ICTMD Dialogues 2026: Ethics of Care in Times of Crises

Date: Saturday, 28 November 2026, 12:00 (UTC)
Moderator: Tan Sooi Beng, Ph.D., University of Science, Malaysia

Register here  - the sessions will take place online (via Zoom) and are free of charge. 

Participants

• Abdullah Akat, Ph.D., Istanbul University State Conservatory, Türkiye
• Ayat Al Matani, Ph.D., Sultan Qaboos University, Oman
• Suchismita Ghoshal, Indira Gandhi National Open University, India
• Daouda Dao, Ph.D., and Dramande Sidibé, Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers Multimédia Balla Fasséké Kouyaté, Mali
• Faisal Jailani, Mirwais Hakimi, and Emran Mahmood, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
• Waheedullah Saghar, Ph.D., and Marko Kölbl, Ph.D., University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

About the Session

The emergence and steady expansion of research addressing theoretically and methodologically diverse contexts of crises and conflicts around the globe (e.g., Pettan 1998, Araujo 2006, Ochoa 2006, Dirksen 2012, Ruiz 2021, Quintero Rivera 2021, Levignat 2021, Garcia 2021) constitutes a groundbreaking trend in music and dance studies (Rice 2014). Deeply committed to working closely and horizontally with the communities of practice to overcome the harsh and often predatory pressures on their lived realities, such initiatives have informed a plethora of more specialized subfields. These include areas of research—often referred to as applied, medical, participatory, and engaged (eco-) ethnomusicology/ethnochoreology—in which communities and researchers develop collaborative strategies in search of more sustainable forms of coexistence.

This session focuses on the ethics of care for researchers and communities living in the face of conflict, war, and violence in different parts of the world. The presentations will explore the following questions: How can all parties involved cope with various conflict situations through their collaborative actions, potentials, and pitfalls to be addressed in the course of their joint work? How can we build bridges between researchers and performers living in countries in conflict? How can we apply activist collaborative ethnomusicology and engage with musicians and dancers living in war and conflict zones in our research? How can we help archive materials that are in danger of being lost?

Presentations

1. From Archival Voices to Living Relationships in Conflict-Affected Crimea

Abdullah Akat, Ph.D., Istanbul University State Conservatory, Türkiye

This paper examines how an archival research project developed into a long-term relationship with Crimean Tatar musicians and researchers living through conflict and war. It considers the responsibilities that arise when historical recordings connect researchers with communities still experiencing political violence, displacement, and disruption. I first encountered 45 Crimean Tatar recordings made by the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission in German prisoner-of-war camps between 1916 and 1918 at the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv in 2013. In 2017, following Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, I travelled to the peninsula via Moscow for fieldwork. The recordings provided an entry point for dialogue with Crimean Tatar researchers and musicians. I played them to older, experienced researchers and musicians, asking whether they recognized the voices, songs, or musical forms and whether related versions were still known or performed. I also developed relationships with Qırım Ansamble and other musicians, attending rehearsals and performances and observing their musical activities in their social and cultural contexts.

These relationships continued beyond the fieldwork and through the subsequent years of war. Some of the musicians and researchers I came to know have experienced the closure of Crimean Tatar media institutions, displacement to safer parts of Ukraine, and major changes in their professional and everyday lives. The 2022 publication Crimean Tatars’ Recordings in German POW Camps, 1916–1918, along with subsequent exhibitions, media work, and documentary activities, became part of my effort to sustain these relationships and keep the recordings connected to the people and cultural practices with which they remain meaningful.

Reflecting on this trajectory, I suggest that care is not simply an ethical principle applied to fieldwork, but an ongoing responsibility within relationships that endure beyond it. In this case, care has involved listening, contextualizing, maintaining relationships, and finding ways to sustain them when conflict makes research engagement increasingly difficult.

2. Archiving as Care: Community Authority and the Safeguarding of Musical Heritage in Times of Conflict

Ayat Al Matani, Ph.D., Sultan Qaboos University, Oman

Armed conflict threatens musical heritage through the loss of recordings, the displacement of practitioners, and the disruption of relationships through which musical knowledge is transmitted. Safeguarding recordings also raises questions about authority: who decides what is preserved, where it is held, and how it can be heard, interpreted, or reused? This presentation examines archiving as a practice of care, understood as an ongoing responsibility to the people whose music an archive holds.

Drawing on my research into institutional and community approaches to safeguarding musical heritage in Oman, I bring questions of access, representation, and custodianship into dialogue with published documentation of archival safeguarding in Sudan. The presentation adopts a reflective, document-based approach, distinguishing insights grounded in Omani research from questions arising in conflict settings. It considers the responsibilities of researchers working beyond conflict zones and the limits of their knowledge and intervention. The discussion centres on three questions. How can urgent preservation respect community authority when displacement complicates consultation? How should access be negotiated when making recordings publicly available may conflict with performers’ wishes or circumstances? How can archival collaboration support the continued use and transmission of music by the communities concerned?

Building on UNESCO’s ethical principles for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage, I propose a framework centred on ongoing consent, shared decisions about access, preservation of contextual knowledge, and sustained relationships with practitioners and collection holders. The framework is offered for discussion, with attention to unequal resources and the practical constraints facing researchers and communities during conflict. I argue that archiving becomes a practice of care when preserving recordings is accompanied by accountability to their creators and custodians and by support for communities’ continuing relationships with their musical heritage.

