Decolonizing the World Music Survey

University classrooms have grown dramatically more diverse as global migration accelerates, with students from many backgrounds gathering in unprecedented numbers. Instructors can no longer presume any single shared cultural reference point among their students—nor should they have made such an assumption in the first place. Alongside this human mobility, global sounds now travel with ease, and students encounter a vast global soundscape through streaming services, social media platforms, and ubiquitous earbuds. K-pop, Southern American trap, Indonesian punk, and countless remixes of global genres intermingle with the noise of urban life as students move through their day.

Given the rich sonic environment students already inhabit, one must ask whether the traditional "Intro to World Music" survey course remains relevant. Students may not need a class for simple exposure to global musics, but they do need frameworks for thinking critically about difference—perhaps more now than ever. In an age marked by political crisis and intensifying cultural contact through globalization and technological modernity, a rehabilitated world music survey can serve as a vehicle for decolonial practice. The pedagogical strategy outlined here focuses on conversations about self and other, rejects Eurocentric assumptions, and builds experiential learning projects that foster genuine encounters. These approaches nudge students away from oppositional or analogous thinking about culture—where "they" are judged as either different from or similar to "us"—and toward a relational, other-centered understanding of difference. Both the pedagogy and the specific strategies described are transferable to any course examining music in its social and historical context.

None of this, however, offers a complete solution to colonization. The structural realities of twenty-first-century academic life confine decolonization to the realm of aspiration. What follows are reflections on why and how we should make the effort regardless.

Defining the Terms

The term "decolonization" as used here refers to strategies aimed at dismantling colonial, imperial, and Eurocentric assumptions about what music is, who creates and consumes it, and how it operates in human communities. Yet defining decolonization in fixed terms or prescribing a single model for all contexts contradicts the concept itself. Cultural studies scholars Catherine Walsh and Walter Mignolo do not offer "global answers" or "global designs for liberation." Instead they define decoloniality through what they term relationality:

the ways that different local histories and embodied conceptions and practices of decoloniality, including our own, can enter into conversations and build understandings that both cross geopolitical locations and colonial differences, and contest the totalizing claims and political-epistemic violence of modernity.

Simply including an "Intro to World Music" course or specialized area-studies offerings in a music department curriculum does not constitute decolonization. Alejandro Madrid has called this "diversity understood as tokenism." In rejecting a merely tokenistic addition of Ibero-American music to the history canon, Madrid argues that it is "about quotas and not about the challenging nature that diverse experiences may bring to the very structures music academia has taken for granted for decades." Decoloniality fundamentally unsettles the knowledge regimes that thrive on epistemic power imbalances and reorients undergraduate curricula toward a more equitable view of who and what is considered significant. Within the world music classroom, this requires a radical rejection of Eurocentric concepts of "the world" and "music," displacing those frameworks to make room for genuine difference. Such a reconfiguration demands explicit discussion of the power structures mutually entangled with those concepts.

The work of decolonization extends well beyond diversifying a syllabus or changing classroom delivery methods. It is not a superficial proclamation of progressive values; it is demanding labor. Within the Western university system—bound by curricular requirements, deep investment in Western civilization, institutional legacies of slavery and colonialism, recent memories of exclusionary policies and practices, and physical occupation of indigenous land—the task is far easier stated than accomplished. Decolonization exceeds the capacity of any single person and calls for a collective vision that academia as a whole currently lacks. That claim may sound pessimistic, and there is ample reason for such feelings, but acknowledging this reality is an important first step toward recognizing one's own agency within the system. Anthropologist Nayantara Sheoran Appleton urges us to accept our limitations by doing "anti-colonial, post-colonial, and de-colonial work in the academy" while refraining from "claim[ing] to a 'decolonized programme,' 'decolonized syllabus,' or a 'decolonized university.'" Recognizing colonization's entrenchment within the academy, she argues, "allows you to be honest—about who you/we are and how you/we are situated within certain privileges."

