This 120-minute roundtable, convened in conjunction with the American Folklife Center’s (AFC) 50th Anniversary, will examine AFC’s longstanding and future-facing relationship with the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) and the discipline of ethnomusicology. Framed as a facilitated conversation, presenters will address how AFC collections, programs, and professional practices have developed in parallel with SEM and the discipline of ethnomusicology as a whole, while considering how AFC can continue to serve as a vital resource for ethnomusicologists in the decades ahead.

The roundtable will open with an overview from Panelist 1 situating the historical trajectories of SEM and AFC and reflecting on the collaborative ecosystems that support ethnomusicological work. Panelist 2 will focus on collections associated with prominent ethnomusicologists and SEM’s history, underscoring AFC’s role in preserving the intellectual and institutional memory of the field. Panelist 3 will consider major disciplinary trends, such as sound studies and commons-based approaches, and examine how these frameworks inform current and emerging archival practices at AFC. Panelist 4 will address AFC’s public-facing and digital initiatives, including online concerts, lectures, and audio resources. Panelist 5 will highlight research and teaching support offered by AFC, including reference services, grants and fellowships, research orientations, support for teaching with primary sources, and acquisition of archival collections.

Through collective discussion between participants and attendees, the session aims to articulate and shape AFC’s ongoing and future contributions to SEM and the field at large.

This roundtable considers twin notions of care and service and their relevance to fieldwork, practice, and the overlapping roles of professional academics. Engaging with queer and feminist theories, we discuss service both to the communities whose music we study and to others who are served by our expertise. Drawing upon an ethics of care (Gilligan, Tronto) we raise the question: how would viewing our scholarly activities - including research, teaching, and outreach - through the lenses of service and care inform our views of, relationships with, and obligations toward communities we serve.

Presenter1 considers how long-term research led her to become Greek Orthodox liturgical chanter and how this experience changed her perspectives toward women’s role in performance. Presenter2 shares a collaboration between local accordionists and an educational institution toward a concert that supported the institution’s future in return for members’ help in researching its past. Presenter3 theorizes queer politics of Sacred Harp singing as an active participant and volunteer within singing communities. Presenter4 explores how scholars, students and performers participate in communities of care through an experimental sound conference. Presenter5 examines how community needs dramatically shape the direction of scholarly work within a collegiate West African drumming ensemble. Presenter6 documents global music ensembles on college campuses and how individual directors nurture intercultural communities within institutional structures that offer scant recognition of their labor. Taken as a whole, our roundtable opens space for discussion of scholarly and musical activities that advance accessibility, inclusion, and social justice in disparate settings.

This panel seeks to dislocate the archive from its institutional and written moorings with a focus on transnational Arab cultural geographies. By siting archival matter in ephemeral and natural resources and by locating archival agency and intervention in artistic practices, we reconsider archival processes and scholarship in relation to sensoriality, materiality, and cultural geography. The first paper considers how water becomes an archival formation – a sonic container for memories and stories of those who can no longer speak – while reflecting on Arab diaspora artists’ use of archive as a metaphor for institutional power. The second paper examines how archives function in relation to creativity and scholarship by reframing the special collection archives of the sonic experimentalist and composer Halim El Dabh in relation to contemporary sonic artworks and retrospectives inspired by El Dabh. The third paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Egypt’s Diana Market to conceptualise street markets as archive and everyday practices in the street market as a method that attunes to the material life of musical things. Together, the panel addresses how the notion of archive becomes an object of study, artistic experimentation and drive for collecting personal items and stories that preserve imagined collective and personal histories from the MENA region. We ask the following questions: in what ways do practitioners, collectors and scholars engage with the language and logic of the archive? And what is the role of sensory experience in the formation and distribution of archival stories across different institutional and spatial formations?

This paper theorizes Mongolian musical practice in Inner Mongolia as a form of ecological mediation that challenges dominant separations between culture and nature. Rather than approaching sound as symbolic representation, I argue that musical practices actively produce relationships among humans, animals, land, and governance under conditions of accelerating ecological transformation.

Drawing on ongoing fieldwork, interviews with musicians and instrument makers, and documentation of ritual and performance contexts, I examine how ecological knowledge is embedded in vocal production, instrumental timbre, and material practices. Vocal forms such as long song and throat singing enact modes of listening attuned to wind, animal movement, and spatial openness, while rhythmic structures resonate with histories of nomadic mobility. These music practices articulate relational ethics grounded in interdependence with the grassland.

At the same time, musical sound becomes a site where environmental disruption and regulatory intervention are negotiated. Under intensified grassland management policies and shifting economic structures, narratives surrounding music register dispossession, constraint, and uneven power relations. The story of Suhe and his white horse is a folk story often linked to the morin khuur, can be read not simply as folklore but as an acoustic response to loss and territorial rupture.

By positioning sound as a material and political force, this paper explores how music, as a material and political force, carries ecological knowledge that can support or question contemporary environmental practices.

This paper extends a transnational ethnography of contemporary Hani music, the aural expressions of people who identify as descendants of an ethnic group in Southern China, Laos, and Vietnam. In the past decade, a vibrant reggae scene has been flourishing in Yunnan, Southwest China, where bands led by ethnic minorities gained recognition through album releases and international tours, alongside the rise of regional record labels (e.g. Sea of Woods). Among those joining this wave are Hani musicians (e.g. band “Wild Mushrooms”), who mobilize reggae, ska, and psychedelic elements to reimagine traditional folk songs in contemporary musical production.

By examining Hani musical innovations as a critical case of “Yunnan Reggae” and “Global Grooves,” this paper asks how the intersection of Afro-diasporic genres and Hani traditions engender new forms of intercultural interaction, minority identity negotiation, and transnational circuits. I argue that Hani musicians do not position themselves as preservers of “heritage” or participants in “world music” markets; rather, they develop what I call “counterpublic musicking” practices that articulate dynamic forms of Hani identity (Small 1998; Warner 2002). Gleaning insights from ethnomusicological scholarship of mediation, circulation, and mobility (Meintjes 1990; Novak 2013; Kielman 2022), this paper challenges ethnonationalist logics and reconceptualizes “caifeng” (采风) in Chinese folk music studies—a practice that documents minority music through short-term visits to rural villages. Treating recording studios, live performances, and record label practices as key sites of circulation, this project repositions Hani music within global circuits and listening publics while foregrounding its sonic mobilities and creative transgressions.

Despite its definition as a non-immigrant nation, China embodies a structural contradiction by becoming the unanticipated destination for Asia’s largest African diaspora. Since the late 1990s, transnational commerce driven by African migrants has transformed Guangzhou’s urban enclaves into a vital Afro-Asian hub (Mathews 2019; Lan 2017). However, a profound dissonance exists between this tangible presence and its inscription in official archives. While state media frames African music as a political symbol or exoticized display, authentic diasporic voices remain muted. Their sonic expressions, rooted in memories of home and global markets, are rendered inaudible within mainstream records. I conceptualize this absence not as a vacuum, but as a blank history. Drawing on Veena Das (2020), I argue these silences are inhabited by everyday struggles and tacit knowledge that homogeneous official archives fail to register yet are haunted by. To access this history, I employ “listening to the text” (Ochoa Gautier 2014) to interrogate gaps in media reports and urban descriptors. Following Xu (2025), I treat these textual silences as active sites where fleeting sounds and embodied practices can be reconstructed. This inquiry gains urgency post-2020, as pandemic-era policies triggered a mass exodus (China Times 2024). As African residents navigate a precarious return, this blank history becomes critical for understanding their resilience. By attending to the friction between their silenced everyday realities and China’s hegemonic narratives, this study renders the diaspora’s invisible history visible, revealing a sonic presence surviving within the texture of the ordinary.

After the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the state announced the existence of 56 ethnic groups, including the Han, the vast ethnic majority accounting for over 90 percent of China’s population, and 55 ethnic minorities. Every Chinese citizen, every musician, has been officially registered as belonging to one of these 56 ethnic groups. Since then, these 56 ethnic categories have remained persistent identifiers in the collection, documentation, and publication of Chinese music, as well as in the nomination, inscription, and preservation of musical traditions as Intangible Cultural Heritage elements. In the meantime, ethnic minorities have been a frequent theme in the musical representations of China and Chinese culture.

This article calls for rethinking some of the 56 official ethnic categories in the study of Chinese music. Based on ethnographic research conducted over the past two decades, I argue that these ethnicities were proposed only after 1949 as a state-sanctioned way of understanding China’s cultural others and of reshaping hundreds of existing groups native to the annexed lands who still maintained diverse non-Chinese cultures. Therefore, I suggest that ethnomusicologists avoid using these ethnic categories uncritically as analytical starting points or labels to summarize the cultural backgrounds and identities of musicians. This paper further examines how music helps actualize these ethnic categories by generating shared attributes among culturally diverse groups categorized as the same ethnic minority and by helping the nationwide public and global audiences imagine the millennia-long existence and cultural unity of these recently proposed ethnicities.

In contexts of forced displacement, children and young people are often framed through narratives of crisis, vulnerability, and integration. Within these accounts, their musical lives and creative capacities are frequently overlooked. This panel places musical arts at the centre, examining how displaced young people use creative practice to negotiate belonging, sustain cultural memory, and imagine shared futures across transit, waiting, and resettlement.

The three papers explore how collaborative arts practices operate as sites of world-making under rupture and mobility. Together, they consider how music-making creates spaces for young people to express layered connections to place, culture, and community; how participation can unsettle dominant narratives of trauma and resilience; and how collective creation supports processes of social connection and integration. Rather than treating music as a therapeutic tool or symbolic inclusion, the panel understands it as embodied, relational, and inherently political practice.

Drawing on applied and community-based research with displaced young people in diverse settings, the presenters show how musical engagement enables the authorship of complex identities and the cultivation of emplacement within shifting geographies. For some participants, music sustains intergenerational and transnational ties; for others, it offers space for experimentation and the emergence of hybrid identities grounded in a changing sense of “here.”

Bringing together scholars at different career stages, including members with lived experience of displacement, the panel concludes with a discussant who situates the papers within contemporary ethnomusicological debates and reflects on the methodological and implications of engaging music as collaborative practice oriented toward creative possibility.

Reggaetón and salsa are two musical genres connected not merely by shared geography but by their racial politics, transnational trajectories, and regional stances. Salsa artists like Rubén Blades have claimed that, although reggaetón musicians are perceived as requiring a different technical training in their craft, they have adopted lyrical styles and other aesthetic aspects of salsa vieja. This link has been explicit in the rhetoric of reggaetón practitioners: Old-school Puerto Rican reggaetón musicians like Eddie Dee and Daddy Yankee have been vocal about drawing inspiration from the maestros salseros while honoring this legacy through albums and performances. Yet, how does this connection extend beyond sampling practices and discursive references? This paper examines the transformation of Puerto Rican reggaetón’s compositional practices through its rhythmic and historical relationship with salsa, focusing on how the clave rhythm of salsa has shaped and counter-shaped the dancehall riddim and singing/rapping flows of reggaetón. Through a close reading of the 2004 album 12 Discipulos, in which 12 famous reggaetón artists pay homage to salsa, we explore the extent to which the instrumental layers and songs align or misalign with clave. Drawing on Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation (1990), we contend that the rhythmic encounter between clave and dancehall riddim articulates a musical genealogy of diasporic belonging in an ongoing negotiation rooted in Black Atlantic diasporic traditions shared by these two pan-Latino genres. By examining how reggaetón discourse materializes in rhythmic design, this discussion contributes to balancing the role of musical sounds and discourse in ethnomusicology.

During World War I, music played a crucial role in the lives of soldiers in the United States Armed Forces as a result of systematic efforts to integrate it into military culture through phonograph records, singing groups, artistic performances, and the expansion of military bands. (Suisman, 2024) In 1917, nineteen years after the United States took possession of Puerto Rico through the Treaty of Paris, U.S. citizenship was imposed on the citizens of the archipelago, enabling Puerto Rican musicians to be part of this process through military recruitment. This paper examines the United States military’s strategic use of music in Puerto Rico, exploring why the U.S. Armed Forces sought to integrate Puerto Rican soldiers into its musical initiatives, and highlighting the resulting issues of racial, social, and musical identity that arose from this process. Drawing on historical newspapers and military documents, I argue that military bands served as a tool for shaping new hegemonic relationships on the archipelago through a musical framework that reinforced the musical and aesthetic values of the United States. Additionally, these performances functioned as sites of racialization, where Puerto Rican musicians were categorized and understood within U.S. racial and cultural hierarchies. By situating Puerto Rican military bands within the broader political, colonial, and social context, this study sheds light on how music served as an instrument of imperial power and identity formation, contributing to broader discussions of music, militarization, and race in the early twentieth century.

Between 1949 and 1960s, a period in Puerto Rican history some scholars call the Muñozismo period, was marked by an ambitious wave of infrastructural and cultural reforms aimed at overcoming economic constraints inherited from the Great Depression, as the government pursued modernization through state-funded programs known as Operation Bootstrap and later Operation Serenidad. (Lazo, 2017) The administration of the first Puerto Rican elected governor, Luis Muñoz Marín (1898–1980), implemented a cultural program that positioned music at the center of state-building and national identity formation. Music operated between these programs: the internationalization of Puerto Rico through European-derived classical institutions and the curation of popular and traditional musics through educational media and heritage initiatives. This paper argues that during the Muñozismo period, two parallel but unequal musical priorities were institutionalized. An analysis of these asymmetries reveals a Eurocentric cultural logic embedded within Muñozismo, whereby popular and traditional musics were elevated as markers of national identity yet denied the same institutional permanence, prestige, and international projection afforded to the classical tradition. In this framework, European classical music became the primary vehicle through which the state performed modernity, legitimacy, and refinement on the global stage, while vernacular traditions were preserved as heritage—valuable but not institutionally sovereign within the same hierarchy of national representation. By examining funding structures, publicity campaigns, institutional archives, and interviews with affiliated individuals, this study demonstrates that cultural policy under Muñoz Marín organized a hierarchy of cultural value that shaped Puerto Rico’s national image and its place within transnational modernity.

During the 1920s, radio station WKAQ in San Juan, Puerto Rico, played a key role in shaping the island’s national identity through its musical programming. Inaugurated in 1922 with a broadcast from the Teatro Rialto, WKAQ was among the first radio stations in Latin America and quickly became a fixture of musical life on the island. Influential figures such as Joaquín Burset, the station’s artistic director, and the Figueroa-Sanabia family curated musical tastes by hosting frequent, diverse radio concerts featuring the station’s studio orchestra and other popular ensembles. These performances included works by local Puerto Rican composers, as well as classical and U.S. popular music. Station host Joaquín Agusty and Burset emphasized that all musical broadcasts should include at least one piece in the style of a danza, Puerto Rico’s national music genre. Applying a historical-ethnographic lens to contemporaneous census data, U.S. Department of Commerce trade reports, printed programs, and historical newspapers, this paper traces WKAQ’s early years, revealing the station’s financial structure, reach, and programming. I argue that by consistently featuring local genres and musicians, WKAQ helped shape Puerto Rican national identity and consolidate a distinct Puerto Rican musical canon. The experimental nature of radio in the 1920s, combined with Puerto Rico’s cultural self-assertion under U.S. colonialism, positions this case study to provide valuable insight into how emerging mass media technologies influenced nation-building, popular tastes, and canon formation in the early twentieth century.

In the postwar era, enka was canonized as the “soul of Japan,” a cultural vessel projecting a unified national identity (Yano 2003). Yet this quintessential “Japaneseness” was itself a postwar construction that effaced broader Asian entanglements (Bourdaghs 2012; Shamoon 2014). This process aligned with what Dower (2009) terms “imperial democracy”—a project that sought to forge a democratic future by disavowing an imperial past. In this shift, former colonial subjects—most notably Zainichi (ethnic Koreans remaining in Japan)—were rendered socially and historically invisible.

I argue, however, that this "national purification" of enka exposed the inherent fragility of its claim to a homogeneous Japanese essence. A primary symptom of this fragility was the persistent circulation of rumors suggesting that certain iconic enka singers were "secretly Korean" (Wajima 2018). These rumors functioned as a form of sonic surveillance, where public discourse scrutinized vocal styles, birthplaces, and biographies to patrol the borders of Japaneseness.

