholars, particularly in fields like ethnomusicology, can collaborate across organizations and disciplines to protect intellectual freedom, and how institutions can learn from each other’s strengths and vulnerabilities in the face of these challenges. What is the role of SEM in a moment like the present? How can SEM members internationally work together to bolster intellectual freedom, and explore strategies for collaboration and mutual support, rather than competing for increasingly limited resources? What creative ways can we use to speak to public audiences directly? We invite panelists and participants to think expansively about preserving access to higher education, and the protection of public trust in research, even amid financial and political pressures.

Rose Library at Emory University houses over 30 collections (and growing) related to African American artists and musicians from New York, the U.S. South, and around the world. Prominent collections include composers William Dawson, Undine Smith Moore, and George Walker; entertainers such as Victoria Spivey, Bricktop, and Geoffrey Holder; and researchers such as Rae Linda Brown (biographer of Florence Price), Geneva Southall, and Delilah Jackson. Rose Library has also begun collecting from contemporary Atlanta's hip hop scene, including a collection from entrepreneur and entertainer Darryl "Jasz" Smith, founder of Earwax Records. During the tour, you will see a draft of Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony, a manuscript of a spiritual arrangement by H.T. Burleigh, a contract from Spivey's blues record label, and many more one-of-a-kind documents—as well as beautiful views of Atlanta and the Emory campus from the 10th floor.

The tour will be led by Dwight Andrews, Professor of Music Theory and African American Music at Emory University and Pastor of First Congregational Church, UCC. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan, the Yale Divinity School, and a PhD in Music Theory from Yale University. He has taught at Yale, Harvard, and Rice Universities. As an instrumentalist, he has appeared on over twenty-five jazz and ‘new music’ recordings and been recognized for his collaborations with playwright August Wilson. He served as musical director for the Broadway productions of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, The Piano Lesson, and Seven Guitars. His film credits include The Old Settler, The Piano Lesson, and Miss Evers' Boys. His research interests include race, identity, and aesthetics. Andrews is currently working on a manuscript on the intersection between spirituality and jazz.

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.

BFE Roundtable: Who can be an ethnomusicologist?

Panellists: Yuiko Asaba (SOAS, University of London), Beverley Diamond (Memorial University), Amanda Hsieh (Durham University), Alisha Lola Jones (University of Cambridge), Lonán Ó Briain (University of Nottingham), Ioannis Tsioulakis (Queen’s University Belfast)

Chair: Byron Dueck (The Open University)

Alan Burdette (Society for Ethnomusicology), Shannon Garland (University of Pittsburgh), Amelia López López (Indiana University), Alejandrina M. Medina (University of California - San Diego), Gabriel Solis (University of Washington), with Matt Sakakeeny (moderator) (Tulane) 

This roundtable is organized as a response to threats to universities and granting institutions that have narrowed opportunities in education, research, and employment for ethnomusicologists. In the U.S. today, budget and staffing cuts to the NEH, NEA, NSF, the Smithsonian, and other institutions have deeply impacted SEM and our membership. The universities that train and hire ethnomusicologists have imposed austerity measures in response to a general reduction in funding and the exclusion of specific research topics. The elimination of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and targeting of “gender ideology” has undermined the very foundations of ethnomusicology’s core values of fostering cultural understanding through music. And international students are facing particular challenges in the revocation of visas, travel restrictions, surveillance, and even deportation. How will these economic and ideological shifts impact the prospects for graduate education and the job market for ethnomusicologists? How do the recent changes in U.S. politics relate to a global shift to “far-right” governments? How should we contextualize the current crisis within a longer history of struggle for those without employment, contingent faculty, and underfunded students. And what unique insights can be gained from ethnomusicologists in the public sector witnessing and experiencing the hollowing out of higher education? In addition to reviewing potential impacts, the roundtable will offer suggestions on how SEM might help mitigate the challenges facing members. The panelists include graduate students, faculty, university administrators, and non-profit workers each with unique knowledge how the current crisis might reshape the future of ethnomusicology.

2025 Charles Seeger Lecture: Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje

The Fiddle/Violin in African American Culture: Meanings and Associations.

Introduction by Birgitta J. Johnson, University of South Carolina

The Charles Seeger Lecturer for the SEM 2025 Annual Meeting, held in Atlanta, Georgia, is UCLA Professor Emerita of Ethnomusicology Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje. She will discuss “The Fiddle/Violin in African American Culture: Meanings and Associations.” Her retirement from UCLA in 2013 as a Distinguished Professor marked 34 years of service and leadership to the university in the Departments of Ethnomusicology, Music, and the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA in 1979, DjeDje taught at the historic Tuskegee University (1975-179). Her collegiate education in music began as a piano major at another HBCU and the birthplace of American concert spirituals, Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Her time at UCLA actually began when she was a graduate student where she earned her master’s and doctoral degrees. It was at UCLA in the 1970s and working with “the father of African musicology” J.H. Kwabena Nketia that “Jackie" began a lifelong pursuit of researching African and African American musical traditions, documenting their connections as well as their distinctions. She is particularly interested in how the dynamics of urban life give rise to change and other musical activity. In addition to conducting fieldwork in several countries in West Africa (Cote d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal), East Africa (Ethiopia), North Africa (Egypt and Morocco), as well as Jamaica, she has also done ethnographic research in various parts of the United States such as California, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, North Carolina, and Virginia. In her 1942 autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road, anthropologist and Black feminist literary pioneer Zora Neale Hurston defined research as “…formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” Professor DjeDje’s contributions to the fields of ethnomusicology, Africana studies, history, and archiving exemplify the kinds of excellence a life of focused poking and prying can yield to the world. In the encomium for her 2020 SEM Honorary Member recognition I noted, “she is a scholar of excellence, distinction, tenacity, candor, and respect who gently pushes her students, colleagues, and community to dig deeper, ask more questions, and add to the overall cultural historical narrative from as many angles as possible. She has been a remarkable presence in the discipline of Ethnomusicology serving in numerous roles that modern ethnomusicologists strive to embody today.”