Since the 1990s, cooperative farming—rooted in many cultural communities—has surged in the U.S., reconnecting food growers to land and community. In this context, new generations of Jewish communal farmers have flourished, reconstructing earth-based spiritual practice grounded in song, meditation, physical labor and intentional community that grapples with complex relationships to land, politics, and Jewish and gendered identity. Adamah (Hebrew “earth”) is a farm fellowship in restorative agriculture, Jewish learning and food justice created in 2003, launching hundreds of Millennial and Gen Z alumni to establish Jewish cooperative farms, environmental programs, and singing circles across the U.S.. Many leaders and songwriters identify as women, gender-fluid, queer, disabled, and people of color, including the founders of Let My People Sing! which gathers in “multi-racial, multicultural and genderful Jewish community,” defying voiced and bodily categorization and consciously building new models of belonging. Singing practices grounded in mystical teachings serve as “spiritual technologies” (Schachter-Shalomi, 2012) that strive toward re-enchantment, vulnerability, intimacy and healing through sung Hebrew and Yiddish text and wordless melodies, creative harmonization and dance, emphasizing the “in-between-ness of affect and its grounding…in physical bodies” (Graber and Sumera 2020:5). Through ethnographic interviews and participant observation, this paper explores how these shared singing and spiritual practices nourish connection and drive food and environmental justice movements. It demonstrates how song circles generate feminist strategies of participatory leadership, attuning voice not for the sake of performance, but rather striving for mutual healing, social liberation and community action through song, dance, and embodied listening.

On February 19, 2024, WXTJ in Charlottesville aired a radio show produced by teenage Afghan girls who DJ in English, Dari, and Pashto. A fourth grader opened in Dari, then shifted to English to introduce “Labkhand Bezan” by Aryana Sayeed, a song she and her sister dance to. By the time the girls produced their second show in fall 2024, the Taliban had issued new legal codes making it illegal for women and girls to speak in public; the female voice is now a sin. I treat these broadcasts as a form of nomadic vocal agency: voices that travel across borders, platforms, and listening publics. I argue that shared listening, dancing, and youth radio production operate as everyday technologies of belonging and place-making. The shows make community audible through laughter, dedication, rhythm, and shared attention. The girls and their mothers participate in Cville Tulips, a program I co-founded with Marjan Omranian in winter 2022. We work with students, faculty, and staff at the University of Virginia to offer culturally responsive English, health education, and youth programming to recently arrived Afghan and Syrian women. Drawing on a quantitative study of belonging and a community-driven project on resilience and mental health (workshops, interviews, participant observation), I ask questions about the relationship between ethnography and advocacy and offer a model for arts-based, community-engaged research that asks how sound can support co-produced knowledge rather than merely “amplifying voices.”

AI scholarship often centers on technological capacity, overlooking the political stakes of AI voices in public listening. This paper examines Nava, an AI-generated female singer, as a site where musical aesthetics, digital mediation, and gender politics intersect in contemporary Iranian sound culture. By focusing on Nava’s reinterpretation of traditional Iranian melodies, this paper asks: How does AI voice remake familiar melodies into global-pop sensibilities, and what does that remake do to gendered power under Iran’s vocal restrictions? Firstly, this paper focuses on musical analysis. Nava’s voice avoids ornamentations and has a smooth, compressed pop timbre, moving her singing away from Iranian vocal techniques and reshaping it into a globally recognizable sound. This “de-specialized” style mirrors change in Iranian listening, where global media and algorithms favor immediacy and accessibility over virtuosity and traditional lineage, and reflects a broader turn among young listeners toward platform-trained expectations. Secondly, the paper situates Nava within feminist and cyberfeminist debates on voice, embodiment, and technology. Nava’s digitally produced female persona enables forms of legitimacy inaccessible to many Iranian women musicians, particularly in post-“Woman, Life, Freedom” struggles. Framing Nava’s voice as religiously permissible by the dominant authority because it is artificial exposes a paradox: Nava becomes permissible precisely because she is disembodied; this mediation expands musical visibility while weakening the political force of women's embodied vocal resistance. By integrating musical analysis with feminist critiques of AI and embodiment, this paper shows how Nava’s voice reshapes Iranian listening cultures and exposes the cultural costs of sonic accessibility.

Labeled “coloured” by the apartheid regime, South African singer songwriter, indigenous healer, and mother, Ernestine Deane identifies as “brown,” connecting to the global movement towards indigenous audibility, presence, and ceremony after decades of colonial, segregationist, and apartheid dispossession. “Brown” allows her to embrace her indigenous aboriginal Khoi and San and Zulu mixed with Irish via Anglo Zulu war and missionary migrations, Dutch/ Indonesian/Mozambican (via Dutch East India Company) heritage to write/sing /restore a matrilineal relationship to the land from which her family was forcibly removed. “Constantia” is now one of Cape Town’s wealthiest white-owned wine producing suburbs. In 1964 Deane’s family was forcibly removed from Constantia to a remote place for “coloureds” called “Grassy Park,” on the Cape Flats which was neither grassy nor park. Close to birthing her first child in 2003, Ernestine Deane interrogates the contours of her family’s loss in an award-winning documentary film, “Brown” (2005) as a step toward healing the effects of a traumatic apartheid past. Embracing her Khoi and San knowledge/roots, she offers healing ceremonies and sings to extend an invitation for personal and cultural repair. In this paper I focus on Ernestine Deane’s contemporary healing ceremonies and songwriting, with its particular approach to voice, timbre, and texture, as a vessel of connection and restoration for her extended family after the severance of their relationship to the unique floral and animal kingdoms of the Western Cape.