The paradox, then, runs deep: if the Zainichi presence was meant to be relegated to the nation's margins, why did the "soul of Japan" become the very site where that presence repeatedly surfaced in the public imagination? Drawing on Gordon’s (2008) concept of haunting, I suggest that these recurring suspicions reveal the impossibility of severing a national sound from its imperial history. The voices mobilized to chant postwar unity were inextricably linked to the colonial circuits of labor that produced them, revealing enka not as a purified essence, but as a genre fundamentally structured by its imperial traces.

Two strikes of a temple bell announce the beginning of a chant, and the presiding priest begins to intone the first line of Shinran Shonin’s Shoshinge. Attendees and other priests join in the second line, filling the worship hall with a mix of voices. At other times the main worship hall resounds with worshippers reciting the name of Amida Buddha, namo amida butsu, as a response of gratitude after hearing a reading from a letter of Rennyo Shōnin or a particularly moving Dharma talk. These are some of the quotidian sounds of a Buddhist temple in the Jōdō Shinshū sect which, while ubiquitous in presence, may not engender commonality in meaning or interpretation. Following recent insights by Yun Emily Wang, this paper will consider the temple as a “site of multiple, competing interpellations” generated by the multiple levels of attendance and engagement, from priest to lay, tourist, or even researcher (2025). Based on fieldwork at Buddhist temples in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, I argue that sounds and music heard generate new modes of being for participants through their meditative, participatory, and transformative potential for priests and lay. While sonic practice may be shared by all in attendance, the meanings, applications, and expectations of those sounds for each person are varied. Hearing the temple in this way, ethnomusicologists can further nuance the discussion of Japanese religious engagement int the twenty-first century, showing sound as fundamental to the persistance of religious teachings in Japan.

During the U.S. occupation of Okinawa (1945–1972), jazz musicians performed largely on American military bases, where musical labor was organized along racial and military hierarchies. These musicians mastered American swing and big band styles to meet the expectations of U.S. audiences, often suppressing local cultural expression in favor of sonic mimicry. Following the reversion of Okinawa to Japan in 1972 and the collapse of base entertainment, many musicians were forced out of professional performance, yet jazz persisted through informal sessions, small clubs, and intergenerational mentorship. This paper examines the historical transformation of jazz in Okinawa from a form of military entertainment under U.S. occupation to a locally rooted cultural practice known today as “Uchinā jazz.”

Drawing on oral history interviews with first- and later-generation Okinawan jazz musicians, archival research and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Okinawa, I show how jazz has been continually reshaped by shifting political, economic, and cultural conditions on the islands since 1945. I argue that Okinawan jazz has undergone a process of sonic reclamation. Musicians increasingly integrate Ryukyuan folk melodies, indigenous scales, and themes of war memory and peace into jazz performance, reframing the genre as a medium of cultural belonging rather than imported entertainment. By situating Okinawan jazz within broader debates on cultural hybridity, globalization, and postcolonial musical exchange, this study complicates center-periphery models of jazz globalization. It demonstrates how a genre shaped by asymmetrical power relations can be reappropriated to articulate local histories, intergenerational memory, and Okinawan cultural identity in a global context.

This paper examines the collaborative development of "Harmony between Heaven and Earth (HHE)," a guqin-based wellness program created in partnership with the Tucson Chinese Cultural Center in Southern Arizona. Addressing gaps in cultural diversity within music-and-health research, the study asks how ethnomusicologically informed, community-based approaches can be used to design music and wellness programs that meaningfully serve diasporic communities. Based on weekly stakeholder meetings as well as interviews and ongoing conversations with community members and guqin practitioners, the research documents local perspectives on wellness-oriented approaches to music learning grounded in cultural philosophy and lived experience. Over the past three decades, scholarship in medical and applied ethnomusicology has demonstrated music’s role in health and healing as a culturally situated phenomenon, often through ethnographic, collaborative, and intervention-based studies. However, comparatively less attention has been given to diasporic communities, where health values and practices may be marginalized within North American systems. I argue that culturally grounded, participatory program design—rooted in ethnomusicological engagement with community values, histories, and musical traditions—is essential for promoting wellbeing in diasporic settings. Building on existing scholarship while addressing this gap, the paper proposes an integrative framework that bridges ethnomusicology and health promotion through the collaborative design of a guqin-based wellness program situated in a cultural center. By foregrounding non-clinical notions of wellbeing, community participation, and cultural sustainability, this study contributes to applied ethnomusicology by offering a model for collaborative research that expands the field’s role within interdisciplinary Arts in Health initiatives.

Anglophone evangelical Christianity has witnessed a profound exodus over the past two decades, with one estimate putting the number at more than 25 million in the USA alone (Gushee 2020). Some members of this cohort of mostly white, politically liberal young adults—often dubbed “exvangelicals”—have abandoned organized religion altogether, while others have migrated into myriad other forms of historical Christianity. But often shared across these trajectories is a particular distaste for the industrial machinery of contemporary praise and worship music. Christian popular culture and worship music, in particular, is a conflicted carrier for markers of political identity and social position and may also be tied to ongoing spiritual and familial trauma. But perhaps because of this spectral presence, it often continues to loom large in the exvangelical imagination. In this paper, I examine two case studies—American songwriter David Bazan and the Australian rock band Gang of Youths—in an attempt to understand how even those explicitly rejecting contemporary worship music are continuing to feel its push-and-pull.

Aiding my analysis is the theoretical concept of metamodernism—a term coined by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker to describe an aesthetics of oscillation “between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity” (2010). Metamodernism in both form and content helps elucidate the multivalent relationships to music within my case studies and unveil an ongoing hauntology of worship music even amongst those who have left the faith behind.

Following the fall of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian Protestant church experienced a revival of congregational singing, drawing heavily from Russian-language worship traditions and Western contemporary Christian music translated into Russian and Ukrainian. During this time of renewed religious freedom, Russian and Ukrainian languages coexisted in worship, with translated songs offering accessible expressions for a newly energized faith community. However, the creation of indigenous Ukrainian worship music was largely overlooked. In the wake of Russia’s war on Ukraine, the Protestant church is now re-evaluating this borrowed worship tradition. With increasing national emphasis on Ukrainian language and identity, churches have begun transitioning entirely to Ukrainian-language songs. Many now critique Western worship imports (e.g., Hillsong, Elevation) as theologically and poetically inadequate to express the grief and resilience of a suffering nation. In response, Ukrainian Christian leaders and musicians are initiating a movement toward songwriting rooted in local theology, language, and aesthetics. Ethnodoxology-based training and graduate degrees are emerging to support this cultural and spiritual shift. Based on the researchers’ experiences and interactions with Ukrainians from before and during the war, this presentation explores the early stages of this movement and offers theoretical insights for contexts where worship and identity are being reimagined in response to conflict and cultural transformation.

The Syrian Christians of Kerala, one of India’s ancient Christian communities, trace their origins to the evangelization of Thomas the Apostle. During the colonial era, European missionaries sought to reform this community by vernacularizing the Syriac liturgy. Through printed hymnals and catechetical formation, Carnatic music, the classical tradition of South India, was integrated into Christian worship. In post-independence India, the Church institutionalized this practice through competitions that promoted Carnatic compositions and trained generations of musicians. Building on scholarship on vernacular Christianity and South Indian classical music, this paper traces the trajectory of Carnatic music among Kerala’s Christian communities, examining continuity and change in its adaptation across colonial and postcolonial contexts. While Carnatic music is often framed as an exclusively Hindu art form, this study shows how Christian composers and performers reshaped it as a vehicle of devotional expression and communal identity. In contemporary India, this tradition faces renewed tension as hate campaigns target performers of non-Hindu Carnatic compositions, reflecting Hindutva ideology that seeks to define classical music within a Hindu framework. By historicizing Christian encounters with Carnatic music from colonial translation to contemporary resistance, this paper challenges assumptions about Indian classical music as religiously bounded. It demonstrates how Christian musicians navigate cultural and political pressures while continuing to create and perform, offering a model for understanding how minority communities inhabit and transform majoritarian musical traditions. The study contributes to ethnomusicological debates on music, religion, and cultural nationalism while foregrounding sound as a site of devotion and contestation in modern India.

This presentation considers the notion of post-secularism as a lens to study Christian Indigenous song in Brazil—specifically the repertoire and practices of Paiter-Suruí Christians—through critical reflection on my fieldwork experiences and research process. The continuance and resurgence of multiple religions worldwide as well as debates over the place of religion in scholarship has led scholars in diverse fields (e.g., Habermas 2008, Milbank 2006, Asad 2003) to explore post-secularism as a concept to describe how secularisms and religions interact. Though the disciplines of anthropology and theology presumably developed in opposition, recent scholarship details how the Enlightenment project structured both areas of study (Larsen 2014; Robbins 2003). In doing so, this research helps account for the frequent marginalization of Christian expressions, especially in scholarship on expressive culture in non-western, post-colonial and Indigenous contexts (Dueck and Reily 2016; Engelke 2014). This tendency is prominent in writings about Suruí culture, which describe their “traditional” rituals and shamanic singing at length, but largely ignore expressions of their Christianity (Pucci 2011). Yet my fieldwork engages with a large body of Christian worship songs that are composed and sung in Suruí and based on their traditional musical practices. Given the import of these songs to Suruí Christians and following calls for theologically engaged anthropology (Mittermaier 2025; Lemons 2018), I argue that post-secularism can facilitate frank conversations between scholars of varying beliefs and ultimately allows a fuller understanding of not only how and why Suruí Christians sing, but also how they can be fully Indigenous and Christian.

This paper examines Vodou vocality and vibration as embodied technologies of resistance and worldmaking within Haitian Vodou. Drawing on ethnographic research with practitioners, ritual specialists, and sound archives, it foregrounds the voice, breath, rhythm, and percussive utterance as epistemic forces that exceed language and textuality. In Vodou ceremonial contexts, vocal sounds, chants, cries, seemingly unintelligible utterances, call-and-answer patterns, and breath-inflected exhalations operate not merely as expressive media but as vibrational acts that reorganize space, time, and relationality. These sonic practices call lwa yo (Vodou spirits), activate ancestral memory, and recalibrate the body toward balance, producing what practitioners describe as alignment rather than belief. By centering the animation of vocality in Vodou, this paper examines how vocal performances function within the liturgical cycle, their role in sustaining cultural memory, and their capacity to mobilize both spiritual power and social solidarity. It examines instances of divine interaction as conveyed through vocal sonorities and the responses elicited from listeners. It highlights the expertise of Vodou priests, who provide insight into the significance of voice and the interpretations of performances of Vodou liturgical songs. Situating Vodou vocality within Black Atlantic histories of enslavement, colonial violence, and epistemic suppression, the paper argues that vibration functions as a counter-archive: a mode of transmission that resists capture by colonial grammars and survives through repetition, resonance, and corporeal attunement. Vocal vibration becomes a practice of fugitivity, enabling practitioners to sustain worlds that colonial modernity sought to silence or eradicate.

Bullerengue is a musical tradition and epistemic site sustained by cantadoras—elderly women singers—in the Afro-Colombian Maroon Caribbean. In advanced age, cantadoras cultivate a vocal materiality shaped through lifelong performance, communal responsibility, and ancestral inheritance, gradually resembling their ancestresses’ vocalities and ethics of care. This paper ethnographically analyzes how the bullerengue-voice is inherited, matured, and socially enacted through two lineages of cantadoras represented by octogenarians Juana Rosado and Petrona Martínez. While Western biomedical discourse frequently frames aging as bodily decline (Powell and Gilbert 2009), cantadoras instead understand aging as privilege, authority, and accumulated wisdom. The bullerengue-voice enables them to remain productive, creative, and indispensable within family and community life.

Drawing on the concept of worlding—“ways of knowing, practicing, and making [a] distinct world” (de la Cadena)—this paper argues that voice and worlding are mutually constitutive through an “acoustemology” (Feld 2015) that illuminates how deep listening to Maroon territory and matriarchal positionality generates knowledge through performance. I propose the concept of epistemic aurality of voice to describe this reciprocal relation between the bullerengue-voice and worlding. Framed through Escobar’s notion of ontological design (2018)—where humans design worlds that in turn design them—the bullerengue-voice emerges as an ongoing life project attuned to relational existence. Such developments allow cantadoras to build constructive ontologies in the face of adversity, as exemplified by their ethos of “las penas alegres,” a poetic construction that casts singing as a vehicle to assuage the adverse existential effects of marginality and life itself.

This paper examines the role of colonial-era music and architecture in articulating Cuban cultural heritage in the wake of the economic and ideological crisis known as the Special Period following the collapse of the Soviet Union. I argue that Havana’s ongoing revival of colonial-era Catholic sacred music that emerged in the 1990s sonically reinscribes reconstructed cultural heritage onto the restored colonial spaces of Havana. Drawing on ethnographic and archival work in Havana, I demonstrate how this musical revival is intrinsically tied to the revitalization of the previously neglected colonial Historic Center of Old Havana in the wake of new touristic and religious opportunities since the 1990s. Focusing on the restoration of the colonial Paula Church as a concert hall and on the resonances of cultural theories by writer Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980) within Havana’s early music revival, I demonstrate how performances of—and writings about—colonial music have supported a cultural politics that reclaims and reimagines the colonial past from the perspective of the postcolonial present. This imaginative, presentist perspective conveys two ideas: cultural and racial mixing as inherent in Cuban identity, and a sense of agency for contemporary Cuba in infusing hegemonic European culture with subaltern cultural practices. I argue, therefore, that the revival of colonial-era music seeks to enroll the fraught colonial past in the needs of the present to foster local identity in place and to project a sense of belonging at times of profound change and uncertainty, yet it highlights the tensions between whose pasts are silenced and sounded.

Sankofa, a prominent element of the Akan Adinkra system, is embedded in Jamaican Maroon worldviews as both a conduit to asserted Akan origins and a framework for self-definition. This paper treats Sankofa’s imperative—to look back, reclaim what was left behind, and use it to build a better future—as a lived philosophical orientation sounded, embodied, and transmitted through Maroon cultural traditions. Building on scholarship on Maroon political structures, histories of resistance, and expressive cultures, I examine the possibilities and limits of a Sankofa-informed approach to advancing Maroon cultural, political, and economic interests in the twenty-first century and beyond. Jamaican Maroons activate their historical archives through music and dance during annual treaty commemorations. However, fulfilling Sankofa’s mandate to “go back and get it” also requires sustained engagement with Jamaica’s less celebratory histories of fugitivity, freedom, victory, and betrayal. How might Sankofa instead be fully enacted through Maroon cultural traditions? Reading between the lines of Maroon songs about war, treaties, life, and death, I ask two questions: How do performances within state-sponsored national celebrations alter their meanings? And how do cultural icons function simultaneously as Jamaican Maroon historical traces and Jamaica’s nationalist symbols? I argue that using music and dance to promote a curated national memory can obscure and displace historical truths deemed disruptive. Nevertheless, the persisting unresolved tensions shape identities, fuel muted grievances, and complicate political claims that ultimately constrain Sankofa’s forward-facing transformative potential. I reveal how music is used to promote curated memory in the negotiation of difficult pasts.

Music’s imbrication in economic regimes has long been in the remit of ethnomusicology. Scholars have documented music’s circulation within diverse topographies of value (Taylor 2024; Garland 2019; Sykes 2018), as well the processes by which music is commoditized (Guilbault and Rommen 2019). What, however, is at stake in endowing music with the status of “property,” as opposed to or in addition to that of commodity? Property, after all, is the language used by the legal, institutional, and social actors interested in “owning” music. In this panel, we address this question by triangulating between heritage, patrimony, and alienation as ethnographic and analytic tools for attending to music’s complex fabrication as property. Three papers experiment with novel ways to theorize the relationship between music and property in different contexts: 1) how Indigenous song in Mexico moves back and forth between legal regimes such as copyright as both alienable object and inalienable patrimony and, in doing so, reveals how and why in/alienability emerges around music; 2) how disputes over the legal status of U.S. blues recordings implicate alienation in a dual sense, affording the music’s intergenerational transfer while also giving rise to fraught contestations over its value; and 3) how Indigenous Bolivians make use of heritage laws to frame their musical practices and pursue the emancipatory potential of law in a recently decolonizing state. A discussant’s remarks will conclude the panel, which taken together pursues novel conceptual directions for a more robust ethnomusicological engagement with the alienating machinations of law and property.

