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Building Sustainable Global Collaborative Networks: Recommendations from Music Studies and the Social Sciences

Year: 2023

Type: book-chapter

Abstract: Diversity is one of the key challenges facing many societies in the twenty-first century.In scholarly research, this challenge has crystallized around the overrepresentation of and overreliance on societies that are WEIRD: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (Henrich et al., 2010).This acronym has been critiqued (Clancy & Davis, 2019; Barrett, 2020), and even its creators emphasize that WEIRD is a rhetorical device not intended to suggest a binary opposition with non-WEIRD (Apicella et al., 2020;Muthukrishna et al., 2020).However, the acronym has become popular for framing issues of inclusion and representation in academia.In music studies, this involves the historical overrepresentation of music by European classical composers and the overrepresentation of undergraduate students at Western universities in participant samples (Thompson et al., 2019;Jacoby et al., 2020; Savage, in press).These issues have gained visibility within the mainstream, particularly following calls for decolonial research approaches (Mignolo, 2011) and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement.Efforts to decolonize music studies and make them more inclusive and equitable (e.g., Ewell, 2020;Brown, 2020;Iyer & Born, 2020; Diamond & Castelo-Branco, 2021;Sauvé et al., 2021) have been covered by the New York Times (Powell, 2021) and Fox News (Betz, 2020).In the United States, they have triggered important changes at the highest levels of the organizational structure of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) and prompted the board of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition to publish an antiracism statement (Baker et al., 2020).These changes are part of a broader, long-term international trend, as evidenced by the International Council for Traditional Music (2021) issuing a statement on the topic and instituting a year-long series of dialogues about the decolonization of music and dance studies.

Source: The MIT Press eBooks

DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/14186.003.0032