EF Journal Editors Forum - Call for Papers

Ethnomusicology, Migration, and Anti-Migrant Politics
 
Introduced by the journal Ethnomusicology Forum in 2025 to gather short pieces (maximum 2,500 words) on topics of timely relevance to the ethnomusicological community, the Editors Forum returns in 2026 with a focus on ethnomusicological engagements with contemporary migration. The editors invite contributions that examine how migration—in its many forms—shapes musical worlds, creative and cultural labour, ethnographic practice, and the circulation of sound, as well as the everyday lives of musicians and audiences. At the same time, we welcome work that addresses the conditions under which migration unfolds, including contemporary regimes of exclusion and anti-migrant politics that increasingly structure movement, belonging, and cultural life. Contributors are encouraged to consider the aesthetic, ethical, political, and methodological implications of a moment in which intensified hostility and forms of violence toward migrants, refugees, displaced and stateless peoples, and those marked as ‘out of place’ are part of the contexts in which musical practice and ethnomusicological work take place.
 
Submissions may take the form of essays, think pieces, position papers, or other experimental modes of writing. We especially welcome contributions from early career scholars, musicians, artists, activists, and public scholars, and from authors working outside the UK and the US.
 
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
 
  • Migration and its role in contemporary musical life;
  • Music-making in contexts shaped by anti-migrant rhetoric, policy, policing, and border regimes;
  • Migrant, refugee, and diasporic musical practices under conditions of surveillance, precarity, or forced (im)mobility;
  • The role of music in movements resisting deportation, detention, and exclusion;
  • Migration and history—migration as a mode of analysis in historical ethnomusicology and global music history;
  • Musical worlds (re)constituted in contexts of displacement;
  • Music-making in humanitarian, carceral, and border-zone settings;
  • Nationalism, nativism, and sonic constructions of ‘the foreign’;
  • Ethnomusicology and the politics of documentation, legality, and asylum;
  • The politics of migrant musical appropriation, and/or migrant musics as sites of sociopolitical contestation;
  • Heritage, cultural policy, and the categorisation of migrant musics;
  • The role of musical categories (e.g., ‘traditional,’ ‘authentic,’ ‘national,’ ‘foreign’) in marking migrant musics as external, peripheral, or non-belonging;
  • The reanimation of a ‘new orientalism’ through contemporary forms of exoticisation, including the recasting of migration as spectacle across cultural, media, and academic representations;
  • Pedagogical, ethical, and methodological challenges of doing ethnomusicology in a climate of hostility toward migrants;
  • Digital platforms, media ecosystems, and the amplification or contestation of anti-migrant sentiment;
  • Postmigration musical lives;
  • Sonic practices rendered impossible in contexts of migration;
  • Restrictions on circulation and the uneven passage of music across political and territorial boundaries;
  • Music as trace in contexts marked by migration and its afterlives.
 
Interested authors should submit a 300–400-word abstract and a 75-word biography by Friday 8 May 2026 to: efeditorbatbfe.org.uk

 
Timeline
  • Friday 8 May 2026: Abstract and bio due
  • Friday 22 May 2026: Preliminary decision communicated to authors
  • Friday 24 July 2026: Full submissions due
  • Friday 7 August 2026: Final decision communicated to authors
  • Late 2026: Publication