While fields such as music psychology (Fischer and McAdams 2022; McAdams et al. 2022; Zhu and McAdams 2024), music theory (Lavengood 2020; Beavers 2021; Zeller 2022; Momii 2024; Reymore 2024), and musicology (Gurman et al. 2021; Dolan and Rehding eds. 2021, Wallmark 2022, Liu and Wallmark 2024; Shelley 2025;) have seen a recent surge of interest in timbre, the topic remains comparatively underexplored in ethnomusicology. This panel modestly addresses this imbalance with four analytical papers that draw on diverse global case studies. Panelists examine the timbres of assorted practices such as South Asian poetry and classicized drumming, Inuit throat singing, orchestration in the Western drumset, and Afro-Haitian solo drumming in the diaspora. They collectively question why prior studies of such traditions have focused on abstract patterns of duration and downplayed the contours of timbre that animate these rhythms and give them cultural meaning. Despite this critical reprioritization of tone color, the authors still acknowledge that timbre is never truly operating on its own (Fales 2002). These papers thus explore how the interplay of timbre and other parameters of performance (e.g., rhythm, melody, form, kinesthesia) can be perceived in varied ways by cultural insiders and outsiders. The authors investigate timbre at various stages of the musicking (Small 1998) process including composition, practice, performance, and listening. By paying close attention to the nuances of sonic structures and the cultural backgrounds that inform their conception, production, and perception, the panelists aim to acknowledge both in-group and expanded understandings of musical patterning.

This paper asks how a contemporary African American jazz improviser-composer—who embraced Islam and Sufi devotional practices in the early 2000s—mobilizes improvisation as a practice of healing. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, correspondence, and audiovisual analysis of public performances, I show how a Sufi-informed discipline of attention and Yusef Lateef’s concept of autophysiopsychic self-cultivation—articulated in mid-twentieth-century Black Muslim musical thought—shape the artist’s listening habits, rehearsal routines, and improvisational decisions. While scholarship on Islam in jazz has largely framed conversion as public political critique within civil rights–era struggles, I argue that healing functions here as a practical method for inner repair and spiritual endurance amid intensified Muslim legibility—marked by heightened public visibility and racialized scrutiny—in the post-9/11 United States. Through close listening, I identify audible features—especially breath-centered phrasing and calibrated silence—that render this disciplined attention audible in performance, even as the artist negotiates “jazz” as a contested category. By treating healing as method rather than metaphor, the paper connects religious practice to sonic technique and positions spiritual transmission as a form of musical knowledge, contributing to ethnomusicological debates on embodiment, ethics, and religion in performance.

Though best known for his role in the 1960s US Black Arts Movement as a Black Nationalist critic, poet and dramatist, Amiri Baraka was an unusually varied artist who exploded traditional boundaries of nations, politics, and art forms. I mobilize the microcosm of a 1977 Berliner Jazztage performance by Baraka's lesser-known funk ensemble “The Advanced Workers”—a performance panned by prominent West German critics Ulrich Ohlshausen and "Jazz Pope" Joachim-Ernst Berendt—to expand onto shifting, macrocosmic “constellations” (Benjamin) of actors, histories and discourses. The most local story is a quarrel between the festival’s founder, Berendt, and his successor, Swiss pianist/composer George Gruntz. Increasingly suspicious of politics in jazz, especially Black Nationalism—and ignorant of Baraka’s recent shift to Third World Marxism in 1976—Berendt turned from jazz to a depoliticized, universally humanist concept of Weltmusik, whereas Gruntz championed Baraka’s poetry and politics. Broader contextualization tells a more global story. West Germany reeled in the immediate wake of Deutscher Herbst, while Baraka's poetry spoke to multiple transnationalisms: not just transeuropean, transatlantic jazz festival circuits, but also, networks of solidarity with the Third World. In dialogue with contemporary Black Studies (Moten, Da Silva, Okiji) and transnational Jazz Studies (J. Wipplinger, B. Barson), I summon Baraka’s “Changing Same”—from his 1966 essay on “R&B and New Black Music” and taken up again in 1978 by N. Mackey in his analysis of Baraka—to argue that Baraka’s “Black Soundwork” (A. Reed) disrupts critical mishearings and refuses to submit to ongoing hegemonic categorizations and fixed understandings of Black Music.

In this paper, I draw on Dorinne Kondo's notion of world-making (2018) in combination with Jayna Brown's theorization of Black Utopias (2021) to argue for a more capacious understanding of Black musical world-buidling through an examination of the musical practices of composer, pianist, and multi-instrumentalist Patrice Rushen (b. 1954). Within, I employ comparative musical analysis of three performances and compositions of Rushen's, "Shortie's Portion" (1974) "Superstar" (1984), and "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory" (2004) to demonstrate how her musical identity, one emergent from and devleoped within Black musical history, is maintained and developed across these different modalities. A relatively understudied figure in academic music studies, Rushen's work is not only exemplary of the ways Black musicians challenge simple generic delimitation, but also one whose popularity amongst Black listeners calls for closer attention.

Guiding my analysis throughout are the musical, historical, and theoretical insights gained from my personal interviews with Rushen alongside those published in public venues. To parse the often intersecting and overlapping ways that Rushen's study and knowledge of Black musical history can be heard across genres and time periods, I employ Michael Silverstein's notions "indexical order" and "ethno-metapragmatics" (2003). Silverstein's work offers an analytical framework for recognizing and addressing the ways the multiple layers of semiosis, and indexicality in particular, inform and shape one another in social life.Though unique in the ways she deploys her knowledge and study of Black musical history, the methodology presented within s intended for wider application across Black music studies.

This paper unpacks tensions and weighs ethics among concepts of musical creativity and globalization through the music and career of Cyro Baptista (b. 1950), a New York-based Brazilian percussionist, composer, collaborator, and bandleader. Specifically, the analysis will focus on cultural anthropophagy (cultural cannibalism of Brazilian modernism, with which Baptista self-identifies) in relation to appropriation, exoticism, and experimentalism. To interpret Baptista’s work through these charged terms foregrounds the ethics of creative appropriation of globally eclectic musical experimentations; yet the paper will avoid passing excessive judgement. Especially in his own projects, Baptista’s ensembles comingle culturally iconic instruments (berimbau, cuíca, oud, gimbri, kora), myriad percussion, vocal sounds, grooves, and melodic characteristics from Brazil, North Africa, and jazz as well as nature-inspired soundscapes. Since the 1980s, Baptista developed his works collaboratively in and around New York City. He participated in overlapping circles of eclectic experimentalists: fellow Brazilians Hermeto Pascoal and Naná Vasconcelos (his closest mentors), Woodstock’s Creative Music Studio, and New York City’s downtown music scene. As a first-call percussionist, he toured and recorded with John Zorn, Paul Simon, Herbie Hancock, Osvaldo Golijov, Trey Anastasio, and others. The paper draws on original ethnographic research and analysis of his recordings, online videos, and critical reception, and is informed by musicological studies of anthropophagy (Harvey, Averbach, Della Torre), appropriation (Born and Hesmondhalgh, Feld, Young), the Brazilian musical diaspora (Stanyek, Goldschmitt, Perrone and Dunn), Latin American experimentalism (Alonso-Minutti, Herrera, and Madrid), and New York’s experimental jazz and downtown scenes (Gazit, Heller, Lewis, Barzel).

This roundtable addresses the concept of “public" ethnomusicology and folklore using various approaches. Panelists will share their hands-on experiences, and participants will discuss innovative strategies for meaningful engagement between institutions and communities. Panelist 1 will discuss practical and philosophical considerations pertaining to public-facing events that interweave scholarship, performance, discussion, and storytelling. As a “performer-scholar” pursuing an advanced degree in Ethnomusicology while maintaining deep community ties and a regular live-music touring schedule, Panelist 1 is in a unique position to articulate the potentials and challenges of planning events meant to bring together institutional entities and community members in the shared pursuit of knowledge. Panelist 2 will describe the development of a virtual exhibit intended for wide public dissemination. As the primary curator of a Google Arts & Culture page for a US-based ethnographic sound archive, Panelist 2 will reflect on how archivists and ethnomusicologists can engage the public while navigating challenges, such as the centrality of ethnographers/donors; metadata considerations and problematic language; and rights/licensing considerations. Panelist 3 will discuss collaborative ventures between institutions and communities. A late-career arts advocate focused on public projects, Panelist 3 has worked with long-term partners to strategically document traditional practices with the goals of preservation, pedagogy, and the search for material support (e.g., grant funding). Taken together, the session situates public ethnomusicology and folklore within broader conversations about knowledge circulation, institutional accountability, and the ethics of representation, asking not only how we make our work public, but how we make it accountable, reciprocal, and transformative.

In 2025, two different música urbana artists released new albums that invoked genres strongly associated with Puerto Rico, simultaneously addressing the island’s history and social issues. While the artists were responsible for any number of aesthetic choices, they did not make these decisions in a vacuum. In this panel, we explore the role of some of the other factors, particularly how historians helped inform the artists and how contemporary circumstances interacted with the history and significance of the genres employed. We demonstrate the different forms that applied ethnomusicology can assume, while also recognizing the limitations that existing systems of production as well as racialized, economic social structures inevitably place on certain aspects of the discipline. The researchers’ emotions that this work evoked ranged from celebratory to resignation, but overall, the panel offers insights into the way popular artists and academics can mediate history together.

Since mid-2025, over a hundred protest songs against ICE have been produced, of which a substantial portion is AI-generated. These AI songs sound well-produced with catchy choruses, despite stereotypical musical and lyrical patterns. Some AI protest songs have attracted more clicks than human-produced ones. This paper considers the musical content, reception, and political and ethical ramifications of AI-generated music opposing ICE compared with human-made protest music. First, I outline political roles of protest music—attracting attention, recruiting followers, educating the public, and providing an affective outlet and vehicle for participation. I consider the affordances of AI protest music, particularly speed of creation, and the preexisting forms of protest song, particularly contrafacta and remixes, that AI is replacing. Through interviews with creators, I ascertain their motivations and processes. I analyze the songs as products (musical characteristics, lyrical patterns) and as social process (political messaging, reception). While AI affords fast generation of professional-sounding protest songs, it takes attention away from heartfelt songs by humans or innovative, humorous forms like remixes of past decades. AI-produced “Minnesota Anthem” combines lyrical clichés in nonsensical ways, muddling its message. Yet at 400,000 views, it has outpaced Billy Bragg’s “City of Heroes,” which has a clear political message and vocals conveying anger and authenticity. AI also introduces issues of bias in training materials and the potential for pseudonymous bad actors to produce misleading songs. My analysis highlights how AI protest songs have the potential to both stimulate and deaden affective response to political events.

On January 7, 2026, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey appeared on national news demanding that ICE agents “get the fuck out of our city.” In the following weeks, Minneapolis musicians released new songs with titles like “Minneapolis (Fuck ICE)” and “Fuck This.” Others wrote and released songs of political awareness, action, and hope. This paper chronicles and reflects on local Minneapolis protest music written and released in January and February 2026 in response to the federal occupation. Operation Metro Surge began on December 1, 2025, initiating over four thousand ICE and CBP federal agents in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Thousands of black, brown, and indigenous Minnesotans went into hiding and white allies armed themselves with whistles and car horns to alert their neighbors of ICE vehicles appearing in front of homes and businesses. On January 7^th, after five weeks of illegal ICE activities, a federal agent murdered Renee Good; less than two weeks later, they killed Alex Pretti. Traumatized, local musicians responded by writing songs that registered community outrage and demanded ICE’s immediate exit from Minnesota. Like the role of print media in Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities, I argue that these protest songs, released online and shared on social media, served as important touchstones in the development of political affinity groups of occupation resisters who share a common understanding of what it means to be a radical ally and good neighbor. As recorded artifacts, these protest songs are an index of the brutal occupation and human rights atrocities in Trump’s America.

This paper explores how protest music both illuminates and consistently refracts Taiwanese national identity through the pop anthem “Island’s Sunrise,” which has mobilized across recent social movements. As an imagined state uneasy in hegemonic conceptions of nationhood, Taiwan has, over the past decade, witnessed the rise of grassroots protest movements responding to escalating interventions from China. Paradoxically, appeals to unity have intensified the historical precarity of this national identity. This paper examines the creation, enactment, and effects of “Island’s Sunrise,” outlining a semiotic analysis of the music itself alongside semi-structured interviews conducted with protester-musicians. Preliminary findings suggest that “Island’s Sunrise,” imbued with cosmopolitanism, interweaves verbal and nonverbal signs inherited from Taiwan’s serial colonial history. Building on Dylan Robinson’s concept of critical listening positionality, I decipher these signs through what I term post-serial-colonial listening in contemporary Taiwan, whereby the semiosis generates a political collective affect oriented toward Taiwanese sovereignty. Yet in practice, this song operates as a discordant semiotic mediator, revealing a peculiar double-edged force: for protester-musicians, it is powerful yet fragile, communicative yet prone to slippage, crafting collective belonging while cracking it from within. Across song-related multi-scalar episodes, it trumpets partisan tensions between pro-Taiwan and pro-China positions and, through its prohibition in China, reverberates conflicts between democracy and authoritarianism. Through “Island’s Sunrise,” this paper extends Thomas Turino’s framework to examine the generative dynamics of participatory music-making amid multidimensional political pressures, inviting a rethinking of music as carrying, at once, the potential of political mobilization and the conditions of its undoing.

This roundtable explores the ways in which contemporary Japanese anime sonically represents real and imagined marginalized ethnic others. Participant 1 analyzes _Samurai Champloo_’s main character Mugen, whose Ryūkyūan-coded background is rendered through a blending of Okinawan musicality with hip hop production. This hybrid, anachronistic soundscape sonically positions Mugen as culturally illegible within the homogenizing order of Feudal Japan, framing indigeneity as rhythmic disruption and resistance. Participant 2 analyzes anime’s use of Ainu female voices as a topical signifier of Japanese indigeneity in _Oshi no Ko_ and _Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End_. In these series, Ainu indigeneity serves as a marked foil to modern Japan, encoding Ainu culture as sublimated into or appropriated by the modern Japanese nation-state. Participant 3 turns to Joe Hisaishi’s paradoxical musical treatments in a pair of Studio Ghibli films. In _Princess Mononoke_, the composer uses gagaku instruments for scenes with Ashitaka from the historic Emishi tribe. In _Spirited Away_, he draws on markers of Ryūkyū music to depict the merrymaking of Japanese deities. Participant 4’s paper examines the _Fullmetal Alchemist_ series’ scoring of Ishbal, a fictional indigenous culture based on the history of the Ainu and their struggles against Japanese settler-colonialism in Hokkaido. Their scoring raises questions about how anime represents a generic “indigeneity” displaced from specific real cultures.The flexible and eclectic uses of sonic symbols in these examples not only indexes Japanese cultural fascination with its internal “Others” but also destabilizes the myth of ethnic homogeneity.

Academic discourse in Mexico and abroad characterizes the Salon compositions of nineteenth-century Mexican composers as outdated, conservative, and un-Mexican (Gutierrez 2024; Gaytan 2014; Behague 1979; Mayer-Serra 1941). According to this narrative, Salon music was “condemned to ostracism” in twentieth-century Mexico as modern nationalist schools of composition emerged (Meneses 2020). However, historiographic analysis reveals a different trajectory: Salon composition did not disappear after the Revolution. It found new life in popular spheres, expanding its audiences through new technologies, and experimenting with different ensemble instrumentations and aesthetics.

