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Dear colleagues,
The Ecomusicology Special Interest Group of the Society for Ethnomusicology invites submissions to two related opportunities at the 2026 annual meeting, scheduled November 5–8, 2026 in Bloomington, Indiana:
Call for SIG-Sponsored Panels
We invite proposals for organized sessions (panels, roundtables, workshops, films, etc.) related to the topic of ecomusicology. The SIG can sponsor several panels for the upcoming meetings, and having your panel sponsored by a SIG increases its likelihood of acceptance (although not guaranteed). We are also open to individual paper proposals. Depending on volume and fit, the SIG may assist in grouping these into sponsored panels.
CFP: SIG-Sponsored Roundtable – “Bad Ecomusicology”
The Ecomusicology SIG will also sponsor a roundtable titled “Bad Ecomusicology” inspired by Nicole Seymour’s Bad Environmentalism (2018). We’ve included a tentative panel abstract at the bottom of this email. We invite short provocations (<10 minutes) that engage ecomusicology’s bad objects and bad habits. We welcome speculative, self-reflexive, and unresolved contributions.
All submissions should be submitted via this Google Form by February 20.
Questions may be directed to co-chairs Elizabeth Frickey (elizabeth.frickey@nyu.edu) or Bailey Hilgren (bhilgren@nyu.edu).
We look forward to your submissions,
Elizabeth Frickey and Bailey Hilgren (co-chairs)
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Dominant stereotypes of environmentalists tend to portray us as gloomy, nostalgic, overly serious, or self-righteous – in other words, decidedly unfunny and unsexy. This problem is compounded by the reality that the more you know about climate change, the less likely you are to take any action (Norgaard 2011). We wonder if environmentalist music and sound art, as well as our scholarship on this work, might fall into similar patterns. We are not limited to somber or sentimental moods and modes of doing environmentalism, environmentalist art, or ecomusicology.
Nicole Seymour’s 2018 book Bad Environmentalism: Irony and Irreverence in the Ecological Age points out the drawbacks of “good” or “correct” (read: unfunny and unsexy) environmentalism. Social perceptions of activists do matter and, as Seymour argues, such “proper” and moralistic modes tend to be tied to and reinforce a form of activism most often associated with mainstream masculine/straight/white environmentalism. In her book, Seymour considers instead environmentalist art and performance that is irreverent, ironic, funny, queer, disgusting, or ambivalent: in her words, full of “bad affects.”
Inspired by Seymour’s “bad environmentalism”, we invite submissions for a session tentatively themed “bad ecomusicology.” We are curious about pieces, performances, and practices of music, sound art, and ways of doing ecomusicology that are unserious, irreverent, frivolous, or sexy for the purposes of contributing to environmental discourse or activism. What might “bad affects” within ecomusicology contribute to or provoke?
This panel will be submitted with eco-sig sponsorship.