Honesty about the Course Itself

An honest assessment begins with the very name of the course, which carries heavy ideological baggage. The title suggests that a single curricular unit can adequately introduce students to the musical diversity of all world cultures across every place and time. This point is not a criticism of how instructors currently teach the material but an acknowledgment of how the course historically tokenized non-European music within broader curricula. Its existence reflects past decisions by dominant stakeholders who begrudgingly included non-European content to project an image of liberal multiculturalism while reinforcing European cultural primacy.

Recent decades have seen what Georgina Born calls a "broad methodological drift" that theoretically blurs the disciplinary lines between historical musicology and ethnomusicology. However, Born cautions that genuine rapprochement "will require cumulative expansion of the conceptual and theoretical frameworks within which music scholarship proceeds." It demands "a commitment to certain arduous passages by which we might eventually arrive on new epistemological and even ontological terrain, backed by serious commitment to changing music pedagogies." Despite some convergence between musicology's sub-disciplines, few serious attempts have been made to "world" music history in ways that render obsolete the curricular separation organized along colonial-geographic lines—what Eric Wolf called "Europe and the people without history"—rather than around methodologies or skill sets.

The course title also derives from a defining moment when colonial thinking and global capitalism intersected: the music industry's invention of "world music" in the 1980s. Timothy D. Taylor observes that "'globalization' and then multiculturalism, its domestic face in the (post)industrialized countries, are new incarnations of an older set of conceptions of difference, but they entail a greater degree of the commodification of difference, as well as its consumption." This tension creates a pedagogical dilemma: how can curriculum designers and instructors embrace difference in ways that actively resist its commodification within the very political and economic structures that shape student—and instructor—worldviews?

The Classroom Reality

The classroom setting inevitably shapes how instructors answer such questions. Although world music surveys appear in many configurations, this discussion focuses on the large lecture format, where the author has developed the curricular insights described here. Like other survey courses, the world music class typically functions by "warehousing several hundred students in a lecture hall to be talked at by a distant professor." Students then attend discussion sections for supposedly active engagement with the material. At the author's institution, the course enrolls 180 students with two lecture sessions per week and a recitation where groups of twenty meet with a graduate teaching assistant. As historian Kevin Gannon has observed, group size matters less than course design: "It doesn't matter if there are 20 or 200 students in a classroom; if the course design and dominant pedagogy are predicated on merely transferring chunks of content, then the class itself will be—to use a technical term—a dud."

Curricular reforms must scale to various classroom settings, but the large lecture format—a structural outcome of the neoliberal university's drive toward higher FTE numbers—is designed for content delivery, not for the reorientation demanded by decolonial pedagogy. It therefore needs special attention to the peculiar and frankly bizarre instructor-student dynamics that the setting produces. The central question becomes: How can instructors working within a large lecture environment go beyond content transmission to engage students in ways that resist the dehumanizing logics of both the classroom arrangement and the survey curriculum itself?

Three Pedagogical Challenges

Considering the course's fundamental flaws within a flawed system, the structural limits of mass lectures, and students' access to global sounds, three interconnected challenges emerge for the world music survey:

1. Scale and engagement. Large classes create distinct difficulties related to student motivation and physical setting. Most students enroll not from genuine interest in the material—aside from a general musical interest—but to satisfy a general education or diversity requirement. Fulfilling such requirements through a lecture environment with minimal dialogue does not equip students or instructors for productive conversations about cultural difference.
2. Eurocentric origins and student diversity. Although the course provides music departments with diversity credentials, it emerges from Eurocentric thinking. Student diversity creates further difficulty: while not every student is white, US-born, and Christian studying music created by people of color elsewhere, many entering students hold exactly that perception.
3. Perceived expertise gaps. Despite extensive listening experience, students often feel they lack the vocabulary to discuss musical sound or cultural context. They claim ignorance of music theory or avoid classifying music in "incorrect" terms. Those with formal training usually come from Western classical traditions, which predisposes them toward analogous thinking (applying Western concepts) rather than the effortful engagement with music on its own cultural terms that these challenges require.