This project follows Alfonso Esparza Oteo (1894–1950), a prolific twentieth-century composer of Salon music, examining his career alongside (and in contrast to) dominant claims regarding Salon composition often repeated in musicological discourse. Drawing upon the historiographical interventions of Leonora Saavedra (1998, 2001), I explore the ways written perspectives by Mexican musical intellectuals became increasingly disconnected from lived musical practices, producing a distorted account of cultural life during and after the Revolution. Despite his work being framed as aesthetically and ideologically regressive, Esparza Oteo directly participated in revolutionary action, spearheaded advancements in Mexican publishing, radio, and recording industries, and deeply influenced Mexican popular music culture. By highlighting his contributions, this project challenges entrenched musicological narratives and reassesses Salon music’s place in twentieth-century Mexican cultural history.

In Pinotepa Nacional, Oaxaca (a town in Mexico’s Costa Chica), a group of elderly gentlemen known as Los Banqueros congregate at a park bench in the town square to share music, poetry, gossip, and cultural critique. Here, their performances of chilenas and versos evoke a social world understood as fading in the present. Although chilena is often framed as a mestizo genre, Los Banqueros conceptualize mestizaje in ways that differ from the Black-exclusionary logic of nationalist discourse. While debates over the correct way to play the chilena’s rhythmic accompaniment have been shaped by competing and often racially coded claims to authenticity, Los Banqueros take a more fluid approach that highlights the diversity of chilena performance. This flexibility resonates with what René Zavaleta describes as a motley society, in which diverse histories and temporalities coexist without being fully reconciled (Tapia Maella, 2022). At times, members of Los Banqueros strategically engage multicultural frameworks when doing so is beneficial, yet they do not focus on cultural rescue or heritage display. Instead, they perform chilena as a social practice oriented toward pleasure, critique, and nostalgic remembrance. Drawing on memory studies, the concept of motley society, and ethnographic engagement, this paper examines how social music-making and storytelling among Los Banqueros produce a counter-narrative to the etnogenesis model that frames Blackness as newly emerging through political recognition (Varela-Huerta, 2023). Rather, the gatherings of Los Banqueros reveal how Black presence is embedded within everyday local understandings of history, place, and social belonging.

Mexico City’s sonidos típicos (“typical” sounds) play a paradoxical role in the lives of city dwellers: from street cries to the warble of barrel organs, these sounds are, for many, powerful indices of the city itself, yet so integrated into quotidian routines that they are rarely considered a subject worthy of conversation much less cultural patrimony. In this paper, I trace unofficial histories of sonidos típicos through the interpretations of street vendors. I analyze these accounts with two theoretical frames that arose in these conversations: convivencia (co-existence), both perception and performance of cultural intimacy, key to the day-to-day activities and popular representations of street vendors; and the barrio (neighborhood) concept, a literal and figurative setting for convivencia in which traditional lifeways are thought to endure in the face of gentrification. I put these accounts in conversation with a fragmented official history and ambivalent public policy—from noise abatement to cultural patrimony—in which the subject of sonidos típicos and, by proxy, the sound makers themselves have been intermittently stigmatized, coopted, and omitted. I will argue that within the shared experience of convivencia lies the potential for what Rolando Vázquez dubs decolonial aesthesis, the possibility of reconstituting a history that has been appropriated or erased altogether. By focusing on how sounds perform histories to construct the present, I forgo a linear genealogy of Mexico City’s sonidos típicos for an engagement with the past that is both intersubjective and multitemporal, joining myth and popular culture with the material realities of urban life.

This panel brings historical and contemporary cases into dialogue to examine how technologies of mediation and circulation reshape religious musical practice, devotional listening, and public religious life in the United States. Across twentieth-century recording culture and twenty-first-century platformed sociality, the papers ask what happens to sacred authority, communal memory, and evangelistic intention when worship sound travels beyond the co-present event and becomes portable, replayable, and recontextualizable. “Recording the Mission Field” reconstructs the career of the Musical Betts showing how their instrumental hymn recordings functioned as intentional extensions of itinerant evangelical mission, and how commercial recording infrastructures enabled a form of mediated ministry oriented toward domestic devotional space; methodologically it combines digital archival reconstruction with track-based analysis and production-oriented listening. “The Blood Still Works” analyzes the circulation of a gospel vamp on TikTok to argue that platform affordances convert circulation into interpretive labor: users mobilize audiovisual performance and comment-thread discourse to attach shared histories, negotiate church authority and “church hurt,” and rearticulate Black Protestant belonging through participatory interaction. “Sacred Music’s Technological Echoes” brings a musicological lens to contemporary American Catholicism by pairing digital and in-person ethnography with scholarship on disenchantment/secularity to argue that expanded online transmission of Catholic sacred music (often organized around nostalgia and communal memory) signals an emergent mode of re-enchantment across parishes, choirs, and monastic communities. Taken together, the panel advances an ethnomusicological account of mediation constitutive of how religious publics are formed, how missions scale, and how sacred sound accrues meaning as it moves.

This paper examines how Kenyan musicians narrate and recalibrate their performance practices within China’s theme park industry. Based on ethnographic interviews with Nairobi-based musicians who have worked in Chimelong parks in Southern China, I analyze how “Africa” is curated as immersive spectacle and how performers strategically craft sound in response to those demands. In themed environments that organize the world into walkable cultural zones, difference must be rendered immediate and legible. Music plays a central role in this process, anchoring atmosphere and signaling place. For performers hired to represent “Africa,” this demand translates into an emphasis on sonic markers that circulate globally as recognizable signs of the continent. Certain instruments, rhythmic textures, and timbral qualities are valued less for regional specificity than for their capacity to communicate "Africanness" quickly within tightly managed performance economies shaped by short-term contracts and standardized show formats. My interlocutors describe amplifying these elements not because they transparently reflect local tradition, but because they operate as effective currencies within transnational circuits of work. I frame this dynamic as musical hustle: the strategic crafting of sonic legibility to convert recognition into livelihood. As such, this paper shows how the notion of cultural authenticity emerges as a negotiated and infrastructurally shaped category at the intersection of tourism, diplomacy, and entertainment capital. By foregrounding sound as a site of political-economic mediation, the paper contributes to discussions of circulation, performance, and the staging of cultural difference in contemporary China–Africa engagements.

“Come on, let´s strengthen our eastern roots” – is echoed by many contemporary Hungarian musicians, engaged in a distinctive folkloresque music genre since the early 2010s. Táltos drums are played on public television, throat singing is incorporated into musical performances, nomadic horsemen drink from horns in video clips, and Turkish-Hungarian music co-productions are emerging.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted at selected sites pertinent to this particular tradition-invention- among musicians, audiences, cultural professionals, and locations of memory- the dissertation investigates this phenomenon through the application of key anthropological concepts, like musical affect, identity and tradition invention. Utilising music and its affective power as a methodological lens, it seeks to gain insights into broader cultural processes. In accordance with Hobsbawm and Ranger´s theory of invented tradition and Benedict Anderson´s concept of imagined communities, it is posited that the emerging “Steppe music tradition” constructs a mythic continuity with nomadic ancestors, thereby responding to what András Máthé-Tóth conceptualises as a wounded collective identity. Furthermore, this invented musical tradition functions not only as an expressive vernacular form but also as an endeavour to heal collective trauma, facilitate political myth-making, and institutionalise a reinterpretation of history.

On Taiwan’s alpine hiking trails, mountain shelters and designated camping areas are set up to provide hikers with safe places to rest at night. These shelters vary in capacity, size, location, and management methods, and most require hikers to apply for a bed and a Mountain Entry Permit online in advance. Hikers aim to reach shelters before dark to avoid accidents, typically sleeping around 8 PM and starting their hike between 3 and 5 AM. Most high-altitude shelters in Taiwan are communal and offer little or no privacy. Early-morning jarring sounds, such as packing and talking, can disturb others, especially when hikers bring their everyday habits into this shared space. This disruption not only creates fraction but also lead to insufficient rest, increasing the risk of altitude sickness or hiking-related accidents and ultimately raising serious safety concerns for alpine activities.

In this case, drawing on the conceptual tools of listening positionality by Dylan Robinson and Jennifer Hsieh’s sono-sociality, I argue that jarring interactions as forming the shelter etiquette and along trails are not merely acoustic disturbances, but serve as moments of attunement—negotiated experiences shaped by hikers’ auditory orientations, cultural assumptions, and differing perceptions of risk. These sound practices show how urban hikers’ listening is registered by embedded ideas of shelter etiquette, care, and bodily vulnerability in alpine environments. Through jarring as a form of attunement, hikers recalibrate their bodily rhythms and perceptual modes, a process of acculturation into a survival-oriented praxis that regulates acceptable sonic events within these liminal, risk-sensitive spaces.

When the soprano singing Floria Tosca, the titular character in Puccini’s opera, flings herself off the set piece to her fictional death at the work’s conclusion, scene shop foreman John Del Bono’s work begins. After making sure the soprano lands on thick foam, he helps her onto a board with wheels and rushes her downstage for her bow. Historically, Del Bono’s performance in this moment would hardly be considered a manifestation of the opera equal to that of the soprano he is pushing. In this presentation, however, I argue attending to the work of Del Bono and his stagehand colleagues at the San Francisco Opera illuminates an alternative mode of operatic performance in which materiality, genre, and invisible labor are intertwined. Drawing on ethnographic work with the San Francisco Opera, my paper examines how stagehands redefine the genre of opera through backstage performances before, during and after the opera itself is sung. I argue these contributions should be understood as stand-alone representations of each opera itself, meaning that the stagehand’s experience might be understood as equivalent to a score or production. While operatic performance has drawn the attention of ethnographers (Atkinson 2006, Steigerwald Ille 2021; 2024, Sikau 2023), such work has focused on the work of singers and directors, not those technicians whose labor offers another lens on contemporary US opera. In putting studies of materiality in dialogue with the embodied experience of operatic labor, I offer new conceptualizations of how different types of musicking are defined, constructed, and valorized.

Despite the two activities having little overlap, a significant number of singers of Sacred Harp music are also rabid dancers on the Contra Dance scene. The experiences are fundamentally different (most Contra dancers do not play in the instrumental band and Sacred Harp singers sit and sing a capella), and the genres have no common repertoire. This paper considers theoretical avenues to describe a common phenomenological experience practitioners of these performance arts experience in the moment of performance, explored through interlocutor’s testimony gathered from fieldwork sites across New England. Dance scholars, like Tomie Hahn and Cynthia Jean Cohn Bull, have investigated the affective properties of dance, a part of the anthropoidal “sensory turn.” Music educators have explored the experiential knowledge transmitted in pedagogical situations, though mostly focusing on instrumentalists and invoking strands of ANT and Mediation theories to study the organology of these encounters. Some ludo-musicological articles, such as those by Kiri Miller, have considered the phenomonology of solo musical acts. This paper will apply these frameworks to communal musical and danced activities in order to describe a common affective complex inherent in their mode of participation. This literature suggests that the rules of performance have an inherent ‘meaning’ or ‘truth’ experienced by participants. Instead of seeking an abstracted truth content, my ethnographic research explores how contemporary participants make meaning for themselves in dialogue with narratives established by revival activists. When revived, these narrative echoed New Left social values which modern participants update to contemporary sexual and gender politics.

Barbershop harmony is a form of four-part a cappella singing practiced by around 70,000 singers worldwide. The rise of modern barbershop singing closely follows the timeline for late-stage capitalism and subscribes to its market logics; namely, success, competition, meritocracy, and self-improvement (Verhaeghe, 2014). From its 1930s reinvention as a formalised “genre” (Döhl, 2014), barbershop has positioned a complex contest system at its centre and included a plethora of educational events that centre on upskilling its members. Through a combination of auto-ethnographic and ethnographic examples, this paper explores the neoliberal logics at play in three types of barbershop events: conventions (where competitions happen), “harmony brigades” (weekend quartetting events), and “afterglows” (informal party after an event). We make two central arguments. Firstly, drawing on scholars such as Harvey (2005), Verhaeghe (2014), and Wilson (2024), we demonstrate the ways barbershop organisations and their members subscribe to the neoliberal focus on self-improvement and success. Secondly, we highlight how some barbershop events and activities (such as afterglows) can challenge neoliberal market logics. As such, this paper provides a vital contribution to the study of ethnomusicology: while we focus specifically on the barbershop style, this paper can provide a greater understanding of the neoliberal influence on other styles of musicking that also centre around competition and upskilling. Overall, we argue that, while barbershop provides a great sense of joy and community to its singers, these effects will remain limited so far as they subscribe to the market logics of success and self-improvement.

Indigenous Christian denominations in Nigeria preserve and transmit theological traditions through embodied ritual practices by which musical performance plays a central role in shaping how spiritual authority, leadership and communal belonging are recognised. While music is widely acknowledged as an inseparable part to Yorùbá Indigenous Christianity , scholarship has largely focused on theology, prophecy and institutional history but treating music as expressive accompaniment rather than as a constitutive mechanism of authority. Consequently, a key question remains unresolved: how does sacred musical practice produce and regulate spiritual authority within Yorùbá Indigenous Christianity?

This paper investigates both the repertoire itself and its embodied performance and how musical structure, participation and circulation operate as mechanisms through which ecclesiastical hierarchy and communal belonging are constituted within Yorùbá Indigenous Christianity. Through musical elements and embodied performances, Seraphim Songs shape how holiness, obedience and spiritual discipline are enacted and understood within Yorùbá Indigenous Christianity. This is an ethnomusicological study that focuses on the Songs of the Seraphim, as a distinctive sacred repertoire which lies at the heart of Yorùbá Indigenous Christian worshipers. While many C&S congregations share related repertories, the ESOCS maintains a distinctive organisational hierarchies and liturgical protocols that shape who may initiate the lead or authorise particular songs.

By examining the Songs of the Seraphim across different order of services and ritual contexts, this study demonstrates how sacred sound operates as a key mechanism through which the ESOCS sustains theological independence, negotiates continuity and change and constructs hierarchical structure within a rapidly transforming Christian landscape in Nigeria.

This paper examines the dynamic soundscapes of worship found in postcolonial African churches, conceptualizing them as deeply connected personal and communal expressions. In many twenty-first-century congregations throughout sub-Saharan Africa, the church has become more than just a spiritual hub; it serves as a place for physical and emotional healing. Within these sacred environments, worshippers create a rich tapestry of musical and non-musical sounds—sometimes intentionally, other times instinctively—during their services.

This study dives into the world of vocal sounds, artistic expressions, rhythmic beats, and onomatopoeic expressions, examining how activities like music ministry, handclapping, prayer, screaming, and groaning come to life, grow stronger, and persist during religious ceremonies. Based on recent ethnographic research and phenomenological analysis conducted from 2023 to 2025 in various congregations, the paper looks at how these sonic expressions are sparked within ritual settings and how they influence worshippers' spiritual, emotional, and psychological journeys.

By focusing on how sounds emerge and their effects, I propose that both established liturgical frameworks and spontaneous sonic expressions create rich layers of sound that can be both cathartic and therapeutic. These intricate soundscapes foster shared emotional experiences that help people connect with one another, find personal release, and feel a sense of the divine. This study emphasizes the complex relationship between how we hear, think, feel, and embody our emotions in shaping religious experiences. Ultimately, it adds to larger discussions in sound studies, ethnomusicology, and African religious studies by showing how sound-based practices create intricate, culturally relevant meanings in modern worship settings.

Across different cultures, decolonization is often interpreted through literal, moral, anagogical, and allegorical frameworks that parallel Biblical hermeneutics. Within African sacred music, literal approaches often imply a total rejection of elements deemed “inauthentic” or Western in origin. Recent publications on decolonization by Agawu (2025) and Taiwo (2022), foreground a primary danger of such literalism– the reinforcement of essentialist practices that rigidly distinguish African and Western practices while ignoring lived realities in contemporary societies. This essay will extend current debates on literal decolonization through a case study of the 2026 Sexagesima mass at the Holy Cross Catholic church of Kenya, which primarily incorporated Gregorian chants during the liturgy. The Holy Cross Church is affiliated with the Society of Saint Pius X founded in 1970 by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre to preserve the traditional Roman liturgy in the wake of Vatican II’s reforms. Following a brief historical overview of chant transmission in East Africa from the nineteenth century, I will juxtapose the rationales that literalist perspectives often invoke to justify the decolonization of Western repertoires in HCCK’s liturgy with the distinctive liturgical functions that Gregorian chants fulfilled during the Sexagesima mass. Rather than providing a definitive position on whether Gregorian chants should be eradicated or preserved, this essay seeks to illuminate the complexity of liturgical preferences among Kenyan Catholics that risk being flattened by literal decolonization approaches.

