Letters from the Editors
This is my last issue with SEM Student News after about four years and eight issues of working with the publication in various roles. This has been an invaluable process and I feel proud of the work that I have been able to participate in and grateful for the relationships I have formed as a member of this revolving team of talented graduate students.
I have been thinking about the issue of “identity” in very specific and personal ways as we have moved through this most recent editing process. Earlier this year, I finished a dissertation project that ended up looking very different from the original concept that I proposed to a committee at UC Riverside in the summer of 2018. After a rather serpentine and unexpected fieldwork experience during the peak period of the pandemic, I managed to defend that project for the same committee and graduate this past June. As the editor of a student journal committed to student issues in music academia, I have had many moments while reading these essays to reflect on how my new professional identity, as a member of the no-longer-quite-“here”-and-not-yet-quite-“there,” might contribute to the broader goals of this publication. Having several years to interrogate my own identity as I fieldworked in both virtual and physical spaces, I never actually thought too much about the role my identity would play in networks of friends and colleagues as I move through this liminal professional moment.
Last month, we congressed in person for the first time in three years in one of the world’s great music cities. Hannah and I, along with SEM program specialist and Indiana University graduate student, Kurt Baer, facilitated a meeting of current students representing a number of different disciplinary orientations, professional stages, and identities. We engaged in a dynamic and productive conversation about student concerns (broadly defined) and how this publication might best serve and respond to the goals of this diverse community. I was personally struck by a sense of excitement and engagement, but also caution, uncertainty, and flexibility that marked the ways some of these students talked about their relationship to the Field.
If the capital-F “Field” is changing in ways that necessitate new strategies, relationships, and senses of possibility in order to navigate its unfriendly waters, then I wonder if the post-pandemic lowercase-f “field” that we return to, that we enter into, or that we have always been a part of might similarly stimulate new techniques of engagement and reflection. The essays herein address the field—and the Field—and all of the manifold complications, pleasures, difficulties, and possibilities that arise when we face it with the fullest version of ourselves. Although not authoritative in their theoretical or methodological accounting, we hope that these pieces offer an expansive and dynamic impression of how a number of rising scholars are thinking about themselves, their work, and the future of our discipline.
These essays recount strategies for navigating fieldwork that often wound up complicating expectations about where the field might be found and how these researchers would approach it. Matthew James considers new possibilities and tools for engaging with the virtual cultures around kankyō ongaku music on YouTube and the consequences these might have in the non-virtual world. Alexandros Rizopoulos describes the way that digital and non-digital activity developed in tandem during the preparation for the carnival Bules ritual during lockdown in Naoussa, Greece. Hermán Chávez offers a narrative account of the role WhatsApp played in his research and his familial identity and connection during the pandemic.
Several essays describe processes of conflict, tension, and growth between the authors’ sense of identity and its placement in the field. Luca Gambirasio expresses feelings of change and reflexivity as he returns to his home in Tuscany in the role of “the researcher.” Darren Culliney and Leandro Pessina talk about “insider” and “outsider” roles as co-researchers on Irish traditional music. Shuanise Odunaiya, in recounting her own experiences of anti-Black racism in South Korea, reveals a more complex critique and praxis for navigating discrimination in the field. Abigail Lindo reflects on her experience as a Black woman in the Azores during a music festival, leading her to interrogate more complex questions around the body, the self, and research. And Matthew Horrigan, drawing on a more abstract form of storytelling, works towards locating himself and his memories alongside the history of a music venue in British Columbia.
In the past, we have offered a resource list of relevant materials related to the theme of the issue. Here, we instead feature a group project by the International Student Network for Music and Sound Studies (ISNMSS). The almost diaristic reflections in this collective essay address complex theoretical and methodological strategies, which approach themes around in-betweenness and fluidity. This essay is also buttressed by an extensive bibliography, which we wanted to highlight for this issue.
