In her recent book How We Write Now (2024), Black feminist critic Jennifer Nash considers how Black feminist writers, in the face of profound Black loss, have cultivated a singular voice that is beautiful. Nash articulates a kind of “living-with” this reality of loss that is “about an ethic of companionship that … animates the Black feminist archive." In this roundtable, we are inspired by Nash’s engagement with loss, beauty, and creativity to imagine how we might live with one another and this moment as ethnomusicologists. Specifically, we are curious about how ethnomusicologists—through our research and writing, teaching and mentorship, and curation and collaboration—can work together in a context of mass deportation, transphobic policy, expanding imperialism, global antiblackness, ecological catastrophe, and dystopian technologies. We speak from diverse institutional and geographic positions in the field, both within and outside of the university, in order to: consider histories of intellectual censorship in higher education, revisit artists’ responses to related crises in the 20th century, propose collective avenues for applied ethnomusicological work today, and share strategies from the music classroom that strive to meet students’ current needs. Throughout, we listen to Nash’s Black feminist archive to resist exceptionalist renderings of our current moment by historicizing contemporary trends, foreground humility and collaboration through tough questions rather than providing quickly satisfying answers, and encourage acts that interrupt the imperative to continue with business as usual in higher education in these times. Together, we ask: What is the work of the ethnomusicologist in times of crisis?