Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the SEM 2026 Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 29th Aug 2026, 08:47:10pm EDT
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Daily Overview |
| Session | |
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09L: Music That Moves: Memory, Protest, and Belonging Across Indian Worlds Location: State Room West | |
| Presentation 4 | |
Meaningful Sounds: Protest Songs of the 2020-2021 Indian Farmer’s Movement University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, The Indian Farmer’s Protest of 2020–2021 has been recognized as one of the longest and largest in the history of independent India (Moliner and Singh 2024). For over a year, hundreds of thousands of farmers and supporters are said to have participated in what has been hailed as a victorious mass movement of unity and resilience. Thousands of protesters camped for months at the outskirts of the Indian capital in harsh weather conditions until the government repealed the three “farm bills” that farmers argued would put them at the mercy of large corporations capable of manipulating grain prices to maximize profits at the cost of farmers’ incomes, resulting in impoverishment that would only exacerbate the huge current social problem of farmer suicide in India. At the camps, amateur and professional musicians chanted and sang poetry for spiritual nourishment and as caustic critique of the government (Abbi 2022; Moliner 2024). They also played protest song-videos recorded by popular musicians since before the encampments, with over five hundred songs released over the course of the movement; these garnering hundreds of millions of YouTube views (Kalra 2024). Reporters and scholars have commented on how the songs enlisted and represented people across social and political divides such as religion, caste, landownership, gender, age, ableness, and border. In this paper, I analyze the sonic, musical, lyrical, visual, cultural, and historical tropes in these songs—live and studio-produced—and building on sound, sensory, and phenomenological studies, explore how sounds carry meaning, across time and space. | |
