The Society for Ethnomusicology announces the inaugural “Returning” Workshop, prior to the 2026 Annual Meeting on Wednesday, November 4 in Bloomington, IN. Created in partnership with the Archives of Traditional Music, and co-sponsored by the SEM Executive Board, the SEM Indigenous Music Section, and the SEM Archiving SIG, this workshop will provide hands-on training for any practicing ethnomusicologist interested in connecting communities with their recorded sound and songs held in archives. We especially encourage attendance by graduate students and early career scholars.

The 2026 Workshop returns us to our roots as a discipline, where collections of sound recordings were created as part of standard professional practice. The collecting of songs and the subsequent study of them as sound objects was the professional activity upon which our discipline was founded.  Each of our intellectual ancestors likely participated in these activities, and so we as a discipline are the intellectual benefactors of this collective knowledge about the world’s music. However, as our colleagues during the 2023 Seeger Lecture have pointed out, this collective benefit enjoins collective responsibility.

The workshop also returns us to the rift created by collecting activities at the inception of sound archives: separating songs, sounds, and other media from their communities of origin. And yet, despite declining institutional support for music archives, high rates of staff turnover, and a loss of public support for higher education generally, archivists and archivist-scholars have engaged in sustained, significant, and innovative projects to reconnect communities to the collections. However, given the breadth and depth of archival collections, and the unreliable and diminishing support for trained archivists, the project of reconnecting ethnographic media collections with their communities cannot fall to archivists alone. Thus, we call for a broader movement of return; engaging in the cultural and logistical labor of reconnecting ethnomusicological collections to their communities.

This workshop calls for investment from all ethnomusicologists in the project of return (connecting communities to ethnomusicological collections) and provides professional development toward that end. The “Returning” Workshop is intended for ethnomusicologists with any specialization, with expertise in any musical tradition, to participate in the shared professional obligation to help with return. Participants will learn from distinguished specialists about potential models for proactive return at major ethnomusicological archives (such as the IU Archives of Traditional Music (ATM) and the American Folklife Center) as well as digital pathways to curate and provide responsible access to home communities. Participants will learn models for relationship building with communities, co-curation, and repatriation/rematriation. Participants will also have the opportunity to do hands-on work with staff from major archives in service of connecting collections and communities.

 

Proposed Schedule:

8:00 – 9:00am: Light Breakfast, Opening Remarks

9:00 – 10:30am: PANEL 1 - Why we Work on Return: History of Collecting as part of Colonial and Settler-Colonial Dispossession

10:30-10:45am: BREAK

10:45am – 12:15pm: PANEL 2 – Models for Return: Working Models, Digital Access Projects, Challenges and Opportunities

12:15 – 1:30pm: CATERED NETWORKING LUNCH

1:30-2:45pm: PANEL 3 – Futures of Return: Digital Pathways, Making Community Connections, and Future-Work Workflows

2:45 – 3:00pm: BREAK

3:00 – 5:00pm: Break-out Sessions for Hands-On Work with Archivists