ICTMD Dialogues 2025 Session 1

Towards Studying Musical Assemblages of the Non-Human and Human

Throughout the four decades I have studied Indigenous musics (in Nepal, Northern Europe and Greenland), I have been disturbed by the fundamental onto-epistemological differences and unbalanced power positions between Western academic and Indigenous thought and musical lives. Unlike western onto-epistemology, which privileges humans, Indigenous peoples’ knowledge formations involve non-human elements and beings, as well. This is also seen in recent Indigenous rights movements towards protecting nature as a living being, even with human rights.

Inspired by Indigenous philosophies (as well as critical posthumanism), we should move on to study music no longer as a humanly ordered sound, but as assemblages, in which both material and non-material, human and non-human elements resound. In these assemblages, non-scientific non-human experiences and onto-epistemologies should be equally included as relevant knowledge formations. In (Greenlandic) Inughuit philosopher Hivshu’s words: Everyone is of equal value. They are part of life, like the stars above us. They are there to guide us. That doesn't mean they are above us. Everything is living and should be respected as such; in the same way we respect each other.

Pirkko Moisala is Professor Emerita of Musicology and Ethnomusicology from the University of Helsinki. She has done extensive ethnographic work among the Tamus of Nepal, Sámi of Northern Europe, as well as Inuit and Inughuit of Greenland. Her most recent study is about the transformative power of contemporary philosophy (Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari, 2017). Previously, she focused on cognitive ethnomusicology (Cultural Cognition in Music, 1991) and gender studies of music (Music and Gender, 2000).

Sound and Stars in the Time of Matariki: New Imaginings for Research Across the Humanities, Space Science, and Indigenous Knowledge 
 
The emerging profile of space science within the Pacific region and Aotearoa New Zealand has created new opportunities for engagement across areas of science, the humanities, and Indigenous knowledge. In 2022 for example, Aotearoa New Zealand celebrated its first official national celebration of Matariki, the Māori new year, which coincides with the eastern rising of the open star cluster Matariki (also called The Pleiades or Messier 45), and an event that connects to other similar time-markings in the region and globally. While Matariki has offered new possibilities for music and dance engagements, global experiences with astrophysical objects and methodologies for considering them in research have remained limited in sensory scope and inequitable in access. How might new technology-driven sensory experiences enhance science understanding, foster inclusion in access, and increase engagement between Indigenous knowledge and space science? This presentation describes how recent work in the Pacific region has connected areas of space science with the humanities and Indigenous knowledge. It describes the early results of a new collaborative project in Aotearoa New Zealand that connects Indigenous sound systems and song with visual and spatial renditions of astrophysical objects, with a focus on Matariki.  This cross-disciplinary presentation asks how sensory renderings of astrophysical objects might connect more meaningfully with Indigenous knowledge to enhance public engagement and offer broad accessibility across areas of knowledge.  

Brian Diettrich is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Te Kōkī New Zealand School of Music, at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington. For the past twenty-five years Brian has conducted in-depth collaborative research with culture-bearers and communities in the Pacific Islands, across Micronesia, in Hawaiʻi, and in Aotearoa New Zealand. Brian has held numerous international service roles, and he is currently a Vice President of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance. Brian’s publications have appeared widely, and he is currently leading a new collaborative project that explores intersections between Indigenous knowledge, Space Science, and the Humanities. 

Screen/Video Dance and Anthropological Imagination: Notes on the Arts of Correspondence

Following the trajectories of anthropology and cinema as devices of knowing the “Others” of modernity/coloniality, the paper problematizes audiovisual representations of the body and corporealities associated with the ethnographic study of Indigenous and popular performances. I argue that these are not merely symbolic models because they constitute existential and historical presences that have the potential to produce sensitive and intersubjective experiences. From this perspective, I reflect on the sub-genre of screen/video dance as an artefact of communication and artistic imagination. In conjunction with anthropological research, it opens dialogues toward creating transdisciplinary - or undisciplined - knowledge that problematizes the limitations and authority of scientific representation. Specifically, I understand audiovisual creation as an experimentation that shares the fragility of experience and seeks to give back, in the manner of a counter-gift, what we owe to those who participate in our existence and research-learning processes. Thus, based on my review of various works, I propose that the relationship between the performing arts and video art produces sensitive effects that lead to new appropriations and celebrations.

Andrea Chamorro Pérez. Anthropologist (Universidad de Chile), Master’s and PhD in Anthropology (Universidad Católica del Norte-Universidad de Tarapacá, Chile). She is principal investigator of the Millennium Nucleus on Musical and Sound Cultures (CMUS, Chile), where she studies the sounds and sonorities associated with Andean dances and rituals. Also, as an academic in the Department of Anthropology at the Universidad de Tarapacá (Arica, Chile), she teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses, conducts research and audiovisual creation on the ecological-cultural practices and archaeology of the Andean Mountain range, indigenous cultural performances, and audiovisual anthropology. 