Curriculum Design and Representation

No amount of innovative pedagogy or technology can fix an inherently flawed curriculum design. It has proven necessary to examine how colonized thinking about music and geography has shaped the organization of the world music survey. Should the course treat discretely bounded, colonially produced regions—"sub-Saharan Africa," "the Middle East"—or abandon a geographical focus altogether and instead trace the soundscapes of global cultural flow?

The latter approach risks losing local distinctiveness when subsuming everything under umbrella themes such as "Music and Politics." Yet the geographical method may reinforce colonial conceptions of space and time while inadequately addressing cultural exchange, whether from contemporary globalization or pre-modern routes like the Silk Road. Neither option is inherently decolonial, and a satisfactory solution does not lie in curriculum organization alone. Any curricular structure demands early conversation with students about its inherent limitations. Discussing the course's basic conceptual weaknesses early in the semester holds pedagogical value because it undercuts the curriculum's assumed authority. Without careful attention to pedagogy, both approaches can fortify the very colonial narratives the course aims to disrupt.

The author has taught the course both ways and has found that thematic units while mitigating challenges from reduced emphasis on tidy (but problematic) cultural geography are preferable. In practice, the semester is built around bi-weekly thematic units whose topics and case studies shift from year to year based on past success, newly published scholarship, and other variables.

In recent course iterations, the units have included "Locating Music" (addressing space, performance contexts, and globalization), "Music’s Materials" (focusing on theoretical elements like rhythm and mode, alongside music as material culture), "Sound and the Sacred" (covering ritual, liturgy, and theological debates), "Music and Politics" (examining protest, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism), and "Music and Identity" (centering on race, gender, and intersectionality). Additional topics, such as "Music and the Body" (including disability studies and entrainment), could readily substitute. This structure privileges conceptual understanding while ensuring repeated exposure to musical traditions; Shona mbira music, for instance, reappears within "Music’s Materials," "Sound and the Sacred," and "Music and Politics." Abandoning a "coverage" model has been freeing, enabling me to foreground subjects that inspire both my scholarly passions and long-term student growth.

Reading assignments are drawn from peer-reviewed articles in journals like Ethnomusicology and Ethnomusicology Forum, as well as monograph and edited volume excerpts, chosen for relevance and accessibility to mixed-level undergraduates. While a few canonical works appear, such as Paul Berliner’s The Soul of Mbira, most materials date from the past decade. This focus keeps me updated on recent scholarship and allows inclusion of work by women, queer, black, indigenous, and people of color authors, giving students access to cutting-edge research even in an introductory course.

For example, Meredith Schweig’s 2016 article “‘Young Soldiers, One Day We Will Change Taiwan’: Masculinity Politics in the Taiwan Rap Scene” works effectively in the "Music and Identity" unit. It provides an excellent foundation for learning about music as a site for gender performance, masculinity politics, homosociality, and the link between gender and genre, all contextualized within twentieth- and twenty-first-century Taiwan. The language is accessible and clearly connects musical practice and style to social history, so students understand why extramusical context matters. The reading also introduces broader concepts like Mark Slobin’s "micromusics," sparking discussion about the globalization of hip-hop from a specific US context familiar to many.

When planning biweekly units, I aim for diversity in cultural settings, musical styles, and traditions. The "Music and Politics" unit from the latest course illustrates this. It was mapped as follows:

- First, we read an excerpt from David McDonald’s 2013 book My Voice Is My Weapon on Palestinian hip-hop and the poetics of resistance. After the prior "Sound and the Sacred" unit introduced the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the region’s multi-faith soundscape, students arrived informed. Using McDonald’s ethnography, music videos, and musician interviews, we explored how Palestinians express political traumas through music, questioned hip-hop’s assumed association with resistance, considered hip-hop’s globalization and media-driven pathways, and discussed how global musics are localized for distinct social or political needs.