This roundtable presents perspectives from the multiple roles involved in creating a first-of-its-kind online music education resource designed to address a long-expressed need by educators—providing meaningful cultural context in K-12 music classrooms, so teachers can feel comfortable teaching beyond the Western European music canon. Many existing resources focus on virtuosity defined by Western European norms, or introduce “diverse” repertoire with little or no context for a piece’s importance or corresponding aesthetic value. Furthermore, they are often not created by members of that music community. In contrast, this resource is written collaboratively by artists, educators, and cultural knowledge keepers from cultures more representative of the diverse North American classroom.

The six participants in this roundtable will reflect on the impact and challenges of the co-creation process across sonic, professional, and geopolitical borders. We will hear from a museum educator with a Ph.D. in curriculum development and 22 years of experience in the music classroom, who will talk about the format of the online resource; a Professor of Ethnomusicology who will talk about the decolonial approach of research-creation with artists; a Music Education scholar who will discuss approaches to decolonizing education; an Indigenous musician-educator, who will speak to creating lessons grounded in Indigenous ontological perspectives; a Professor of Indigenous language, who will address music’s role in language revitalization; and a Ukrainian musician, who will reflect on music and remembrance. Each participant will offer a seven-minute introduction to their involvement, followed by 45 minutes for facilitated dialogue between participants and the audience.

As ethnomusicologists we are alert not only to the acts of the individual creator, but also to how social-cultural, economic, religious and political forces beyond the individual constrain or enable those acts, making them more or less impactful, long or short term. This panel views creativity through the perspectives of individuals as they imagine possible responses to their work. This entails understanding the stance of a given actor in time in relation to such entities as audience and patron; the constitution of such entities through creative artists’ discourses; choices of the actor at a given moment; and implications of how the artist’s vision of futurity comes to be communicated. When do motivations appear to be retrospectively assigned? In what ways is an account by a musician or filmmaker affected by the context for the account—memoire, radio interview, encounter with another artist or an ethnomusicologist? This inquiry emerges from a long history of writings engaging with addressivity and response, including those of Ibn Khaldun, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin and ethnomusicologists Regula Qureshi and Stephen Blum. The three papers on this panel share common ground in late Soviet and post-Soviet Muslim societies with musical practices that Russian-trained scholars long struggled to pin down, and an intercultural environment bringing together creative efforts from across the Soviet Union. The first concerns a Central Asian filmmaker’s musical strategies; the second, voice and vocal timbre in Azerbaijani mugham; the third, the poetic imagination of a Wakhi singer in Tajikistan.

The papers in this panel consider how women build and sustain musical communities across Asia and its diasporas under embedded sociocultural expectations. Female instrumentalists in North India, female K-pop fans around the globe, and taiko drum builders in Arizona are all at work building the capacity to participate in their communities of musical practice in tangible and intangible ways. Working against expectations for how women can, should, and must be involved in diverse musical practices of Asian origin, all three papers trace how women trace how women navigate, reshape, and at times confront constraints. One author focuses on the ways female instrumentalists in North India are saddled with additional labors—often domestic—beyond that of tradition-bearing, and how such expectations shape access to participation. The second author considers the systemic work of female K-pop fans to produce forms of fandom that are socially and commercially recognizable, resisting misogynistic dismissal. The third author documents the literal building of musical infrastructure in the form of taiko drums made and used by the founders of Arizona’s taiko dojos, foregrounding questions of belonging, stewardship, and tradition. A strong undercurrent here is intimacy: the entrapping intimacy of domestic space that can preclude musical involvement; the reframing and commodification of intimacy in popular music fandoms; and the tactile intimacy with materials forged through instrument making and apprenticeship. Together, these papers position community building as an embodied, affective, and political practice. A discussant with expertise in Asian and Asian American musics will synthesize the panel’s shared concerns.

Attention to SEM’s institution-building has been sometimes celebratory, sometimes critical. [Name removed]’s landmark forthcoming book, [title and publication information removed], offers an “eyewitness account” of women’s experiences in SEM’s early years (1952-1963). This roundtable offers SEM a chance to reflect on those years, with a throughline to the present. We will discuss the book and ask: how can it carry us forward? What’s surprising about the stories told… and what isn’t? What stakes are revealed? Given the structural sexism of SEM’s “founding fathers,” can we talk about institutional progress? Since the time of the founding mothers, have shifting gender demographics and a centering of humanistic methods feminized ethnomusicology as a field? [Name removed] dug deep into ten women’s experiences with SEM: she conducted extensive archival research and interviews. Most importantly, she was there. She takes the long view on women’s contributions to SEM, asking provoking questions about whose academic labor counts, and what it means to innovate, trailblaze, and build a field and an organization. Surprisingly, [name removed] concludes that “In contrast with the founding fathers, our founding mothers did not see themselves as a cohesive collective group nor did they ever try to function as one.” The roundtable participants come from three generations of ethnomusicologists. Each has shown sustained commitment to SEM; as thought leaders, they have actively changed the Society. We will run the session as a structured conversation between the participants and the audience, and brief excerpts will be read from the book.

The panel examines song lyrics as the subject of discourse, argument, and debate in the formation of communal and national identities. Engaging a diverse range of genres and performance contexts, the panelists explore how musical texts serve as catalysts for intracommunal rivalry, articulate claims to justice, construct belonging, and complicate ideas of ownership and borders across Latin America.

Presenter 1 examines a competitive Panamanian Carnival songwriting tradition that generates risqué entertainment through increasingly grotesque and personal insults, drawing broad public participation and producing multiple, sometimes conflicting, interpretations. The second presentation analyzes the controversy surrounding a narcocorrido performance by Los Alegres del Barranco that names the leader of the fearsome Cártel Jalisco Nueva Generación, showing how the ensuing backlash places music at the center of debates over authority, legality, and justice in Mexico. Presenter 3 surveys contemporary Dominican popular music to show how musicians use lyrics to assert, negotiate, and project national and diasporic identities across shifting local and transnational contexts. Broadening the perspective even further, the final presentation examines the transnational circulation of iconic songs, demonstrating how musical “covers” and adaptations challenge (or reinscribe) ideas of genre, nation, and regional borders.

Moving from local to national to transnational perspectives, the panel as a whole offers a rich exploration of the way song lyrics become central to the negotiation of power, memory, and collective imagination and the formation of communal and national identity within Latin America.

This panel examines the evolving scholarly discourse surrounding the Black banjo renaissance and its impact on both academic knowledge production and Black communities' relationship with the instrument. As research on the banjo's African diasporic origins and cultural trajectory has expanded, it has fundamentally reshaped how practitioners, particularly Black musicians and scholars, engage with and reclaim this historically significant instrument. The presentations trace Black engagement with the banjo across its historical continuum: from early Caribbean antecedents through the minstrel and classic eras to contemporary revitalization efforts. Collectively, the panel interrogates how each historical iteration has shaped Black cultural identity and musical practice, while exploring the ways in which current scholarship is facilitating the banjo's reclamation as an explicitly Black cultural and political enterprise. By situating contemporary revitalization within this longer historical arc, the panel illuminates the intersections of musicology, African American studies, and cultural memory in understanding how marginalized communities recover and redefine their cultural inheritance.

Capitalism’s insatiable appetite is devouring the wealth of nature, expropriating value from racialized populations, collapsing democracy, and devaluing carework (Fraser 2023). Responding to this reality, post-growth studies is a transdisciplinary field that rejects and critiques the growth imperative and offers alternative frameworks for rebalancing resource use in ways that foster well-being, sustainability, and equity (Savini 2024; Saito 2024; Hickel 2020; Kallis 2018; Raworth 2018). Few post-growth studies, however, have examined these issues through music research. While some work has explored the ecological limits of the material basis of music (Allen 2023; Bates 2020; Roy 2020; Titon 2020; Devine 2019; Solomos 2016), many questions remain. What are the effects of music's expansion through capitalism? How are musical communities proposing other models that reinvigorate the commons and prioritize collective care? The first paper reconsiders “music” through theories of “real abstraction,” identifying growth as a fundamental—and frightening—characteristic of music in racial capitalist modernity. The second paper calls for integrating degrowth studies into ethnomusicology in ways that support alternatives to the unsustainability of endless growth. The third paper considers how all-women performance groups make visible and revalue (re)productive labor in creative spheres, deploying care to upend the capital-driven binary between production and reproduction. The fourth paper models a novel methodology, merging ethnography and plant ecology, to revalorize and spread the radical anticapitalist practices already underway in a local jazz scene. The papers thus collectively offer new theoretical and ethnographic approaches for bringing music scholarship to bear on the challenges of these urgent times.

The HONK! Street Band Movement and its family of festivals – participatory, grassroots, and non-commercial festivals featuring activist or community-based brass and percussion ensembles – have since 2006 used sound and music as a means for inviting people to assemble in public, in-person festivals in ways understood by participants as contesting hegemonic power, reclaiming public space, and facilitating collective solidarity via joyful brass and percussion performances. Yet even as HONK! musicians view their acoustic, mobile, and collective music-making as something which might reclaim public space for more inclusive and democratic uses, an increasing emergence of HONK! bands composed entirely of women, non-binary, and transgender musicians reveals that the inclusive space that HONK! festivals and bands conceive of and seek to produce may be organized in ways that hinder gender-marginalized musicians from feeling like they can participate. In this paper, I argue that gender-marginalized HONK! musicians practice a mode of listening in their bands that “listens out” (Lacey 2013) for diverse voices and perspectives in a radically open, anticipatory, and intersubjective way. Through practices of listening out and with careful attention for one another, gender-marginalized HONK! bands produce spaces that facilitate learning and build confidence among musicians working to find their musical and political voices. I argue that listening out reveals forms of exclusion present and reconfigures relations of attention such that diverse voices might more easily resonate within the broader HONK! movement. In turn, the HONK! movement’s reclamations of public space might be more informed by the lived experiences of its participants.

The soundscape of the Times Square-42nd St subway station is a confluence of social experiences disguised within the everyday cacophony. An active contributor to this environment is a community of Latin American street vendors (vendedores ambulantes). I attempt to elucidate their sonic contribution to the subway’s soundscape by examining the dynamic between their lives and labor. The sounding of their labor consists of monotone repetitions of the commodity—such as “mango, mango, mango, mango”—where semantic meaning elides and sound foregrounds to engage with transitory passengers. The banal everydayness of laborers in the subway tends to obfuscate the structural orientation that coerces certain vendedores ambulantes, particularly unpermitted Latin American women, to work in this environment. The vendors’ sonic contribution emerges through their positionality, an instance localized in this paper as a patch in the network of racial capitalism. Using the methodology of patchwork ethnography, I document the entanglement that my interlocutors experience between their lives and livelihood, using short but frequent visits to weave a thread that elucidates their contribution to the sonic fabric of the subway. This paper analyzes the “sounding” of subway street vending and the “hearing” of colliding modes of production, including the hegemonic mode of capitalism. In discussion with my interlocutors, vending sounds a history beyond the sound that is heard: the transition from criminalizing labor to criminalizing the identity of the laborer. Los vendedores ambulantes vocalize their work within and against the conditions perpetuated by the NYC municipality, and exacerbated by the Trump administration.

How do urban shared-care sites sound? How do sacrality and secularity blur to emerge as spaces for traumatized communities through sound during public life-and-death political crises? Using site-specific ecumenical gatherings led by faith-based leaders in response specifically to the incarceration and release of the Iman Ayman Soliman in greater Cincinnati, OH and generally in support of local immigrants during 2024 and 2025, I ask how immigration rights gatherings transformed public and private digital, geographic, and physical sites to shared-care spaces (Gelsthorpe, Mody, and Sloan 2023). Synthesizing Soliman’s public addresses, participant interlocutors’ stories, advocacy-informed ethnographic experiences, an open letter, social media posts, and journalistic reporting source the ways that religious and secular organizations’ boundaries blurred as individual and collective culture, identity, and values merged dress, geography, images, and sound. From a positionality of advocacy, I bear witness to acoustemologic and emotional entanglements of sacrality and secularity permeating shared care-based gatherings, memorials, and protests at sites of resistance framed by Soliman’s detention and release (Balkenhol, van den Hemel, and Stengs 2020). I explore free-Ayman and anti-ICE soundscapes on a city sidewalk, detention center lawn and parking lot, within a church sanctuary, and reverberations of “A Tale of Two Protests” merging a “No Kings” resistance and “Good Trouble” vigil on a bridge connecting US states Kentucky and Ohio. I show how gatherings in these locales blur sacred-secular binaries and boundaries and reframe these experiences as praxelogic, shared-care sites promoting belonging within the broader US immigration rights community.

New York’s jazz scene is a male-dominated geography. Nonetheless, male jazz musicians and their masculinities are rarely discussed as such. Although gender and sexuality are now important analytics in jazz scholarship, masculinities remain elusive and undertheorized. In my fieldwork in jazz’s predominantly homosocial spaces in NYC, I often find that cishet men struggle to articulate their feelings about masculinity and patriarchy in their community. For bell hooks (2004), “most men never think about patriarchy—what it means, how it is created and sustained…and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experiences.” Consequently, hegemonic masculinities—as categories of power within patriarchy—may hide in plain sight (Connell & Messerschmidt 2005). This presents a methodological challenge: how to have our interlocutors remark on the unmarked?

Masculinities are relational; their definitions are typically reactive to material and discursive shifts experienced by subordinated groups (Kimmel 1987). Today, masculinities in jazz are undergoing change, partly in response to gender-justice initiatives at major jazz institutions designed to support women and gender-expansive performers. These projects ask us to imagine ‘jazz without patriarchy,’ but what does it mean when this structure of domination isn’t recognized by most men? Moreover, as ethnographers we’re trained to construct analyses from our interlocutors’ statements, but what happens when our research questions are embedded in what is taken for granted and omitted? Based on data from my dissertation research, this paper reflects on this ethnographic quandary by analyzing the messy, indirect, and intersectional ways musicians interpret masculinities in jazz’s contemporary gender landscape.

The constitution and continued existence of sonic archives rest upon budget pressures and efforts to preserve specific histories, hence institutional priorities and, frequently, national imaginaries. In the wake of the “sonic turn” in the humanities, scholars have approached sonic archives not only as unproblematic repositories of musical heritage, but as sites of politically positioned preservation, recovery, and historical critique. Extending this line of inquiry, recent studies from Alejandro Madrid and Ana Maria Ochoa examine how sound archives not only document history, but also legitimize imperial violence, sustain institutions, and reimagine collective futures. This panel examines implications of this scholarship across case studies from Brazil, India, and the United States, comparatively investigating the political uses of sonic archives during and after empire. We especially center how archival recordings are wielded in struggles over the historical consequences of empire. The first paper examines contemporary reenactments of 1940s Brazilian radio recordings through podcasting and performance. The second paper analyzes invocations of “archival violence” in Punjabi popular song and nationalist contentions with Sikh militancy. The third paper investigates mobilizations of community radio archives in the late imperial United States amid federal defunding and media precarity. These three case studies examine how sonic archives are not fixed or inert repositories, but mediate discourse in the making, tools for political action both during and after the imperial project. Such analyses illuminate how sound mediates political memory and foreground archives within broader social and institutional formations, exposing ongoing struggles over public culture, sovereignty, and belonging.

In 2018, Jim Sykes theorized the “music and identity episteme” as a European modernist framework that centers identity as music's primary organizing principle, marginalizing non-Western cosmologies. Responding to Sykes, alongside scholarship in African music studies, sound studies, and multispecies ethnography, this panel examines how this episteme operates across African and diasporic contexts. The identity episteme excludes alternative ontologies while reinforcing cultural separation narratives that serve economic interests, nationalist agendas, and colonial legacies—despite their historical inaccuracies and political dangers. The panel argues that identity-centered frameworks obscure African musical worlds' conceptual landscape, including human and non-human relations, ancestral continuity, and cultural actors' self-actualization.

