Silenced Registers of Ethnomusicological Academic Labor under Neoliberalism

Abstract

This chapter explores ethnomusicology as knowledge-production labor in contexts of neoliberal institutions. By discussing some important (and often silenced) aspects of knowledge production, it aims to demonstrate how the transformation of material conditions of academic labor, commodification, and precarization radically reconfigure a praxis of collaborative research. The chapter strives to demonstrate how the claims for alternative knowledge production cannot be made without addressing the structural mechanisms behind neoliberalization of academia, by addressing the following questions: How do current transformations of labor and material conditions for scholars reshape the public-oriented scholarship and the praxis of “applied ethnomusicology”? How can we discuss a more diverse, critical, and impactful future for ethnomusicology in the sense of the “self-transformation” and “self-emancipation” of the discipline as institutional practice and academic labor?