Conference Agenda

In times of crisis, how is precarity made audible? And how does the amplification of precarious worlds and precarious bodies reinforce assumptions about our embodiments—their sonicities and their fallibilities? Taking these questions as its starting point, this paper investigates the relationship between technology, trauma, and (sonic) medicalization. It frames technological mediation during the ongoing endemic era as both creating medicalized sonic environments and transmitting these acoustemologies to a diverse—and globally dispersed—audience. It further characterizes these mediated acoustemologies as a sonic manifestation of catastrophilia (Svenvold 2005; Roelstraete 2007) and (re-)traumatization (Foster 1996; Seremetakis 2019; Bregman 2021). Weaving together audiovisual media, including news journalism and social media posts, and ethnographic interviews, I clarify how mediated praxes not only circulate specific sounds, but also strengthen particular listening habits that are inflected (or perhaps, infected) by medicalization. I focus on the myriad ways sound has been utilized in reporting during the endemic era to announce and authenticate the crisis at hand, while drawing us affectively into its orbit (Fink 2020; Kristof 2020). In analyzing these techniques of mediation, I also consider how they rely on pre-established assumptions about what affects medicalized sound incites. Thus, what happens when, as one disabled interlocutor asked me, the sounds of our disabled lives are shared via mediated representations, presumed to provoke fear and reveal inhospitable conditions? In reproducing and reinforcing negative interpretations of medicalized sound, what are the consequences for how a non-disabled majority evaluates the quality of a disabled life?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian violence in the United States was widely mediated through images of vulnerable bodies—particularly older victims and fearful children. While professional artists such as MC Jin and Jessica Sanchez mobilized music to protest this violence, children and older adults also emerged as musical agents. Expanding scholarship on Asian American musical activism that centers primarily on professional rappers (Shao 2025), I shift attention to children and older adults as agents of sonic resistance. This paper examines two case studies: the all-girl youth punk band the Linda Lindas’ shouted anthem “Racist, Sexist Boy” (2021), marked by confrontational, chant-like vocals and distorted guitar riffs, and older Chinese Americans' multilingual community rap “Gai Mou Sou Rap” (2021), delivered through emphatic rhythmic flow while reclaiming the “chicken-feather stick,” a symbol of disciplinary authority in Chinese culture. Drawing on Samia Hesni’s concept of “social script disruption” (2023), alongside close musical and performance analysis and digital ethnography of online comments and media coverage, I argue that these performances interrupt racialized scripts that cast Asian children and older adults as fragile, passive, or apolitical. This disruption operates through timbral aggression, rhythmic insistence, and embodied gestures—including beat-synchronized body rocking and staged disciplinary gestures—that reconfigure vulnerability as defiance. Audience responses register surprise, admiration, and collective solidarity, further reinforcing this disruption. By centering age-coded self-voicing, this paper demonstrates how musical performance transforms racialized vulnerability into recognized political agency, offering a framework for understanding the intersection of age, sound, and resistance in Asian America.

Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia lead to a syndrome of cognitive and functional decline that ends in death. Health sciences research has identified loneliness and social isolation as major dementia risk factors. Current counseling of older adults includes recommendations for social engagement to mitigate loneliness and social isolation, including a health-focused intervention to increase dementia awareness among Black/African-American faith communities. Ethnomusicological research has identified myriad ways in which the expression of faith through music supports personal well-being and social engagement. Yet the two bodies of knowledge rarely intersect. In this paper, we integrate health sciences and ethnomusicology perspectives in a secondary analysis of a four-year longitudinal ethnography of Pentecostal, Baptist, and non-denominational African-American women in churches in the San Joaquin Valley, California, to show how gospel music performance may reduce loneliness and social isolation. Older women in these congregations used gospel as a central site for demonstrating resilience, forming communal bonds, and enacting perseverance. Gospel musicking served as a form of intergenerational storytelling, spiritual and cultural transmission, and, with continued engagement, a means of reinforcing important memories. As a spiritual resource, gospel musicking supported emotional-well-being, replacing feelings of loneliness with a sense of belonging. We recontextualize these findings within the National Institutes of Health Science of Behavior Change framework to demonstrate the potential for gospel music to function as a dementia risk-reduction strategy and to lay a path forward for studying the impact of faith-based musicking on cognitive health.

How can insights from neurodiversity-informed pedagogies benefit ensemble leading and individual instruction in musics beyond the Western canon? Ethnomusicologists, music therapists, and music educators have explored the role of music in supporting circumscribed neurodiverse clinical populations (Carrico 2023; Bakan 2014 and 2016), while scholarship on neurodiversity, accessibility, and universal design has tended to focus on teaching outside the realm of performance (Carrico and Grennell 2022; Costa 2026). And although some ensemble directors and instructors have worked to make their performance courses more accessible, they often lack the institutional support (including time and funding for coursework on neurodiversity) that would enable them to ground and share their approaches more widely. Based on International Coaching Federation-accredited training/experience in coaching neurodiverse students and 25+ years of teaching Irish traditional music in academic, ensemble, and lesson contexts, this paper connects practice-based research and scholarship in music, education, and psychology. From a strengths-based and specifically ethnomusicological perspective based on teaching beyond the Western canon, this paper discusses some of the ways ADHD, autism, and other forms of neurodiversity can show up in performance instruction and offers strategies for helping students thrive in our classrooms and studios. This work is part of a larger project on Irish traditional music pedagogy: intended as both a resource for instructors and an intervention in Western music-based teaching approaches, it will join work by Thomas (2025), Dor (2014), Clendinning (2020), and others in articulating the value of so-called “world music” performance instruction in fostering community and critical engagement.