The four papers address: transnational disputes over Afrobeats between Ghana and Nigeria, revealing how digital circulation and collaborative networks generate nationalist narratives driven by capitalist structures; Ghanaian violinists’ engagement with diverse musical traditions, disrupting (de)colonial taxonomies by centering their agency through aesthetic choices; palmwine and highlife musics in Ghana, demonstrating how anthropocentric sustainability frameworks ignore non-human dependencies and the ongoing environmental destruction; and Fela Kuti’s enduring presence in contemporary performance and political discourse, through African cosmologies, challenges liberal frameworks of selfhood and embodiment in ethnomusicology by demonstrating music’s persistence beyond the living and individual.

Despite recognition that linking music to identity is “a trap from which we want to escape” (Sykes 2018, 4), identity frameworks continue to foreclose other possibilities for understanding musical meaning across African contexts and diasporas. The panel advocates approaches that consider sonic exchange economies, material and ecological relations, relational ontologies, and extended temporalities.

In India, Bhakti (devotional Hinduism), unlike more orthodox and exclusionary Brahminical ritual-based practices, emphasizes singing devotional songs and poetry as a primary way of connecting with the divine. There are various Bhakti performative traditions. In this paper, I examine how devotional music in India has entered a new realm: music festivals. These festivals are becoming important venues for devotional singing and have facilitated the expansion of Bhakti into a new social space among the urban elite, who do not necessarily subscribe to the tradition's ritualistic aspects. Beyond being featured in music and cultural festivals, the rise of dedicated devotional music festivals calls for an analysis of how Bhakti music functions within this new context. These festivals showcase a range of musical styles and attract a more elite audience than traditional Bhakti traditions typically reach. Most of these festivals are expensive and affordable only to a few. The paper explores the changing contours of devotional music in this new context, including duration, textual intelligibility, language, and new forms of cross-cultural collaboration. As music festivals grow in popularity among performers, I will analyze the strategies employed by artists and curators to make Bhakti renditions in these festivals distinct from traditional forms. It will also examine how Bhakti music adapts to appeal to this new audience and aims to position itself as an aspirational space for the upwardly mobile social class, which finds these festivals meaningful for refashioning their elite and culturally rooted identities.

Two occasions: a Hindu festival, and International Women’s Day. Two tranquil venues in the midst of the city’s noise: one a temple, another a memorial to an educational activist couple. Two musics; two stories – one traditional and religious, the other anti-caste and feminist. Two strong women at opposite ends of the caste ladder. Yet, I argue that there is great sameness amidst all this difference. Both women are connected by the metaphor of milk (Elbaz 2025) and their “othermothering” (Pasche-Guignard 2020) – key to my research on music’s inseparable intertwining with food, motherhood and caste in Maharashtra, India. Anasūyā, a Brahmin woman, becomes mother to three gods. Aklujkar (2000) terms Anasūyā a “pativratā [i.e., one devoted to her husband,] with panache”. Through Nāradīya kīrtan (Schultz 2012), a music-rich form of religious storytelling, I took a fresh look at her story. Anasūyā exerts her strength while remaining within “brahmanical patriarchy” (Chakravarti 1993) – a system that the second woman, Savitribai Phule (1831-1897), strives to dismantle. An oppressed-caste woman, she birthed a feminist, anti-caste educational revolution. I experienced her through an activist-musician’s live performance of a unique genre-blurring song. Major, minor; sweet, bitter; triumph, struggle – this song is a delectable auditory experience of Savitribai’s power. This song and the kīrtan, while sonically distinct, are unmistakably Maharashtrian in their flavour and tell stories of female power in unforgettable ways. My unique contribution to ethnomusicology is in using this complex interplay of sameness and difference to propose new gastro[ethno-]musicological (Mason 2012, Varli 2024) and multisensory theories.

The sarangi players are identified as Mirāsī in Hindustani (North Indian classical) music. The Mirāsī (from Arabic mīrās: “inheritance,” “heritage”) are an under-represented caste of Muslim musicians, dancers, genealogists, and other kinds of tradition-bearers. They were central to forming a pluralistic set of cultural practices in North India and Pakistan but have been marginalized socially and economically by Indic caste hierarchical ideologies and British colonial policy. Cultural Anthropologist Eva-Maria van Straaten has offered insights into the interplay of space, experiences, and assumptions surrounding Hindustani instrumental music by adopting “a radically open mode of listening to demonstrate how power relations are sonically negotiated” (2015: 86). Building on van Straaten’s research, this paper illustrates how the dynamics of knowledge and hierarchy are constructed through listening to the sarangi within the musical lineages of Mirāsī, known as Gharana.

This socio-musical analysis examines a sarangi trio recorded at All India Radio in 1970, interpreted from my perspective as the grandson of Sabri Khan (1927-2015), one of the featured performers. My methodology includes interviews with musicians involved in the recording, as well as personal anecdotes and narratives collected during a listening session at Sabri Khan’s home in 2000. Additionally, I draw upon the 13^th-century Sanskrit treatise Saṅgīta-ratnākara to explore the concept of “classicism” in the music of sarangi players. This approach enables me to apply an interactive digital transcription method developed by Professor Dard Neuman at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The global rise of right-wing populisms necessitates an understanding of how national sentiment is sustained through cultural expressions such that it becomes a visceral force for members of the nation-community. In India, over the last decade, Hindu nationalism, a religious-territorial ideology envisioning India as a Hindu nation, has gained predominance, partly due to electoral victories. However, scholars such as Anna Schultz highlight the significance of locally rooted music/performances to nationalist mobilization. A case in point is the nationalist appropriation of the powada, a performance tradition in Maharashtra historically stemming from performance cultures of subaltern castes. The powada constitutes ballads on themes ranging from pre-colonial figures such as Shivaji, to anti-colonial leaders and contemporary social issues. As Sharmila Rege writes, it has adapted to various socio-political contexts, from anti-caste and left-wing politics to exclusionary Hindu nationalist movements.

Delving into the powada’s politics, this paper analyzes ways in which the powada, performed across spaces like government-sponsored workshops, ticketed programs, temples, and social media platforms, enables performers to perform the nation, in ways that perpetuate as well as unsettle Hindu nationalism. Performers from diverse caste/class/gender/age backgrounds deploy the powada to lead audiences into emotionally charged experiences of differing visions of the nation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with select performers in Pune in 2024-2025, I will analyze how performers from differing social locations plumb aspects of the powada such as a ‘rustic’ voice that ‘emanates from the navel’, liveness, melodramatic enactment, and thematic content to shape varying sonic imaginations of the nation.

Multi-sited ethnography promises a departure from the Malinowskian romanticism of native informancy and single-area expertise, advocating instead for the analysis of world-systemic and polytopographical relations through the intimate affordances of ethnographic science and poetry (Rajan 2021; Tsing 2015; Coleman and von Hellermann 2011; Marcus 1995; Clifford and Marcus 1986). In Anglophone ethnomusicology, the provocations of multi-sitedness have been manifold, imploding and rescaling discourses of globalization, political economy, im/mobilities, postcolonialism, transnationalisms, borders, migration, and diaspora (Shannon, forthcoming; Ge 2026; Allen 2025; Wollert 2023; Appert 2017; Solis 2015; Celestini & Bohlman 2014; Novak 2013; Stokes 2004). Invoked as an abstract meta-method for unruly fieldwork, and a materialization of decolonial, feminist, and diasporic politics in anthropological scholarship, multi-sitedness risks fetishization as another shiny mode of ethnographic liberalism. Yet, its loosening of musical and sonic objecthood also productively engages the project of “studying culture musically” (Pilzer 2022) over the study of music as settled cultural form and terrain. Our panel features four scholars who are multiply situated in terms of social and institutional identities, geographic foci, and musical affinities. Their papers investigate wide-ranging sites of cultural production, including the global racial capitalisms of cruise ship tourism, archipelagic networks of Philippine musicking, diasporic SWANA dance parties and their North American movements, and the intercontinental resonances of Black radical improvisation between the United States, South Africa, and Poland. Heard together, the panelists offer new perspectives on translocal subcultures, diasporic subjectivities, postcolonial geographies, and transnational gig economies, thereby centering worlds of dynamic motion and reinvention.

The Tai Dam, or “Black Tai” due to their traditional black clothing, are an ethnic minority with sizable communities in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, China, France, and the United States, and khap is their main vocal genre used in both sacred and secular contexts. While studies have analyzed Tai Dam khap and music through the lens of preservation and identity (Chansri and Burusphat 2017), transmission and categorization (Lissoir 2016, 2015), instrumentation (Iamsin, Roongruang, and Nanthachak 2012), and social function (Jarusopon 2008), none have specifically focused on timbre. Based upon original fieldwork, I analyze the timbre of twenty-four secular Tai Dam khap documented from nine communities in Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, and the United States, focusing on the non-lexical vocable. Spectrograms are used to provide acoustic support for my timbral conclusions. I argue that the vocables in all twenty-four khap share a timbral concordance expressed through the bright [œ] vowel, as in the British English word “bird” or the French word “fleur”, which consistently delineates the larger sections and/or smaller phrases. In addition to the primary [œ] vowel, other secondary language sounds often appear such as the bright [I] and [i] vowels and the darker [ŋ] nasal. These are plotted against geography to reveal timbral correspondences between secondary khap language sounds and specific Tai Dam communities.

In this paper, I build on scholarship in Buddhist ethnomusicology (Douglas 2020; Greene et al. 2002) to examine the pedagogical processes at work in an ordination ceremony and training program for novice Buddhist nuns (samaneri) in central Thailand. Following Cupchik (2015), I approach the ordination ritual as performing art, attending to how it engages the senses and shapes monastics’ aesthetic standards. Using Mross’s (2022) description of ritual as “multisensorial,” I show how insights from dance, music, and performance studies (Wong 2001; Hahn 2007) provide useful tools in understanding the mechanisms of monastic training, which is also an education of the integrated body-mind system. Based on participant observation as a lay volunteer and temporary novice, as well as semi-structured interviews with nuns and laypeople, I demonstrate how the ordination ritual and training link mind, body, and community in a process I term “attunement of the senses.” I employ autoethnography and feminist sensory ethnography (Guzman and Hong 2022) to relay the embodied and sonic components of the ordination, showing how training the senses is integral to training the mind, which is considered the sixth sense in a Buddhist framework. In so doing, I contribute to a more wholistic understanding of the sensorium and lived practices of Buddhist traditions, which have historically been represented as the silent contemplation of a solitary (male) monk (Sykes 2018). Finally, this “attunement of the senses” gains additional significance within the broader Thai national context in which Buddhist nuns are not automatically heard and seen as religious authorities.

Although composed by a Ukrainian in the late 1880s, the Thai royal anthem, “Sansoen Phra Barami,” occupies a central place in Thailand’s politics and culture. Contemporary vocal arrangements of the anthem show how performers use ornamentation to incorporate a Thai musical identity into an otherwise Western composition. More broadly, in Thai SATB choral repertoire, ornamentation influenced by the language’s linguistic tones serves as a strong marker of a Thai musical identity within a Western style. This paper will compare multiple performances of “Sansoen Phra Barami” and the classical song “Lao Duang Deuan,” investigating how choral performances incorporate ornamentation. Tanese-Itō (1988) and Swangviboonpong (2003) have outlined structural rules governing ornamentation in Thai classical singing, and List (1961), Ho (2006), and Tanprasert and Rockwell (2021), discuss treatment of falling and rising tones in Thai popular music’s text-setting practices. I will show how ornamentation in Thai choral music is different. For example, Tanese-Itō's formula for Thai classical singing, which is a highly ornamented style, predicts that a word with a falling tone will insert notes after and below the primary pitch. My analyses, however, show that in Thai contemporary choral music, the ornamentation will occur before and above the primary pitch for a falling tone. The cross-fertilization between Thai and Western musical styles creates a unique sound world with distinct ornamentation norms. By preserving traditional musical markers in a post-contact environment, Thai musicians create a new musical style, incorporating a Thai identity into traditionally Western contexts.

On January 7, 2023, videos of audience members booing the Thai royal anthem—played with an on-screen request to stand silently in respect to the King—at the opening of a Blackpink concert in Bangkok went viral online. This incident marked the first widely recognized case of a collective vocal reaction to the anthem in Thailand. If participation in the ritualization of the national anthem materializes a unisonous sense of belonging to an imagined community (Anderson 1983), what identities were expressed, and through what forms of belonging, when collective booing clashed with conventional silence? Following Abe’s (2018) framing of human sonic expression as socially embedded across sedimented histories, I analyze online reactions to the incident alongside archival research on the anthem’s history. Rather than a planned protest, the boos signaled audiences’ discomfort with the anthem as a symbol of Thainess that did not resonate within Thai Blackpink fandom, particularly as fans expressed their pride in welcoming the group’s Thai member, Lisa, home. As noted by K-pop scholarship (Siriyuvasak and Shin 2007; Wee 2021; Lee and Kao 2021), the genre generates imagined communities through shared consumer culture, complicating historically constituted national identities and boundaries. Through booing, audiences contested the royal anthem, which has long been an emblem of Thai royal nationalism since the formation of the Thai nation-state in the late nineteenth century. This vocalization reverberated in a space celebrating a stylish, glossy Thainess shaped by inter-Asian pop cultural circulation.

This paper examines how trans+ drag performers in Bristol (U.K.) use music to articulate forms of trans+ embodiment that challenge dominant crisis narratives. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork – including participant observation, interviews, and performance analysis – I approach drag as a sonic ecology structured through listening, affect, and relationality. In public discourse trans+ bodies are typically framed through crisis frameworks of medicalisation, sexualisation, and moral panic. Music has historically been central in queer responses to this. I situate current trans+ responses by building on Matthew J. Jones’s work on recorded pop and AIDS (2024), Keith C. Ward’s analysis of The AIDS Quilt Songbook (1999), and Gregory Barz’s ethnography of AIDS and performance in East Africa (2006). I trace how amplification, textual clarity, and repetition have become aligned with societal crisis narratives. I term this alignment ‘plague logic:’ a sonic mode privileging legibility, urgency, and didactic address. Through close analysis of drag performances, audience interaction, and backstage musical practices, I show how performers disrupt plague logic by foregrounding mundanity as an affective sonic register. Mundanity emerges through genre promiscuity, songs without symbolic gravitas, and affective warmth and intimacy that resist symbolic overdetermination. Music enables privacy within public space and collective strength without heroic framing. By centring mundanity as an ethnographically grounded performance framework, this paper contributes to trans+ methodologies in ethnomusicology (Garcia-Mispireta, 2023; Heller, 2020; Pennington, 2018), reframing music as a site where trans+ embodiment is sustained through community sonic practice and radical care.

This paper draws on autoethnography and theoretical scholarship on care and disability studies to address how the neoliberal model in contemporary universities in the United States hinders and hampers music scholars experiencing parenthood. Following Audre Lorde’s formulation of anger as a source of energy for progress and change, together with Sarah Ahmed’s use of writing from the own experience to make sense of it, I present what I call a rantflection – the combination of the words ‘rant’ and ‘reflection’ – to present some thoughts originating from my anger and expressing them critically to create a dialogue about the experience of parenthood in relation to the practice of music scholarship. While care and disability studies have increasingly gained scholarly attention in the last decade, the focus of these debates has been centered on practices of self-care and the challenges that the structural hostility of academia poses on scholars with disability. Meanwhile, ongoing discussions about the ethics of fieldwork and the figure of the researcher have been present in ethnomusicology and anthropology, and yet, dialogue about care-related day to day activities and how they shape our experiences and decisions have largely remained in the dark. In this paper I set an invitation to think collectively about how acknowledging our own relations to care and the sociability within it could impact our work in the field, but also what possibilities would it open to shaping our discipline into the future.