Beyond the “Applied”: Advancing Transformative, Practice-led Approaches to Concert Programming in Postcolonial South Africa

In what the Nobel-prizewinning South African author Nadine Gordimer described decades before as “a world of strangers” by design (1958), I began programming concerts in 1990 in Pretoria amidst the idealism fueling a rapidly opening public sphere. Concerts, I soon came to see, could become moments of transformative encounter. Mounting concerts, festivals and various kinds of events has long been recognized as an aspect of scholarship that has acquired the qualifier of “applied” research. Yet I have come to question the distinction between modes of music research taken to be ancillary to those deemed to be putatively primary. I have come to see that a concert can explore a premise and advance an argument of sorts through the ways in which it is compiled, framed, and presented. Rather than offering mere platforms for presenting the outcomes of research, working with musicians and other professional participants and audiences back-stage, on-stage, and front-of-stage, musical settings can thus be a valuable primary dimension of a research process. Over time, I have drawn on methods of ‘reading’ and conceptualizing concerts from a range of disciplines and fields, notably those that theorize the poetics and politics of curation. My contribution to this ICTMD Dialogue will be to describe and reflect on how my work in postcolonial South Africa offers an interdisciplinary arts and humanities-oriented contribution to African Studies at the intersection of curatorial studies, applied ethnomusicology, auditory and public culture studies, critical heritage studies and museum anthropology to advance anti-racist and decolonial approaches.

Brett Pyper is an interdisciplinary South African arts practitioner, cultural scholar and former festival director. Since the early 1990s, he has combined critical arts practice with academic study at local, national and international levels. He holds an MA in Interdisciplinary Study from Emory University in Atlanta and a PhD in Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies from New York University. He served as founding chairperson of the South African Society for Research In Music (SASRIM) in 2006, CEO of the Klein Karoo National Arts Festival (KKNK) from 2008 to 2023, and Head of the Wits School of Arts from 2014 to 2021, where he is currently an Associate Professor in Curatorial, Public and Visual Cultures. 

Re-searching Dance: Exploring Methodologies for Critical Dance Studies in India

My recent book, Mapping Critical Dance Studies in India focuses on a multi-disciplinary research methodology for critical dance studies in India. Keeping in mind the overemphasis on the popularly known elite and upper caste history of dance in regional discourse, the book forces us to acknowledge that the study of dance and dancers almost never escapes existing and evolving power hierarchies. These include exploitations based on class, caste, gender, religion and ethnicity-based complexities that restrict intersectional dialogues and patronage possibilities, in addition to those that rendered some dances as not dance enough. Extant literature (usually by upper-class/caste elite authors) largely focuses on aesthetic representation only. To study Indian embodied practices, I have used tools from ritual studies, gender studies, as well as cultural studies and anthropology. With the understanding that dance discourse has remained descriptive, celebratory and non-critical, I suggest a thorough understanding of social/cultural stigma attached to dance and its practitioners within a pre-colonial Indian society. I also suggest that to identify any activity as dance or embodied art, one must analyse the range of functions it performs for the particular community to which it belongs. In this talk, I explore an alternative method of researching/writing dance by exploring the use of tools from dance history and historiography, ethnography, philosophy and dance analysis, facilitating a strong practice through a theoretical interface. I aim to explore critical and functional perspectives of dance from within our community of dance practitioners and scholars, as well as place dance in a global multicultural space.  

Urmimala Sarkar Munsi (Ph.D), retired Dean and Professor of Dance Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics of Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, is currently a Senior Fellow of the Prime Ministers’ Museum and Library (PMML, Delhi). She is a social anthropologist/performance studies scholar and a trained dancer-choreographer. Her recent-most publications include her book (co-edited with Aishika Chakraborty) The Dancing Body: Labour, Livelihood and Leisure (Routledge 2025); Mapping Critical Dance Studies in India (Springer 2024); Dancing Modernity: Uday Shankar and his Transcultural Experimentations (Palgrave 2022); and Alice Boner Across Geographies and Arts (Rietberg Museum 2021).

ICTMD Dialogues 2025 Session 2

“We Will Never Be White”: Dancing Ecuadorian Identities as Resistance in the Midst of a National Crisis

Ecuador, a former Spanish colony until the early twentieth century, remains deeply affected by entrenched hierarchies that privilege individuals whose phenotypical and cultural traits align with ideals of whiteness. Colonial legacies have not only fostered enduring inequality but also institutional fragility. Since 2020, such conditions have enabled the rise of organized crime and drug trafficking, turning Ecuador into a narco-state. This violence disproportionately affects Afro-Ecuadorian and Indigenous populations—historically marginalized and furthest from the societal ideal of whiteness. In this context of crisis, dance spaces offer opportunities to engage younger generations with the potential of resisting the ongoing impacts of colonialism on their identities.

