This lecture discusses the responsibilities, potentials, and challenges of research in relation to music, minorities, marginality, and marginalization. It focuses on India and Tibet, and cases that contrast yet also overlap. How do you undertake research with people and their music who have been marginalized or erased from mainstream, hegemonic national traditions, as has been the case with low-caste hereditary or non-heteronormative ‘traditional’ performers in India – male, courtesan, and kothi transgender performers? How do you challenge the canonization of such hegemonic national traditions in the academy itself towards something more inclusive? How do you teach about parts of the world where little research exists due to intense political repression, like Tibet? How do you teach those of the majority who do have open minds and curiosity when this repression is extra-territorial or pervasive and there is fear or aversion to studying ‘sensitive’ topics? The lecture explores these questions of applied and collaborative research on three levels: research methods to take us beyond social boundaries and to see things that are marginal or barely visible; writing doubly minoritized or highly vulnerable minorities into curricula and institutionalizing their histories and traditions; and working to strengthen minoritized people and traditions in the wider world.