Music and the arts are increasingly used in Southern Africa to reduce HIV-related stigma. However, due to lack of evidence underpinning their impact, rarely do the music and the arts become part of policy development or are they formally integrated into healthcare programmes. The objective of our project was to design and pilot a music, dance, and theatre-based intervention combatting HIV-stigma in urban and peri-urban Zimbabwe, and then to conduct a comprehensive, in-depth evaluation of its impact.

With this presentation, we will show a recording of the music/dance/theatre intervention (20-minutes long), followed by a discussion featuring: (1) the research conducted to identify key drivers of HIV-stigma in Zimbabwe; (2) how we used that data to develop the intervention; and (3) how we assessed the impact of the intervention.

The intervention had a significant positive effect on an individual’s support against discriminatory actions or policies towards HIV: respondents who watched the play had reduced levels of fear and judgement towards HIV. This project demonstrates the potential music and the arts can serve in reducing HIV-stigma, findings that could have widespread implications for HIV prevention, treatment, and care.

“I have been told my arms are too fat and I should cover them up… I’ve been advised that I looked thinner in college and should return to that,” says soprano Victoria Erickson. Promulgated in the early 1990s, America’s moral panic over its so-called “obesity epidemic” extended beyond public health and media into the arts, reinforcing fatphobia entangled with white, classed, and westernized ideals of beauty. In classical music, these bodily norms are often framed as neutral, yet they are deeply embedded in professional training and evaluation. Within the opera industry, such norms surface with particular intensity in Young Artist Programs (YAPs), where emerging singers are judged not only on vocal ability but on their capacity to embody cis-heteronormative, fatphobic ideals of believability and marketability.

Over the past three decades, a neoliberal proliferation of “how-to” discourse—ranging from OPERA America audition guidelines to blogs, workshops, self-help literature, and social media—has codified professional audition attire as a visible marker of competence, belonging, and hireability. These gender-binarized prescriptions converge on a standardized audition “uniform,”disciplining singers’ bodies into industry-sanctioned legibility rather than individual expression. Drawing on young artists’ lived experiences through in-depth interviews, American industry praxis, and cultural criticism, I interrogate how fatphobia intersects with racism, classism, sexism, heteronormativity, and ableism to constrain access and govern opportunity under the guise of professionalism. I argue that audition “uniforms” function as technologies of compliance that naturalize systemic exclusion while displacing responsibility onto individual singers, obscuring the structural forces that shape operatic labor and inclusion.

This roundtable considers how musical talent/musicality has been institutionally constructed within Euro-American culture(s) and critically examines ideological mechanisms that perpetuate these constructions in ways that exclude intersectional identities relative to disability, d/Deafness, and race/ethnicity. Drawing upon their ethnographic fieldwork with neurodivergent musicians, Presenter 1 proposes a counterpoint to ableist understandings of musical talent through the framework of neurodivergent musicality, which centers the neurodivergent experience and privileges nonnormative musical and creative exchange. Presenter 2 critically examines constructions of amateur and professional as applied to the work of rappers involved in dip hop. Based on their ethnographic work documenting the early formation of this style, this presenter problematizes notions of amateur and professional as tied to performance expectations, musical value, and financial longevity. Presenter 3 draws from a case study in the early twentieth century in which musical talent fueled a landmark experiment in racist science. Her analysis of the 1927 report “Race Crossing in Jamaica” underlines how medicalized talent has historically been used as a metric of racial potential in clinical spaces. Presenter 4 interrogates the role of standardization in the Suzuki method of music education, drawing upon fieldwork with learning communities across the U.S. They consider how the method’s repertoire, teaching points, and modes of evaluation can promote equity in some contexts, and exclusionary, normate conceptions of musicality in others. By melding ethnographic and historical case studies this roundtable facilitates a conversation that reveals and disrupts hegemonic understandings of musical value rooted in ableism and racism.

Queering the Field (Barz and Cheng 2019) sought “subversive” transformations of queerness for ethnomusicology, from “the queer embrace of sound as embodied” and “the queer critique of gendered binaries” to “the advocacy for queer-identified musical individuals” (Barz 2019, 13–17). This panel responds to queer ethnomusicology’s ascension through recent feminist theoretical developments (e.g., subjectless critique, more-than-humanisms, materialism), as an elision of gendered and sexual musical identities. Critical ethnographies expand beyond thick descriptions of music made by trans people, thus exceeding cis-hegemonic “hungry listening” (Robinson 2020) that subsumes minoritized creative practice under “queer” ethnomusicology. The papers in this panel work to expand “acoustemologies” (Feld 2015) of and in transition. The first paper documents transfeminine migrant pedagogies in San Diego/Tijuana. The second paper explores the ordinary auralities of transition within London’s transfeminine nightlife scenes. The third paper interrogates the vocal performativities of transing species at furry conventions across the U.S.. We tune ourselves to loud, deafening, and dissonant auralities/oralities which refuse, reappropriate, or disidentify with institutionalized organizations of sexed audibility (Ochoa Gautier 2014). Together, the papers in this panel employ critical ethnographic listening to (re)articulate global and local configurations of transness, where the sonic imaginaries of performers, musicians, and listeners in our fieldwork may recast prevailing conceptual settlements in ethnomusicology about music and sound’s social mediations of gender and sex. Rather than listening for queer- or transness in the field, we let ourselves get out of tune at the after party, on the stage, and up against one another.

Author Arundhati Roy laid bare the ways in which the construct of voicelessness obfuscates hegemonic acts of silencing when she stated, “There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard." In this panel, we follow Roy's words through ethnomusicological studies of the voice that privilege the action of “voicing” rather than the voice or lack thereof as an object or state of being. Using this approach, we utilize three contrasting studies to examine how different actors exercise agency through their voice and the voices of others— their usage, their silencing, and their contortion. Our panel seeks to place this approach to the voice in dialogue with trauma and refugee studies to further interrogate the way people traverse hardships of violence, trauma, gendered repression, and racial discrimination by voicing against forces that attempt to render them voiceless. We ask: how does vocality empower survivors? What kinds of fractures in systems of violence might occur upon their voicings? Our panelists address these questions through examining the affect and empathy Palestinian women’s personal narrative storytelling, the vocalities of long-term refuge in the Cambodian American communities of Lowell, Massachusetts, and the dissonance between child refugee voicing and appropriated voice in state-sponsored propaganda. While drawing from different situations and regions of the world, each paper on this panel argues that the voice exceeds itself as a sounding entity, always but especially in circumstances when people are deliberately silenced or unheard.

This roundtable invites participants to think with and through suspense as a heuristic which bridges the embodied and the political, the local and the transnational, the mediated and the “authentic.” We examine how musical performance “within the slash” of Asian/America (Palumbo-Liu 1999) complicates and enriches the very ideas of “Asian” and “American” upon which it rests, suspending preconceived notions of the boundaries between nations and academic disciplines. Drawing from conversations in Global Asias (Chen and Eubanks 2025) and music and performance studies (Huang 2022, Wong 2004), suspense allows us to put sonic practice into conversation with geopolitical and disciplinary critique. Rooted in the diasporic spaces and politics of Southern California, panelists draw from their ethnographic research on 1) Asian/American listeners’ affective responses to EDM at “Asian/American” music festivals; 2) live concert spaces within globalized Kpop performances as “pan-Asian”; 3) Taiwanese/American musical practices in Taiwan; 4) Taiwanese American music as a form of participation in global politics; and 5) queer panethnic Asian/American nightlife. Each of the speakers invite the wider SEM community to join in on this exploration and to contend with how Asian/American ethnomusicologists as well as others can hold in suspense the field of ethnomusicology through the blurring of taken-for-granted boundaries of nation/state.

Shame is an ugly feeling. It does not drive us to connect or create. It halts us. It isolates us. It’s hard to produce when slumped and alone. Ethnomusicologists have attended to how shame influences our collaborators. With this 90-minute roundtable, we explore shame as it emerges in fieldwork.

[Contributor 1] examines how shame paralyzed him while in his queer open mic field and prevented him from interviewing important interlocutors. That shame is compounded as he faces the discipline without that crucial information.

[Contributor 2] reflects on experiences of impostor syndrome, a deeply-engrained feeling of not belonging in academia or ethnomusicology. Shame distorts fieldwork and scholarship challenges into personal failures, stymying productive reflection and critical analysis of external factors. Academic institutions benefit from this shame, increasing pressures for service and scholarly productivity while reducing institutional support.

[Contributor 3] considers the relationship between her shame and that of queer Afrikaans music fans who are her research subjects in South Africa. In the wake of a diagnosis of PTSD, , she unpacks how sexual violence shapes legible topics and scholars within ethnomusicology.

[Contributor 4] examines their positionality in relation to physical presences of neo/postcolonial power structures in former French colonies of Africa. They explore complexities of access their positionality as a white femme researcher affords in the afterlife of colonization, while also examining how their presentation precludes connections with some interlocutors. They reflect on balancing ethical research with culturally humble interrogation of the prestige of conducting American-funded fieldwork in postcolonial Africa.

This paper examines how sacred boundaries materially organize choral performance, gendered participation, and musical structure in the Celestial Church of Christ (CCC) Yemetu, Ibadan, Nigeria. While scholarship on African Indigenous Churches has emphasized theology, ritual symbolism, and institutional history, comparatively little attention has been given to how doctrinal regulations shape musical practice at the level of rehearsal, sound production, and ensemble coordination. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and musicological analysis, this study argues that sacred boundaries function as performance technologies that structure spatial arrangement, authority, vocal distribution, and liturgical sequencing. Regulations governing altar access, hierarchical rank, and menstrual purity directly influence leadership patterns, rehearsal planning, cantata execution, and harmonic balance. Rather than operating solely as constraints, these boundaries generate adaptive musical strategies, including flexible part redistribution, anticipatory rehearsal culture, and spatially negotiated ensemble interaction. Hymnody and liturgical flow further reinforce sacred order by sonically marking purity, hierarchy, and divine authority. Engaging theories of the sacred and profane alongside ethnomusicological approaches to music as social action, the paper demonstrates that sacred order in African Indigenous Christianity is not only believed or symbolized but acoustically produced and continually reproduced through choral practice. By foregrounding the intersection of gender, embodiment, and musical form, this study contributes to broader debates on religion, performance, and power while advancing a music-centered understanding of how ritual regulation becomes audible in lived worship.

The Omani state’s imperial expansion along the East African littoral in the nineteenth century secured Arab political and military dominance over the western edges of the Indian Ocean’s vast networks of trade in weapons, spices, and the enslaved. This expansion was conducted by Omani political and mercantile elites, who, from their coastal palaces, balanced South Asian investment capital, enslaved labor on new clove plantations, and Indian Ocean merchant networks with their own naval and military might. This paper traces this imperial expansion through the steps of a particular dance form—the Omani razḥa—which, I argue, was a crucial tool in the expansion of Omani hegemony. I show that the razḥa was the premier dance and social technology that accompanied Omani Arab sailors and soldiers as they cut a bloody wake down the Swahili coast, and, in the eyes of African locals, became a symbol of the Arab empire. Through documentary and ethnographic evidence, I argue that the Omani razḥa served as a model for several Swahili dance forms along the East African coast throughout the nineteenth century precisely due to its centrality to Omani political practice. As many scholars of East Africa have noted, East African societies have long adopted and reframed the images, sounds, and regalia of dominant groups, especially within competitive dance contexts. By putting dance at the center of historical and ethnomusicological analysis, I show how dance, especially but not exclusively war dances, can operate as a social practice of domination in the context of imperial expansion.

This paper presents a preliminary inquiry into Tulod-Damag, a mortuary rite practiced in Central Panay, Philippines. Grounded in the local knowledge system and cosmology, it examines how recurring sounds, ritual utterances, bodily gestures, and spatial movements structure the separation of the deceased from the world of the living. Drawing on ongoing fieldwork, interviews with practitioners, audio documentation, and analysis of ritual sequences, the study treats sound not merely as an expression of grief but as a performative medium through which mortuary transition is enacted and communally recognized. The analysis suggests that recurring sonic and embodied actions form flexible, cumulative cycles rather than strictly metrical patterns. Through repetition and intensification, these actions progressively mark separation, transition, and ritual closure. The paper further proposes that the relationship among sound, performativity, and mortuary passage may be explained by an emic concept rooted in local cultural knowledge. By foregrounding this culturally grounded category, the study contributes to ethnomusicological discussions of ritual sound, temporality, death, and social continuity.

With growing interest in how the humanities can inform medical interventions, patient care, and healing, this panel features a collection of studies as entry points to the sonic potentials and critiques of medical(ized) spaces. These investigations compel close interrogation of the rational and colonial legacies that undergird past linguistic and tonal destabilization, contemporary bioethics, and culturally and religiously centered sonic care. Tracing missionary hospitals in early twentieth-century northern China, the first paper examines a phonetic shorthand taught to illiterate patients that split Chinese syllables into two parts, paralleling this phonetic division with the surgical incisions imposed upon China’s body politic by Western imperialism. The second paper draws attention to the instrument and architectural presence of the carillon at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, arguing that as a cultural symbol of the hospital, it represents an alternative aliveness that complicates and reconfigures the bioethical principles of the clinical setting. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria, the third paper investigates the role of culturally grounded musical practices such as songs employed during antenatal sessions as forms of care in maternal health across a government-owned hospital and a faith-based maternity home. Together these papers allow an exploration of sounds and musical practices that have been evoked, invited, and even enforced within medical(ized) contexts of the past, institutionally ingrained in the present, and burgeoning today.

The courtroom is an acoustic and spatial environment where law is enacted through regulated listening. As ethnomusicologists increasingly encounter legal institutions as expert witnesses and as scholar-activists, the courtroom demands clearer theorization as a critical listening space within the discipline. Drawing on Season 3 of Surviving R. Kelly (2023), which features federal court proceedings of sexual abuse by the R&B artist, this paper analyzes how architectural design, courtroom protocol, and surrounding courthouse soundscapes shape what can be heard, withheld, or (mis)understood in legal settings. Microphones, sound systems, white noise generators, architectural materials, and ambient disturbances shape the courthouse as a layered soundscape. Media coverage constitutes a parallel soundscape that recontextualizes courtroom speech as legal narratives circulate in real time. Testimonies delivered under oath are excerpted, replayed, and reframed, while press conferences outside the courthouse transform legal argument into performative statements designed for broadcast. The courtroom thus becomes a site where voice, emotion, and institutional power converge, and where testimony functions as both narrative and performance shaped by acoustic conditions and psychological expectations. Drawing on Gelbwasser’s discussion of courtroom noise and privileged communication (2001) and Blesser and Salter’s theory of aural architecture (2007), this paper argues that courtroom acoustics structure access to information, condition credibility, and influence how justice is experienced by witnesses, legal actors, and listening publics. By theorizing juridical listening through mediated soundscapes and aural architecture, this intervention expands ethnomusicological approaches to power by locating law as an underexamined but increasingly consequential site of listening, governance, and public meaning.

Title: Sounding the “Kawthoolei” (in progress)
Year produced: 2026 (in production)
Estimated total length: 75 minutes
Language: English

This film is part of my ongoing practice-based PhD project on the music and sound of Karen refugees along the Thai-Burmese border, displaced by the Burmese civil war. The Karen are an ethnic minority group, with the majority originally residing in Burma. Many of them have been persecuted by the Burmese military junta for several decades and have settled in Thai border areas. I study the sonic world of the Karen through the theoretical lenses of displacement, ethnicity, and war, examining how Karen music and sound shape and express ethnic identity, construct and present their cultural memory, and engage with themes of war.

The research produces a multimodal and multisensory ethnography, including a thesis, an ethnographic film, soundscape compositions, and a participatory artwork co-created with my participants. For this conference, I would present an excerpt of the film, highlighting Karen youth rap. It centers on oral stories of Karen people’s homeland, “Kawthoolei,” and documents Karen rap music production, interweaving several individual narratives with related Karen music videos. The film explores the senses of the Karen people, such as hearing, vision, imagination, memory, fear, and hope. I have completed my fieldwork and am currently experimenting with different approaches to editing.