- The second day addressed how Japanese climate activists politicized a local musical practice. Reading Marié Abe’s 2016 article "Sounding Against Nuclear Power in Post-3.11 Japan," we examined chindon-ya, a musical advertisement tradition from the nineteenth century. After the March 2011 Fukushima disaster, practitioners mobilized instruments and costumes for political sound demonstrations. Comparing the Palestinian and Japanese cases, we highlighted their specific historical and political contexts rather than drawing false equivalences.

- Day three focused on cultural politics in India, using Jayson Beaster-Jones’s 2009 piece "Evergreens to Remixes." This introduced Hindi film song and the Bollywood film industry’s distinctive labor distribution, reviewed concepts of remix, and addressed Indian debates over musical originality, nostalgia, and anti-colonial politics.

- The unit concluded with Suzanne Cusick’s 2006 article "Music as Torture / Music as Weapon." We discussed the US military’s use of music for prisoner torture and the agency of soldiers carrying out this violence, then examined how studying music or musical expertise can speak truth to power today.

Inside the “Lecture” Hall

As director of this large-enrollment course, I am assigned to lecture but strive to move beyond that format. I aim to connect students with course material not just by presenting information, but by fostering group conversations about the research process—especially ethnographic fieldwork—and how music scholars represent culture, often that of others. My role, then, involves guiding a meta-level discussion of how we come to know the material.

During lectures, students spend time as listeners, absorbing both my words and prepared musical examples across cultural categories. Much of the time, however, they speak. After introducing a topic, I project a discussion question and ask students to break into groups of two to four people, often with unfamiliar classmates. They refer to the prompt throughout. For instance, during a class on the Black Pacific in "Music and Identity," I start with: "Turn to a neighbor and discuss: What is race?" I keep it broad to invite varied definitions. After collecting and sharing five or six student responses, I present scholars’ attempts to define or reconfigure the concept. I then ask: "Turn to a different neighbor: Can you think of examples where music contributed to racializing a group?" Responses draw on their knowledge of Anglo-American pop or earlier course material, like Carolyn Ramzy’s work on Coptic liturgy from the "Sound and the Sacred" unit.

These discussions lead into a focus on blackness, music, nationalism, and colonialism, preparing students for Gabriel Solis’s "The Black Pacific: Music and Racialization in Papua New Guinea and Australia." I supplement with theories from Paul Gilroy’s "Black Atlantic" framework and Antonio Gramsci’s "subaltern" concept, along with musical examples like Yothu Yindi’s "Treaty" and Local Knowledge’s "Blackfellas."

Although students often have substantial listening experience, they may feel intimidated interacting with music from "other" cultures due to a lack of technical vocabulary or fear of being insensitive or awkward. To counter this, I lead group listening exercises in lectures and recitation sections that help students build a critical lexicon using analogy and comparison. I encourage them to draw on existing vocabulary through think-pair-share activities—low-stakes opportunities to talk before sharing insights. Derived vernacular music theory lets students use their own words. We then support them with terminology and contextual details. For the "Blackfellas" analysis, students typically focus on the lyrics, song production elements, and music video gestures and choreography.

This is where critical engagement begins, not ends. Minimizing sound anxiety gives students a firmer foundation for exploring complex topics about sociocultural phenomena. This mirrors what Sonia Seeman calls "embodied pedagogy"—a second teaching level "necessary for the students’ experience of far‑near juxtaposition." It can effectively convey "what music is and what music does." When students articulate their aural experiences, theoretical relationships between music and globalization, identity, race, gender, and politics cease to be abstract. Rather than accepting the instructor’s word, they appreciate music’s meaning by closely attending to contextualization and decontextualization processes that make their own musical experiences possible, especially for controversial subjects where frameworks of power intersect with human practice. Critical listening and critical thinking become mutually reinforcing. At the end of the "Black Pacific" class, I assign a reflection: "As you leave, consider how your own racial identity or racialized person is tied to structures of power and circulations of culture, including music." Such exercises are powerful for students, including white students, who may not have considered their identity racially or reflected on music’s role in their racial beliefs.