Over the past five years, I have facilitated Ecuadorian dance workshops in public universities. These spaces increasingly attract students who arrive with a desire for self-discovery. A growing sense of grief emerges from living in a place perceived as perpetually violent, where being Ecuadorian becomes associated with constant danger. Also, most participants have trained in Western dance forms, which often marginalize local ways of knowing. In these workshops, students recognize their family histories and realize they carry knowledge gained through local embodied pedagogies that have historically been silenced: ways of hugging, walking, healing, being reciprocal or dancing cumbia.

“We will never be white,” far from being a lament, is a hopeful recognition of the richness and diversity of Ecuadorian identities. Thus, honouring local embodied knowledge through dance becomes an act of resistance, enabling the re-discovery of what it means to be Ecuadorian beyond current ongoing violence. 

María Gabriela López-Yánez is an Ecuadorian performing arts researcher and artist. Since 2007, I have led community arts projects focusing on the theoretical research and staging of Ecuadorian dances from an anti-racist and anti-patriarchal perspective. I hold a PhD in Performing Arts from Goldsmiths, University of London (UK), and a Master of Performing Arts from the University of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia). I have presented my work across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. Currently, I serve on the ICTMD Executive Board Committee for Outreach with Latin America and the Caribbean, and I serve as the editor of the Dance Book Reviews Section of Traditions of Music and Dance (Cambridge University Press).  

Music Labour in Times of Crisis: Epistemological and Ethical Implications for Ethnomusicology

The study of music (as) labour has often been hindered in (ethno)musicology by divisions between professional and amateur musicians as well as conflicting conceptualisations of ‘work’, ‘value’, or ‘pleasure’. In contrast, I propose that conceptualising all music-making activity as labour is a necessary act of intervention and allyship with musicians globally at times of crisis. My contribution to this ICTMD Dialogue will explore two different components of this conceptual reframing: (a) Music labour makes epistemological sense: Through theorisations of affective, emotional, aesthetic and phatic labour, I highlight the different elements of work manifesting within all music conduct; (b) Acknowledging musical (and creative, more broadly) labour is an urgent ethical need in times of socioeconomic and political crisis: drawing mainly on the case study of musicians in Greece, I will examine how music work has been impacted by compiling crises: firstly, the economic crisis of the previous decade and consequently the recent global pandemic. In this process, I trace an awakening of collectivism that foregrounds the demand for the recognition of music (and other performing arts) as work. 

In pursuing those two axes of analysis, I am attempting to understand and draw attention to a new discourse around music as labour, from the ground up, in Greece and elsewhere. I propose that our duty as music academics is to analyse and amplify these voices, in solidarity with striving musicians and with close attention to their testimonies and actions. This, I argue, is a means of highlighting an element of musical ‘value’ that has been previously ignored or underplayed in our efforts to document musical and other performance cultures across the world. 

Ioannis Tsioulakis (Ph.D) is Reader in Anthropology and Ethnomusicology at Queen’s University Belfast. His research focuses on popular music in Greece, with an emphasis on session musicians, creative labour, and economic crisis. His monograph Musicians in Crisis: Working and Playing in the Greek Popular Music Industry was published by Routledge in September 2020. He has co-edited a volume entitled Musicians and their Audiences: Performance, Speech and Mediation (with Elina Hytönen-Ng, Routledge 2016), and has published numerous articles and chapters on Greek jazz music, cosmopolitanism and music professionalism. Ioannis is also an active ensemble director, arranger, and pianist.

Rebuilding Beyond Bricks: Music Education for Long-Term Recovery in Hatay's Post-Earthquake Schools

In February 2023, a catastrophic 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Hatay in Southeast Türkiye, leaving a city and its educational landscape in ruins, with over 50,000 people dead. Amid the rubble and temporary schools housed in containers, this project reimagined recovery not just through bricks, but through sound. The project investigated how creative music workshops can contribute to restoring normalcy, foster resilience, and reclaim agency for children whose worlds were abruptly shattered by the earthquake.

The project combined improvisation, collaborative songwriting, and cultural preservation to contribute to regaining a sense of agency, addressing trauma, and rebuilding community ties. Two approaches featured in the first phase of this project: (1) Rediscovering Musicality from Sound and Movement, in which youth explored their voices, body percussion, and environmental sounds in judgment-free spaces, guided by local artist-mentors; and (2) Collaborative Improvisation and Songwriting Workshops, empowering students to weave personal and collective narratives into music, reinforcing linguistic and cultural identity.