3. Times When the Border Enters the Performance: Gambhira, Divided Performance Ecologies, and the Unperformed Archive of Bengal

Suchismita Ghoshal, Indira Gandhi National Open University, India

What happens when a political border enters not only a landscape, but a performance? This paper examines Gambhira, the satirical music-theatre tradition of the Malda–Rajshahi region of Bengal, whose cultural geography was profoundly disrupted by the Partition of 1947. Historically constituted through shared social and cultural relations across religious and regional communities, Gambhira subsequently developed differentiated performance forms on either side of the India–Bangladesh border: the Malda tradition retained the dialogue between Shiva and peasants, while in East Pakistan and later Bangladesh, the nana-nati (grandfather-grandson) form emerged.

Rather than treating this transformation simply as an instance of cultural adaptation or survival, this paper asks what happens to a performance ecology when the social, spatial, and political world that sustains it is violently divided. I propose the concept of the “divided performance ecology” to examine the entanglement of performer, audience, landscape, ritual, memory, language, and political circumstance in the making of performance. I further intend to develop the idea of the “unperformed archive” to draw attention to what conventional cultural preservation cannot fully capture: interrupted repertoires, altered performance relationships, inaccessible landscapes, displaced performers, vanished contexts, and forms of collective experience that remain remembered but can no longer be performed in their earlier configuration.

Through a critical reading of historical scholarship, performance documentation, archival materials, and existing ethnographic accounts of Gambhira, the paper explores three questions: How does political rupture transform the ecology rather than merely the content of performance? What kinds of cultural memory survive in the gap between performed and unperformed traditions? And how might archival practices account for absence, interruption, and lost relational worlds? By repositioning Gambhira from an example of “folk survival” to a site where border-making, embodiment, memory, and cultural loss intersect, the paper proposes an ethics of archiving that asks not only what can be preserved, but what kinds of worlds must be remembered when performance itself has been divided.

4. Kanouya: Staging Social Cohesion and Belonging in Crisis-Torn Mali

Daouda Dao, Ph.D., and Dramande Sidibé, Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers Multimédia Balla Fasséké Kouyaté, Mali

Since 2012, Mali has experienced armed conflict, the occupation of its northern regions by jihadist groups, and successive political transitions. In Timbuktu, where music and dance were banned during the 2012 occupation, the return of the Biennale artistique et culturelle in December 2025 offered a powerful setting for staging cultural recovery and belonging.

We are two lecturers at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers Multimédia Balla Fasséké Kouyaté (CAMM-BFK), Bamako: a dancer who co-created Kanouya (Bamanankan: “bond, deep love”), the state-commissioned work for the Biennale’s opening ceremony on 18 December 2025, and a musician-storyteller who observed its rehearsals at the Conservatoire. Performed by 333 dancers, Kanouya combines dances (takamba, achakal, tendoro, nabaji) from across Mali’s communities with Malian instruments and griot voices.

Our focus is threefold. First, the collaborative process behind the repertoire: who selected the songs and dances, where, and why, through open casting, rehearsals, consultations with historians, and joint work between Timbuktu troupes living with conflict and professional performers from Bamako. Second, the meaning of the songs and dances and how musicians and dancers wove them into a single narrative. Third, the symbolism of the performance: numbers (333 dancers evoking the “city of 333 saints”), words, postures, and circular formations. We reflect on the ethics of care this work demands: towards performers from a conflict zone, and in our own positions, one creator and one observer, analyzing a state-sponsored spectacle of national unity and liberation from violence. We also consider how rehearsal and performance recordings might become an archive for communities whose repertoires remain at risk. Presented as a dialogue between creator and observer, dancer and musician, with video excerpts, the session questions the reparative potential and the political limits of cultural performance in times of crisis.

5. Taking Care! Activism and Solidarity After the Ban on Music Education in Afghanistan

Part 1 (students): Faisal Jailani, Mirwais Hakimi, and Emran Mahmood, University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
Part 2 (teachers): Waheedullah Saghar, Ph.D., and Marko Kölbl, Ph.D., University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

Afghanistan is commonly portrayed as a state in crisis. Following four decades of terror, war, and foreign invasions, the Taliban’s return in 2021 not only reinforced this image but also had drastic consequences for the lives of Afghans, especially women and girls. The Taliban have reinstated their infamous music ban, musicians face severe repercussions, and most of them have fled the country. The music ban also affects music transmission. Kabul University’s Music Department, the country’s only tertiary music education institution, was forced to close, resulting in the termination of all study programmes, the expulsion of all students, and the dismissal of all teachers.

The two presentations address ethical responsibilities and modes of care in ethnomusicological research in an activist educational project, the “Afghan Music Education in Exile” programme at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. It brings together teachers and students from Kabul University’s former Music Department and their new academic home in Vienna. The first presentation provides students’ perspectives, from experiences of living under the music ban in Kabul and forced migration to neighbouring countries like Pakistan to relocation to Vienna and adaptations to new learning environments. Students further relate to their own ethnographic fieldwork on Afghan music education in exile. The second presentation centres on teachers’ perspectives of both Kabul University and mdw, critically contextualizing the project amidst academic hegemonies, the coloniality of Global South to Global North educational transfers, and dynamics of saviorism. They also reflect on what it means to take care of students when studying is censored and banned. Situated within activist ethnomusicology and ethnomusicological migration studies, these presentations are based on personal experiences, lived realities, and ethnographic fieldwork on Afghan music in Pakistani and European exile.