For “Dear SEM” we received generous submissions from four professional scholars both inside and outside of academia. Dr. Katia Chornik considers personal identity and how it relates to inside and outside the academy and Dr. Sidra Lawrence argues for the continued revisiting, reflecting on, and refining how we approach “identity” in our work. The essays from Drs. M. Myrta Leslie Santana and Patricia Campbell were solicited earlier this year when we initially put forth an issue theme on “Music and Pleasure.” Although this issue did not transpire, we wanted to showcase these pieces here as they stimulate our consideration of the role of fun, play, and pleasure during the research process.
My own experience reading and considering these pieces has facilitated valuable moments of reflection on my own identity as I participate in new opportunities for F/fieldwork. I am grateful for my time with this publication, for the friends and colleagues I have made, and for the ways I have been challenged and grown. This issue will hopefully similarly generate a number of exciting conversations about the relationship between personal and professional identity and how it shifts and shapes individually across our respective pasts, presents, and futures.
Jesse Freedman, Outgoing Editor
I’m writing this letter seated at my desk in Valparaíso, Chile, enjoying the warmth of a long-awaited summer while staring out the window at the colorful houses lining the hills of this historic port city. Today’s been a day glued to my computer, after two full days rehearsing and performing Chilean traditional music with the collaborators, mentors, and colleagues I’ve made over the past year. Shortly, a dear friend will arrive at the house, and we’ll make chorrillana, fries covered in meat, onion, and eggs, as we catch up on life. I’m certain the night will end with us musicking, but I’m not sure what exactly we’ll play. My fieldsite consistently collides with my work as incoming editor, as technology has kept the field permeable and porous and I continue academic service from abroad.
My original motivations for publishing an edition about fieldwork were simple: ethnographic research in 2022, “‘post”’ pandemic, after an almost two-year pause from the life we grad students formerly knew, looks radically different from the stories we read about in the classroom. Students are increasingly turning towards mixed methods, urban ethnographies spanning over several cities or countries, and ethnography at home or with our cultures of origin to think deeply about the roles music plays in our lives. As we continue to seek decolonial and humble approaches to our research, new questions and concerns about how our identities operate in the field, and how they shift through relationships and connections, become increasingly important. The new shadows in the field that we experience—the friendships, fears, musical discoveries, and undoings of our academic selves—are crucial to our ethnographies and our transformations as scholars, and yet, due to our ethical commitments to collaborators and the ever-partial nature of ethnography, they will likely not appear in writing.
“Fieldwork and Identity” therefore responds to a flurry of questions I initially had when I began field research, though I’ve now become quite used to them fluttering around my brain. I felt like the nuts and bolts of research, so far removed from the theory we talked about in the classroom, had been inadequately addressed. I felt unprepared for fieldwork, that I had not heard enough stories from older scholars and mentors about their experiences, and other graduate students I talked to throughout the year echoed these sentiments. It has, therefore, been such a joy for me to work with the authors of these pieces, as they address many of the issues graduate students are facing today. These include:
How has the pandemic re-configured the ways we conduct fieldwork online and subsequently in person once again, and how do our relationships with interlocutors change through these shifts?
How do emotionally-loaded relationships with friends and family, both in person and mediated through technology, create what Hermán Chávez calls ‘care-based access’ to ethnographic sites?
How do BIPOC researchers and international students experience and navigate racism, exclusion, repression, and in-betweenness in the field?
How can insider and outsider researchers collaborate together on ethnographies, and how do these partnerships create nuanced, ever-reflexive research projects?
How do our identities shift between researcher, performer, and friend, and how do our relationships in the field change depending upon which role we take on and how we act as a result?
Perhaps, most importantly, how are graduate students navigating between identity categories and individuality to work towards care, compassion, and empathy in our research, to create an ethnomusicology that Sidra Lawrence says “emphasize[s] fully human engagements”?
I hope that by bringing some of these ethnographic shadows into the light, professors, senior scholars, and graduate students alike can learn from current fieldwork experiences and how we are processing and reflecting upon our complex positionalities. The field that graduate students are entering today, and the relationships that they are forming with their interlocutors, are potentially wildly different from how fieldwork was conceived even two years ago. Or maybe it is not the field that has changed, but rather ourselves.
Hannah Snavely, Incoming Editor