• Music Video Making: Participatory Ethnography through Making Hopa lide

Petr Nuska

This presentation explores the collaborative making of music videos as both an ethnographic method and expressive form in the documentary Hopa lide (2023), which portrays the lives of Romani musicians in Slovakia. The music videos – co-created with the musicians themselves – stand not as supplementary media but as central outcomes of a participatory research process grounded in long-term fieldwork. Rather than simply documenting musical life, these videos emerged through an exchange of ideas, aesthetics, and social context, with Romani participants directing not only their performances but also visual frames of their own representation. This mode of collaboration reconfigured the researcher-participant dynamic, turning filmmaking into a space for shared authorship.

In this talk, I screen and contextualise excerpts from these music videos to reflect on how they function as cultural statements and tools for reclaiming agency in visual media. Engaging with visual anthropology, ethnomusicology, and critical Romani studies, I consider how music video-making enabled forms of visibility that resist reduction to poverty, marginalisation, or victimhood – dominant frames in mainstream Romani representation. I argue that this process fostered a creative and deeply relational form of ethnography. The musicians used the opportunity to make the music video not only to show who they are but also to imagine who they want to be – musically, socially, and visually. As such, the videos provide insight into how audio-visual co-creation can operate at the intersection of research and activism in minority settings.

*Petr Nuska is a visual ethnomusicologist and ethnographic filmmaker. His passion for capturing music straddles music documentaries and music videos, both guided by commitment to innovation in pursuit of underexplored perspectives on music. Since 2011, he has been involved in projects worldwide in the fields of documentary and ethnographic film, educational and activist videos, and production of music videos with independent musicians. His recently completed doctoral research at Durham University concerned the musicianship of the Roma in central Slovakia. The film “Hopa lide” is his feature-length directorial documentary debut based on long-term research in this locality.

 

• The Land’s Knowledge and Music Education for Warlpiri people from Central Australia

Evelyn Quispe

“We sing really high with the spirit. They always listen. It’s their obligation to look after the Country, and we look after the songlines” (Sims, 2024). Sims conveys how Warlpiri identity, in Central Australia, is grounded in ontological interconnectedness with ngurrara (sentient land/Country/home) (Munn, 1973; Strehlow, 1968; Berndt, 1970). This interconnectedness, known as Jukurrpa, the Ancestral Present (Dussart, 2000), embeds societal laws and knowledge in ceremonial songs and their narrative stories (Curran, 2020). Today, there is an impetus in telling the stories to young Warlpiri; however, ceremonial songs transmission faces serious endangerment (Curran et al. 2024). 

Given the space to discuss music as culture (Merriam, 1977) and its social politics, I analyse the interconnectedness of the ceremonial songs and their narrative story constituents (Ellis, 1985; Barwick et al., 2013; Curran et al., 2024). I argue that senior Warlpiri people teach narrative stories providing a framework for effective transmission of songs, clear pedagogical goals and methods for contemporary contexts. First, I describe a cyclical framework of speech and music used by Warlpiri women when singing songs, arguing this framework assists in solidifying associated meanings of song and in revisiting memory. Second, I present multimodal teaching of yawulyu (women’s ceremonial songs) with singing, dancing and body painting, arguing that meanings of stories are learnt through embodied participation as essential for learning singing.To conclude, Warlpiri people are developing clear pedagogical pathways for future transmission of songs and stories, based on ‘the land’s knowledge’ (Patrick, 2024) to effectively navigate the contemporary context and respond to the course of song endangerment. 

This paper highlights the competence of Indigenous pedagogies in sustaining endangered music traditions.

*Evelyn Quispe is a PhD candidate in Musicology at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney. Originally from Bolivia, she holds degrees in Linguistics and Intercultural Bilingual Education from the University Mayor de San Simón. Her academic work spans sociolinguistics and intercultural education. Committed to Indigenous communities, and as a Quechua woman, Evelyn was drawn to the parallels between Warlpiri and Quechua women’s voices. This reinforced her interest in researching Warlpiri ceremonial song transmission and narrative stories in Central Australia. She conducted fieldwork recording knowledgeable Elders teaching their sacred stories and songs, as part of the project Rethinking the Dynamics of Place in Warlpiri Performance, led by Dr. Georgia Curran. Evelyn’s work examines how song and narrative stories intertwine to sustain cultural knowledge and enable contemporary pathways for song transmission.

 

• Where to Go Next: Navigating Approaches to Music and Minority Studies

Ulrike Präger

Recent scholarship in music studies has critically examined the roles of power, privilege, and positionality in the production of musical knowledge, particularly in relation to minoritized individuals and communities. While many scholars argue that researcher reflexivity and positionality are tools for dismantling oppressive research approaches and fostering reflective, inclusive methodologies, more recent critiques contend that such reflective statements may be performative or even counterproductive. They are perceived as unintentionally reinforcing power imbalances and institutional authority rather than exposing them. In this paper, I aim to shed light on the latest divergent theoretical and methodological approaches to ethical questions of positionality and representational strategies within the differential power dynamics established by all individuals involved in the research process. Drawing on my interactions with international scholars and my scholarship on music and migration, this presentation compiles, analyzes, and discusses theories and methodologies of reflexive, dialogic, and co-creative research approaches as they have recently been used in music and minority studies. What is the potential for these theories and methodologies to be realized in new practices? And, finally, considering the recent shift in the political landscape (especially in the United States), what does this mean for how our field articulates these frames in the immediate future? Ultimately, this paper seeks a deeper collective understanding of where our field is heading, or, even better, where it could head, regarding its social relevance and potential for active political engagement.

*Ulrike Präger is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Louisville. Her research lies at the intersections of ethnomusicology, musicology, and migration studies, focusing on how and why sonic phenomena serve as nuanced tools for investigating the interrelations among mobility, place, sociality, and political expression. In her previous postdoctoral position at the University of Salzburg, she authored and co-published a compendium titled Handbook Music and Migration: Theories and Methodologies, published in German in summer 2023 and in English in 2024. She is currently working on a monograph titled Sounding 21st-Century Post-Migration. Ulrike has also performed for decades as a soprano with ensembles in Europe and the United States. She holds a Ph.D. in Musicology/Ethnomusicology from Boston University and degrees in Voice/Voice Pedagogy from the University Mozarteum Salzburg and in Music and Dance Pedagogy from the Mozarteum's Carl Orff Institute.