Conference Agenda

In June 2014, the militant extremist organization the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) invaded Iraq from the Syrian border, initiating a three-year conflict alongside a global campaign to defeat it. Based on its extremist interpretation of Islam, the militant group's presence was marked by the implementation of extreme violence, ethno-religious cleansing, and sexual slavery that created an atmosphere of dread and terror across the country. ISIS propagated and put into action its rigid ideology, including the strict control over women’s corporeal presence and the erasure of music. While military propaganda music in the Arab world typically features slow tempos, deep masculine timbres, and large vocal ensembles, in this paper, I will draw attention to the creative and unprecedented characteristics of anti-ISIS propaganda music, including its dance-inducing rhythms, vivid acoustic design, and representation of female body and voice. Building on my ethnography of civilians about their wartime experience of this music, I will then address how the aforementioned musical characteristics acted as a direct counter to ISIS terror. Focusing on the meaning created by these aesthetic elements for civilians, I will demonstrate how these propaganda music tracks encapsulate the idea of the nation’s immortality and endurance, what I call “musical lastingness”. Finally, in tandem with the recent scholarship on the terror-responsive effects of music (Crandy 2017; Young 2019; Thomson 2023), I will situate the idea of musical lastingness within Terror Management Theory (Greenberg et al. 1986) to expand on the understanding of musicking as an existential practice.

“Boycott or Compliance” is a twenty-minute documentary featuring how the sounds, noises, and silence that unfolded during 2025–26 protests and the subsequent violent conflict between the military forces of the U.S./Israel and Iran provide clues to understand the totalitarian character of the Islamic Republic. By focusing on recorded interviews with artists, musicians, and scholars who had to overcome various types of economic, ideological, social, and political obstacles in their daily lives to survive the horrific and untenable living conditions under a totalitarian regime, this short documentary sheds light on the complexity of justice in the context of a war that seemingly aimed to liberate a nation. In addition, by highlighting the reasons for which the members of Iranian art, cinema, and music communities had decided to either boycott or comply with the Iranian regime’s top-down policies for artistic activities before the latest round of protests in the country, this documentary reveals why a careful study of the social conditions in the years preceding the 2025–26 protests is of great significance for a more comprehensive understanding of the reasons that fueled the rise of the latest round of protests in Iran. With its raw approach, “Boycott or Compliance” makes manifest the disguised angst and veiled turmoil that characterized Iranian society during an extremely challenging period in its history. A bridge between ethnographic, observational, and performative styles of documentary filmmaking, this documentary highlights important ethnomusicological issues such as the relationship between music, violence, and justice in contemporary times.

On the last days of December, 2025, protests started in different cities across Iran. With more people joining the movement, the regime opened fire on civilians with a brutal force worse than ever seen before. With almost two weeks of Internet shutdown and absence of any non-regime affiliated reports, there are no official numbers of deaths, but when the state reports more than three thousand, Iranians know the actual numbers must be much more.

During the Women Life Freedom movement of 2022, revolutionary songs were released from known and anonymous artists. But in January 2026, there was only silence. Everyone knew someone who got killed in the protest. There was no place for music. But after families were able to receive the bodies of their lost loved ones, and when there were burial ceremonies, music and dance began to become part of a new uprising. Justice-seeking families wanted to be as far from whatever the Islamic Republic stood for as possible. Instead of Quran recitals, there was music, and instead of Islamic ceremonies, there were ancestral cultures and dances. Starting from a mother doing a ceremonial dance for her lost son, this ceremony was adopted with Persian songs and dance in Tehran and Kurdish dance and culture in Kurdistan.

In this paper, I am looking at the cultural shift and role of music and dance as protest in the burial ceremonies of the protesters, while highlighting protest music during the 2022 movement and the silence during 2026.

In December of 2025 the Trump administration initiated Operation Metro Surge and sent approximately 3000 federal agents to the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area in Minnesota. The lawless behavior of the agents resulted in illegal detentions, abductions, assaults on civilians and journalists, and the murder of American citizens at the hands of these federal forces. The political institutions that ostensibly existed to curtail these sorts of authoritarian overreaches either capitulated to or were stymied by federal agencies. Consequently, resistance to the federal invasion of the Twin Cities was largely rooted in community-based organizing, as local government officials or agencies (e.g. police departments) were unable or unwilling to protect the communities they served. One particular manifestation of this grassroots collectivism was a number of digital musical compilations from organizations like Community Aid Network MN (CANMN) and record labels like Seawind of Battery. These compilations feature artists of various genres who are connected by common progressive politics. Proceeds from these digital compilations are donated to organizations like Minnesota’s Immigrant Rapid Response Fund or Amnesty International. More than simply a means of fund-raising financial support for critical aid organizations, these compilations provide a model of collective action rooted in the ability of musicians to quickly mobilize, stand collectively, and affect a measurable difference. Through ethnographic interviews with artists and producers involved in a number of these projects, this paper examines how compilations of music act as sites of agency, solidarity, and collective political action in the face of failing political institutions.