Key to this is using extracurricular ethnographic examples—asking students about listening habits, musical spaces, and dance practices they have seen, then drawing out global connections. For example, discussions of American gospel, paired with MarOa is comparative. Questioning global inequalities through infrastructure and calling out methodological nationalism—situating those asymmetries—helps instructors model thinking across cultural differences without flattening them into comparativist sameness.

Integrating race beyond US borders is critical. One must critique white immigrants who choose to emphasize inclusion without historical UPLT reference is disingenuous about empire and UPLR.

Teaching cultural sensitivity requires acknowledging genealogies that denaturalize Western academia as the exclusive site of knowledge. Empathy offered via analogous distances trains ears without speaking for or over studied communities.

My reliance on recent, progressive texts actively decenters my experience while potentially slighting classical datasets or traditions less represented.

Active consent concerns about listening to music from religious groups that might discourage outsiders extend digital tools into respectful ethnomusicology driven not just by inquiry but consultation processes instructors navigate to avoid extraction mode.

Office hour metrics and final portfolios concretize bridging disciplinary onto local cultural landscape. I also seek participation demonstrations, bridging Deborah Bradley’s warning about musical "othering" connects training if not careful becomes collidonial oversight. Students on both sides of performing skill find value added emotional boundary by enwement of Seeman's far-to-ear.

Conversations balance imported complexities listening around politics or race direct ground are foundational.

With student musicians from these countries traditions as backdrop (China–suffering pipa showcase), I open authority from instructors/learners each offering family ties plus lifelong valuation marking ties push out yet hold up. It proves risky dealing exactly "local" directly plus exnominis errors not being expert true—and with generous alum guidance this rewarding engagement verily irreplace leaves students speaking for tradition once boxed dead classrooms

I share daily about Syrian maternal lineage "push pull" rates discussion—against current Syrian war—plus grandmother's PR ward hipso style showing continuity to recognize contrast. This melá which, for American kids adjacent known *telenovelas and rice dishes actually both anchored "other seen in people they among many true".

Thus representation through own meaning integrated empathy plus accuracy modeling anti-colonial claims before classroom with access this active memory detail binding language when walls fixed definitions become neutral point but become model layered method honoring each *world me maybe no find otherwise captured

This reflection from evaluation typical:

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My Puerto Rican father’s enthusiasm for the Beatles and his hobby as an amateur rock musician complicates that picture and illustrates diasporic adaptation for them. These family accounts let me highlight the personal importance of the ethnomusicological ideas introduced in the syllabus. Ideally, they also encourage students to consider how those ideas might shape their own perspectives. Much like the musical demonstrations described earlier, these experiences create opportunities for students to undergo a transformative learning process about what it means to be different.

Foregrounding the central methodology of ethnomusicological research—ethnographic fieldwork—is perhaps the most valuable pedagogical tool for weaving decolonial ideas into the “Intro to World Music” course. In discussions of readings, I direct students’ attention to interview excerpts and ethnographic stories of the researcher’s time in the field. For example, with the Schweig article on Taiwanese rap mentioned earlier, students learn to read a musician’s comments about gender and genre critically. This metacognitive strategy enables them to examine how differing concepts and relations of gender shape both fieldwork and the textual representation of musical experience, building toward a critique of knowledge production within ethnomusicology.

To make these critiques of representation and knowledge production tangible, I devote at least one class session per semester to presenting my own research. For instance, when discussing Jerusalem’s religious soundscape, I share my field recordings, videos, and photographs, but I also discuss the process of gathering and creating them on site. Ethical questions receive particular attention—such as obtaining permission to record when appropriate or how such materials are framed regarding their capacity for cultural representation (for example, “What is left out of the frame or beyond earshot here?”). I also emphasize the importance of building connections with research subjects, whom I refer to in class as my “teachers,” to recognize the intellectual contribution of those traditionally called “informants” in human‑subjects research. Discussing my own fieldwork offers a richer picture of musical life worldwide than simply delivering content centered narrowly on musical objects. More crucially, highlighting the politics involved in producing such knowledge prepares students to undertake the decolonial work that a better world would require of them.