The initiative merged action research and ethnography, prioritizing participatory practices. Through needs assessments, audiovisual documentation, and thematic analysis of surveys, it aimed to capture shifts in students’ emotional expression, confidence, and sense of community. With over 200 students (age 7–16) from four schools in Hatay, workshops were co-designed with community stakeholders, role models and local management to ensure cultural relevance. Findings are aimed at refining post-disaster music interventions, proving that music can help rebuild more than structures: it can restore selfhood. The project aims to offer replicable blueprints for arts-based recovery initiatives in crisis zones worldwide.

Founding Director of MIRAS, Olcay Muslu (Ph.D) is a scholar and practitioner with over 25 years of expertise in applied ethnomusicology, music in higher education, and cultural sustainability. She co-founded the MİRAS Centre for Cultural Sustainability in Istanbul to preserve heritage in post-disaster zones and was a founding director of Antioch State Conservatory, shaping traditional music education at Hatay Mustafa Kemal University (2017–2022). Supported by institutions such as the British Council, SSHRC, and SEMPRE, her work has been published by Oxford University Press, Sage, and Taylor & Francis. She currently serves as Professor of Music at Zhaoqing University, China.

Shared Voices: The Survival of Nigerian Music and Dance Research in Times of Crises

Before Timothy Rice’s Ethnomusicology in Times of Trouble (2014), some scholars had highlighted the need for researchers and their research communities to be closely intertwined (Seeger 2008), particularly during crises in various parts of the world.  In Nigeria, the dynamics of cataclysms have shown multiple crises: the current national challenge of terrorism, herdsmen killings, land grabbing, kidnapping, economic crises, ecological issues, oil politics, unrest among minority groups, technological problems, lack of funding and so on. While these challenges have been underexplored, this presentation surveys how collaborative research during multiple crises in different parts of Nigeria can contribute to a global perspective on joint research. Our study highlights how both ‘applied’ and ‘theoretical’ approaches can contribute to collaborative actions between researchers (‘us’) and the people (or communities) they work with (‘them’) in a closely intertwined relationship. What are the potential pitfalls that must be addressed during joint research? In addressing this question, we argue that the Nigerian experience represents a multiplex of collaborative research in times of crises, which must be assessed in specific contexts. In conclusion, we note that the benefits of collaborative actions, therefore, are embedded in expressions of joy and in becoming a voice for most of the seemingly voiceless but shared communities as advocacy for a better and optimistic future.

Ukeme Akpan Udoh is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Music, University of Uyo, Nigeria. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music (Theory and Composition) from the University of Uyo, Nigeria, and Master of Arts and PhD degrees in Music/Ethnomusicology from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. His research interest focuses on traditional music and sustainability, music and revival, and comparative analysis involving indigenous music, art music in Nigeria, and the musicological nexus with other disciplines in African studies

Isaac Osakpamwan Ibude is the immediate past Head, Department of Music, Faculty of Humanities, University of Port Harcourt, Rivers State.  He is the Chairman of the Music Ministries Advisory Board and Ag. Music Director of the Nigerian Baptist Convention.  He obtained a Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Ibadan in Ethnomusicology and African Music respectively, and a Bachelor of Church Music degree from the Nigerian Baptist Theological Seminar (N.B.T.S) Ogbomoso, Nigeria.

Resilience and Adaptation in Solomon Islands through Times of Crises

Solomon Islands is an archipelago in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. Lau and Mbaelelea regions are situated in the northern part of Malaita – the most populous island in Solomon Islands. Our Lau and Mbaelelea peoples continue to live a sustainable lifestyle, as our ancestors have done for generations. Our communities produce fruits and vegetables grown on our lands, we collect seafood and fish across our lagoon and in our waterways. Over the last 25 years, our peoples have increasingly experienced flooding and new challenges due to environmental changes. Life in this region has been impacted by political civil unrest, poor health care support and other issues related to our geographical isolation. Survival and adaptation lie at the centre of who we are. Our communities are used to reacting, adapting, and acknowledging that grief is a part of life.

Events such as the Covid-19 pandemic have tested the resilience of our communities. “The Tensions” civil unrest era of 1998-2003 and subsequent years, have made us more politically minded than ever. Everyday dialogue in my village surveys each of these topics, and the feelings and responses of our peoples. Community development and active research have been negatively impacted since the turn of the century. This discussion will survey how our communities have learnt to be more resilient together, and how we continue to navigate issues of development, continuation of music and dance culture, and the place of research alongside local issues and concerns.

Irene Karongo Hundleby is a bicultural (Solomon Islands-New Zealand) ethnomusicologist, independent researcher, writer, musician, entrepreneur and health therapist. Irene’s research work is focused on documenting indigenous knowledge, stories and perspectives related to Pasifika music, arts and culture. She enjoys participating in collective projects and community entities that advocate for greater cultural visibility, access and equality. Irene is a co-owner of Relics Music and Hifi stores and provides health support through her neuromuscular therapy practice in Ōtepoti (Dunedin), Aotearoa (New Zealand).