Preview excerpt (work-in-progress):

https://vimeo.com/1097677512?share=copy&fl=sv&fe=ci

In many ways, the complexity of composer freelancing in Los Angeles is an intensification of conditions previously observed: musical tradition is interwoven with networking strategies and challenging working conditions. Yet the city’s history of musical eclecticism and desacralization, as described by historian Kenneth Marcus, clearly influences the flavor of artistic activity. Professional opportunities extend beyond a variety of classical music scenes, spilling over to the cultural businesses of film and television (Taylor 2023). At the same time, considerations of musical tradition, ethnic diversity, histories of immigration, economic precarity, and gendered dynamics contribute to artistic profiles and professionalization trajectories. Here, notions of multiculturalism, musical hybridity, and what Andrea Moore has called the “incorporation aesthetic” (2016) become intertwined with contemporary classical music’s connections with entrepreneurialism, the marketplace, and American-based ensemble strategies (Pippen 2014, 2022). Based on my fieldwork, I argue that composers based in Los Angeles operate within a distinct, global “new music” field of cultural production, where professional advancement is influenced by themes of entrepreneurialism, multiculturalism, and social identity. By articulating Los Angeles’s contemporary classical music production in terms of working conditions and cultural diversity, this research contributes to a broader understanding of how freelance musicians engage with and strategize within large, multicultural metropolitan areas.

In this presentation, I investigate how affective music performance and community organizing structure the work of the cantadora Elena Hinestroza in the black migrant communities of Cali, Colombia. Cantadoras are traditional singers of Afro-Colombian music who are the matriarchs of rural Colombian Pacific communities. Hinestroza operates La Azotea de la Abuela in eastern Cali, a cultural performance and meeting space located in the rooftop of her home that hosts Pacific Music workshops for local youth and traditional nightlong musical ceremonies called arrullos, in addition to community and government meetings. I posit that La Azotea is a location where Pacific Music performance (re)produces a politics of black cultural preservation, and that the affective resonances of Afro-Colombian music performance are vital to sustaining the symbolic capital through which Hinestroza performs community advocacy, and furthermore, that La Azotea is a political space where cantadoras reassert their authority to regulate intercommunal and intra-communal relationships. Hinestroza and her collaborators also adapt traditional Afro-Colombian voice pedagogies to compose a contemporary urban song repertoire informed by their experiences of internal displacement. I argue that these songs establish a shared meaning of place for black migrants and their descendants by speaking to their collective memories of the rural Colombian Pacific and current struggles against racial segregation Cali. This presentation is in dialogue with recent sociological and Black Feminist scholarship on black Pacific cultural expression in Cali, and contributes ethnomusicological analysis of performance genealogies and the affective voice.

This paper delves into how sonic and musical experience contributes to espiritismo marialioncero’s (Venezuelan spiritism) formulation of spiritual intensity, or a principle better known as fuerza. Spectacularizing approaches have justified persecution of religious practitioners since the 1950s by describing espiritismo as a "cult to violence" or a scam with negative influences on Venezuelan society (Barreto 2020, Ferrándiz 2004, Taussig 1997). The forceful character of spirit possession is a central concern as it signals a fracture between different understandings of subjectivity, humanity and violence. While for espiritistas marialionceros this ritual is desired and transformative, others see it as threatening and abhorrent (Crosson 2019). I argue that we can explore this epistemological impasse most effectively by interrogating the role of intensity as a threshold between the ordinary and extraordinary. As such, I show how espiritistas also defy long-standing scholarly paradigms for the study of violence that rely on derivative ideals of personhood, individual autonomy (Scarry 1985), and agency. Through (auto)ethnographic engagement, I study espiritistas’ methodical curation of the intensities of sound, sights and temperatures to propitiate the fuerza needed for intervention into legacies of unbelonging and suffering. Ultimately, fuerza illuminates espiritista human/non-human solidarities that profoundly modify how this religious community inhabits Venezuela’s contemporary crisis.

Drawing on archival and ethnographic research conducted in São José do Belmonte, a rural community in the backlands of Pernambuco, this talk examines how grassroots initiatives linked to the Armorial Movement, a multifaceted artistic project spearheaded by playwright, novelist, and scholar Ariano Suassuna (1927–2014) have empowered residents of Belmonte to effect change through what political anthropologist James Holston terms insurgent citizenship. I explore how the Stone of the Kingdom Association has served as a site for the performance of citizenship by cultivating networks of belonging through participatory cultural activities, such as the Stone of the Kingdom Celebration. This event is an equestrian pilgrimage to Pedra do Reino, a historical site where, in 1838, a group of religious zealots, followers of Sebastianismo, a messianic ideology centered on the prophesied return of Dom Sebastião (1554–1578), King of Portugal, carried out a massacre in hopes of bringing about the monarch’s return. Taking the Stone of the Kingdom Celebration as a point of departure, I demonstrate how members of the Stone of the Kingdom Association embrace Suassuna’s Armorial universe as a means of performing cultural identity and citizenship, re-signifying the historic site of Pedra do Reino into a space of cultural and political significance.

In many Orthodox Jewish (“frum”) communities, women do not sing in front of men, shielding men from women’s singing voices for religious modesty. This practice has often been framed as a “silencing of women’s voices” and a form of patriarchal oppression (Lubet 2011; Koskoff 2014; Borts 2021). However, by focusing on the absence of women’s singing voices in male dominated-spaces, researchers and outside observers effectively re-enact the silencing of these women by failing to notice the actual singing voices of frum women. Rather than focusing on what frum women aren’t doing or where they cannot be heard, it is more productive to investigate what they are doing with their voices and why. Not only do frum women sing, but they have unique and vibrant singing practices and spaces that exist separately from men’s or mixed-gender singing spaces. Using the approaches of scholars who investigate the formation of gendered religious subjectivity (Mahmood 2005) and the construction of conceptions of “the voice” (Weidman 2014; Sundar 2023) as well as interviews and participant observation in New York, I argue that implicit assumptions about singing, agency, and frum women obscure the ways that singing is used in these communities, namely as a tool for collective connection and to consciously form a religious and communal subjectivity. This critical examination of understandings of “the frum voice” has implications for wider musical research that involves religious or non-Western communities which may have misalignments between emic and etic understandings of singing and its purposes.

This talk chronicles the results of a federally-funded project at Concordia University "Sonic Heritage Diversity,” a project that explores the disappearing music and musical and listening practices, as well as related intangible cultural heritage, of Montreal Jews of Middle Eastern (Mizrahi) and North African (Sephardic) origin, and more broadly the practices of communities and individuals fitting outside of “Ashkenormative” parameters such as Yemenite, Ethiopian, or Romaniote (Judeo-Greek). This talk will highlight key moments revealed during fieldwork and archival research.

Montreal is currently home to an unusually diverse population of Jews from different origins. While some came to Canada directly from their places of origin, others came from countries like the United States, Israel and France, to which they had originally immigrated often in order to leave situations that had become unsustainable owing to conflict and/or antisemitism. This talk explores the multi-faceted areas to which the project “Sonic Heritage Diversity” contributes, for instance, how the project stimulated the exploration of innovative research methods to preserve disappearing repertoires of intangible heritage in a context in which Canadian Jewish identity is rapidly changing, and previous intra-Jewish ethnic boundaries are shifting and, in some cases, coalescing. The public-facing aspect, including the ongoing creative activation aspect of the project serves as an important resource through which Jewish subjectivities can remember their musical past and engage with it in the present. The talk also highlights rich, community-led depictions of practitioners, their music, and their diverse journeys and encounters.

This paper examines Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest during the Gaza war by looking at its 2024 (“Hurricane”) and 2025 (“New Day Will Rise”) entries as audiovisual articulations of national mourning in the aftermath of October 7th. Instead of looking at these entries primarily as strategic interventions within a moment of political controversy, I analyze their official music videos as platforms through which collective grief and resilience are rendered visible and audible. Through scholarship on semiotics, trauma and grievability, I argue that the videos mobilize visual and sonic motifs to represent mourning through both personal vulnerability and communal endurance. These mediated discourses address domestic audiences that are still going through the aftermath of trauma, as well as international audiences for whom the scale and impact of October 7 on Israeli civilians have not been fully apprehended within dominant media frames. However, once the contest begins, their expression of grief becomes entangled in geopolitical debates, revealing how public grief acquires political force when mediated transnationally. By examining these entries as sites where mourning is aesthetically shaped and the Eurovision as an international arena where both support and contestation occur, this paper contributes to discussions regarding the intersections between public mourning and geopolitical contestation in global media events, as well as to ethnomusicological studies of music in crisis.

This paper examines Dingqu(丁曲)—a grassroots remix subgenre on China’s video platform Bilibili inspired by Ding Zhen (丁真), a Tibetan youth who went viral in November 2020 and was quickly elevated as a tourism ambassador and a state-friendly symbol of “ethnic harmony.”

Building from this mediated celebrity, Dingqu (means Ding Zhen’s music) creators mimic Ding Zhen’s Mandarin accent, rewrite lyrics with irony, and circulate parodic songs that reframe his fame as an uneasy convergence of propaganda, commercial extraction, and anxieties about social mobility. In this paper, I ask: How does Dingqu resist state-sponsored narratives of ethnic harmony and meritocracy, and what does its participatory production reveal about the possibilities and limits of China’s digital public sphere?

This study utilizes a virtual ethnography of highly circulated Dingqu videos, ranging from the early 2021 breakout remixes that established genre conventions to later, intertextual works that weave together classical literature and online memes. I argue that Dingqu functions as networked, humorous dissent rather than mere entertainment. Through satire, mimicry, and dense intertextual play, remixers appropriate an officially celebrated figure to stage counter-narratives about fairness, ethnicity, and symbolic capital.

The paper connects Habermasian debates on public sphere to platformed participatory culture and highlights puns as a tactical aesthetic that enables critique while navigating censorship and platform governance. Ultimately, Dingqu crystallizes how digital musicking can open contingent spaces of commentary and agency—yet only within shifting boundaries of state and platform control.

Nigerian Afrobeats artist Asake (born Ahmed Ololade) rose to national and global pop stardom with the release of his first album Mr. Money with the Vibe (2022), under famed Nigerian hip-hop artist and music producer Olamide’s Yahoo Boy No Laptop Nation (YBNL) record label. One of the album’s singles, “Peace Be Unto You (PBUY)”, was released before Nigeria’s celebration of the Muslim Eid-el-Kabir. The hit song, which was secular in nature but utilized religious language in its lyrics, called for peace amid growing political insecurity that disproportionately affected Muslims. This paper argues that popular music opportunely centered Muslim religious expression during the holiday period, discursively challenging insecurity and generating revenue among Muslim music consumers. I draw upon Allottey-Pappoe’s (2024) description of Afrobeats as a hypernym, a broad categorization that elucidates sonic influences of Afro/Afro-Diasporic religious communities. I also use Osiebe’s (2016) conception of market-driven themes in Nigerian popular music to examine how Asake and other Nigerian Afrobeats artists address Muslim audiences in their music productions as morally attuned citizen-consumers. Their musical works subvert industry margins by sonically mediating the experiences of African Muslims, involving them as discursive citizens and popular music consumers contending with Nigeria’s daily precarities.

In Equatorial Guinea, a small Central African petro-state where music streaming has not taken hold, music circulates primarily via WhatsApp—a Meta-owned messaging app never designed for music distribution. This paper examines WhatsApp as an accidental alternative to the dominant infrastructures of digital music circulation and asks whether its architectural features circumvent core logics of platform capitalism—algorithmic recommendation, data extraction, copyright enforcement—more effectively than purpose-built alternatives such as P2P file-sharing networks, netlabels, and producer-oriented platforms like SoundCloud and Bandcamp. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork—including participant observation in recording studios, interviews with musicians and fans, and analysis of WhatsApp-based music sharing networks—the paper explores how digital music exchange in Equatorial Guinea is shaped not only by global technological infrastructures but also by local economic and political formations, most notably a longstanding oil-rich authoritarian state and the musical patronage it sustains. The analysis reveals a paradox: WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, absence of algorithmic recommendation, and lack of licensing agreements create a distinct space for circulation, yet these very features—combined with state control of internet access and entrenched patronage logics—prevent artists from monetizing their music, reinforcing their dependence on political elites. The paper contributes to scholarship on digital platforms in the Global South by showing that resistance to platform capitalism may emerge not from intentional design but from infrastructural accident.

This paper explores the notion of barulho (noise) in Mindelo, São Vicente, Cabo Verde, as a contested sonic category shaped by colonial legacies and contemporary spatial politics. While scholarship von Cabo Verdean music has predominantly centered genres framed as “tradition”—such as morna, coladeira, batuku, and funaná—this paper turns to two practices that are frequently relegated to the domain of barulho: Kolá San Jon and Heavy Metal in Mindelo. In local discourse, barulho often contrasts with ideas of heritage and respectability, implying that excessive loudness, distortion, and percussive intensity fall outside the bounds of legitimate tradition. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, I examine how Kolá San Jon’s processional drumming and Heavy Metal’s amplified rehearsals and concerts are regulated, spatially contained, and at times morally condemned. Building on Camal’s (2019) concept of “creolized auralities,” I argue that both forms articulate alternative modes of sonic belonging that unsettle inherited hierarchies of civility and musical value rooted in colonial governance. Historically, African-derived expressive forms were disciplined through spatial restriction and discourses of disorder; contemporary debates over volume, amplification, and public festivity echo these earlier regimes. Finally, this paper conceptualizes barulho as a relational category through which race, class, and postcolonial modernity are negotiated. By juxtaposing these two genres, I demonstrate how creolized aural practices challenge dominant auditory regimes and reconfigure urban space through sound. In doing so, the paper contributes to ethnomusicological discussions on sound, power, and the afterlives of colonialism in the Atlantic.

Swastikas, Sieg Heils, and claims that metal is a “white thing”: these overt expressions of white supremacy are widely acknowledged by scholars and participants as present in isolated pockets of the metal scene. Less examined, however, is how members of the scene respond when these ideologies emerge from these pockets with a violent roar or manifest as an insidious whisper.

This paper addresses this gap through a case study of US metal musician Phil Anselmo and his band, Pantera, once deemed as the “saviors of American metal” (Krovatin 2019). Although Anselmo has repeatedly expressed white supremacist views, these actions are often treated as isolated incidents, allowing both his reputation and Pantera’s legacy to remain largely intact. By recovering numerous overlooked examples of racist rhetoric from Anselmo and his bandmates, this paper demonstrates that such incidents constitute an ongoing pattern rather than discrete scandals. Because Anselmo is among the most influential musicians in metal history, this case study reveals just how deeply entrenched and normalized white supremacy has become in the metal scene.

Drawing on semiotic approaches from linguistic anthropology and analysis of interviews, media coverage, and live performances, this study shows how overt and subtle racialized discourses reinforce the metal scene’s white racial frame (Feagin 2009). This paper contributes to conversations about the enduring effects of white supremacy still inherent to the scene today (Hoad 2021; Fischer 2022; Hudson 2026), adding to and expanding the ways in which those who study this genre think about and discuss issues of race.

This paper explores the popular allure of the abject in the music of the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, specifically in the song “Closer” and its accompanying music video. Julia Kristeva defined the abject as the material result of bodily waste separated from the body, like vomit, excrement, and blood, which causes simultaneous disgust and intrigue in the subject who experiences it. While the genre of industrial music as a whole often contains explicit references to Kristeva, Georges Bataille, and other philosophers who have written about the abject, Nine Inch Nails was the first to receive worldwide radio and television play without compromising on grotesque imagery, including visuals and lyrics running the gamut from sadomasochistic sex to suicide. This paper probes the public’s hidden desires and fascination with the abject through the band’s most popular single, “Closer,” and how that fascination aided in catapulting the band to stardom. In tandem, I situate the band’s cult following in a countercultural movement that felt abjected–expunged, alienated, sequestered–from the rest of society and how identification with the extreme and disturbing lyrical imagery allowed them to band together as outcasts. Using ethnographic and theoretical methodologies, I explore the abject’s ability to both unify and divide, and how that mirrors its dual nature as alluring and repulsive.