Decolonizing “Intro to World Music?” 53

Experiential Learning, Multimodality, and Empowerment

Integrating experiential learning theory into course assignments can strengthen the decolonial potential of the curricular and pedagogical approaches discussed so far. Educational theorist David A. Kolb defines experiential learning as “a dynamic view of learning based on a learning cycle driven by the resolution of the dual dialectics of action/reflection and experience/abstraction.” Black and Bohlman have written about using “soundwalks” on a campus marked by toxic racial politics. They argue that “care‑oriented and site‑specific ‘sonic meditations’ … have the potential to reposition listening as a collective exercise in the music (history) classroom—and thus as an activity fundamentally linked with community and collective action.” Kate Galloway, among others, focuses on creative outputs as processes that foster deep critical reflection in students. Drawing on these arguments and related teaching techniques, I share some strategies I have developed for weaving experiential learning into my “Intro to World Music” course, particularly by teaching the theory and practice of ethnography. Although ethnographic fieldwork can sometimes resemble a colonial methodology—Western researchers have historically traveled to “other” places to learn from “natives,” occasionally even serving colonial administrations—within the classroom it can be re‑framed to emphasize the course’s decolonial potential: as a way of creating space for musicians to speak on their own terms and exploring the iterative relationship between action/reflection and experience/abstraction. The experience/abstraction axis is especially central to the politics of representation when students try out multiple modalities (textual and non‑textual) for expressing their experiences, as I will describe below.

I supplement the course content with experiential learning assignments that lead to multimodal projects, replacing some traditional assessment forms such as essays and exams. These tasks push students to engage critically with the material and reflect on the politics of collective learning. Multimodality involves allowing research outputs to use multiple forms of communication, rather than sustaining the dominance of text. As Literat and colleagues contend, “multimodal research is valuable because of its potential for more comprehensive and inclusive inquiries, analyses, and representations that can be socially, culturally and politically transformative,” and because it can “facilitate wider and more meaningful participation in the research processes.” Such inclusive acts hold the greatest decolonial promise for both curriculum and pedagogy.

Anthropologist Julius Bautista advocates “for a pedagogic dialogism that channels how anthropologists handle the discursive politics of ethnographic practice such that meaningful learning occurs when students ‘struggle’ with the mutually awkward, sometimes uncomfortable effort to recognize the agency of the people that they encounter in the course of EL‑based curricular programs.” To that end, I not only discuss ethnography in lectures but also require students to actually engage in the “struggle” Bautista describes by assigning ethnographic research projects to be conducted in the campus region. In recent versions of the course, I have assigned three such projects, each done in collaborative groups with a distinct topic or output. Students typically begin with a broad prompt: “In groups of five, attend, observe, and/or participate in any musical performance related to the genres, practices, traditions, styles, and/or topics we have discussed in class. Take notes and work together to jointly write a 3–4‑page ethnographic sketch from your jottings.” Students have the power to form their own research teams, choose field sites, and make contact with potential interlocutors. In essence, the project’s primary goal is for students to experiment with methodology.

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Later assignments become more targeted, guided by specific research questions. For example, in one project I ask students to attend a religious service, site, or event within a community where the majority of the group does not belong, and then write a 3–4‑page ethnographic description of how sound functions in that setting. The main aim here is for students to consider how they represent a sacred or sensitive cultural domain while producing knowledge. Requiring written essays for these projects helps students to contemplate the process behind the ethnomusicological research they read throughout the semester, while preparing them for the multimedia project they create at the term’s end.

At this point, Seeman’s “embodied pedagogy” and Bautista’s “pedagogy of discomfort” converge, creating a feedback loop between classroom discussion and students’ external experiences. Students begin to see music not merely as a text for class analysis but as the product of human intellectual and creative labor woven into social life. The ethnographies also further the course’s mission by forcing students to confront the dynamics of knowledge production. Working collaboratively provides opportunities for students to reflect on writing in a way that differs from single‑authored papers, and, more importantly, they engage metacognitively with how musical experience is rendered into writing. This focus on the creation of knowledge supports the course’s decolonial goals.

