In 2026, the pre-conference organizers for the annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology tried something new. Instead of curating a mini-conference, they created the “Returning” Workshop for Collections in Need of Communities. This workshop, conceived as a direct response to the call of our colleagues during the 2023 Seeger Lecture, was designed to provide hands-on training for any practicing ethnomusicologist interested in connecting communities with their recorded music, dance, language, and other cultural heritage held in archives. The 2026 Workshop returns us to our roots as a discipline, where collections of sound recordings were created as part of standard professional practice, and provided a pathway for wide-scale participation in the shared obligation to help with return.

This roundtable reflects on the major lessons of the pre-conference and invites the audience to collectively consider how best to continue the work of return. Panelist 1 will discuss the vision and planning for the Workshop, addressing the collective responsibility for the rift that separated songs, sounds and other media from their communities of origin in a political-economic context that has stripped resources, increased workloads, and fostered precarity among professional archivists. Panelist 2 will speak about the impetus for the preconference and plans for ongoing initiatives by SEM. Panelists 3, 4, and 5 will share their experiences as presenters and mentors for return. They will reflect on the histories of extraction and ethics of return, about potential models for proactive return, and the hands-on training they provided.