Written essays are just one form of cultural representation students can experiment with in “Intro to World Music.” Multimodal learning projects can tap into the spirit of ethnographic research while separating it from writing (narrowly conceived) and linking it to other narrative media technologies with which students are already familiar—film, podcasting, photo essay, mixtape, and other formats. Film, as a multimedia format, allows for simultaneous thinking about visual and sonic dimensions of representation, thus encouraging multimodal learning. Accordingly, for their final project, students conceive and produce a short ethnographic film tied to a specific course theme.

Students collaborate in groups of five to create a short ethnographic film documenting an aspect of the Triangle region’s sound world (Chapel Hill and surrounding towns). Groups develop the project during recitation meetings leading up to the film’s execution. Past groups have captured a neighborhood’s soundscape, documented a single musical event from different vantage points, and conducted interviews with musicians active in a local scene, group, or religious community. Each project adopts a distinct approach to building narratives about music as an ethnographic topic. Students must get signed releases from people serving as documentary subjects. The final films are roughly five minutes long, edited down from much more raw footage.

Naturally, rolling out such a project in a large class has presented logistical hurdles. Beyond developing a project concept derived from course content, students must acquire (free through our institution) the necessary software, learn to use it via library workshops scheduled during recitation times, check out cameras and microphones, and meet in groups outside class for filming and editing. The project is very time‑ and resource‑intensive, posing potential headaches for both instructors and teaching assistants regarding logistics and group dynamics, but its political and pedagogical value outweighs these professional inconveniences.

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The technical quality of the films varies depending on student skill and how thoroughly they absorbed the technical training, but overall such projects have produced genuinely thoughtful engagement with the politics of representation, a focal point of the course. At the semester’s end, I ask students to reflect on those politics and the interplay between action and reflection in a two‑page essay about their filmmaking experience, focusing on how the project may or may not have deepened their understanding of musical ethnography, cultural representation, and the topics we discuss across the term. These responses have largely supported the view that multimodal learning assignments, compared with traditional academic assignments, enable students to think more creatively and more critically about broader discussions of methodology and cultural representation. The ethnographic study of music and experimentation with narrative modes help students theorize about cultural encounters and open discussions about how colonial—or anti‑, de‑, or post‑colonial—politics are embedded in the very labor of learning about human culture. Thinking critically about cultural difference through careful engagement with global musical traditions and issues gives students skills they can carry beyond the classroom. Such work represents a key contribution of academic music studies to developing ethical citizens.

Conclusion

Is the “Intro to World Music” survey course still relevant? The answer depends on how it is taught. I remain conflicted about the overall curricular model and feel ambivalent about whether the course should be part of current music‑department curricula. In principle, I view its historical inclusion as a clear act of tokenism. The past goal was to “expose” students in one semester to the world’s musics from all places and times, in all languages and genres (art, pop, traditional), while a far larger share of departmental resources supported specialized teaching of music from Western and Central Europe, and to some extent North America. “Intro to World Music” appears to be a classic case of inclusion without equity, as departments enjoy the optical benefits of global music offerings without giving non‑European traditions a genuine foothold in the curriculum.

That said, I would not back simply dismantling “Intro to World Music” without a plan to overhaul the entire music curriculum, achieving greater equity among world traditions across the board. This includes reconsidering how we teach music history and analysis. In lieu of truly ambitious macro‑level curricular and institutional decolonization, micro‑level curricular and pedagogical choices that open doors for thinking about decoloniality may have to suffice. By establishing a conceptually structured curriculum that provides repeated encounters with others’ music, framed by pointed discussions of music‑making’s context and content, and by integrating experiential learning and multimodal outputs, any course—but especially “Intro to World Music”—can create spaces for students to develop openness to relationality and radical self‑evaluation, a potential foundation for a decolonized world.