Another Music Studies Is Possible: Centering Experiences of Graduate Labor from Members of Project Spectrum

As committee members of Project Spectrum—a coalition led by graduate student (ethno)musicologists, music theorists, and intellectuals working in music and sound—our work over the past seven years has centered the experiences, needs, welfare, and career paths of minoritized graduate students.1 We work to provide practical and holistic approaches that consider graduate student needs inside and outside of classrooms, conference meetings, and spaces that do not privilege the academy. Our coalition consists of graduate students from various public and private universities in the United States and Canada, in addition to a faculty affiliate board that offers important mentoring. As graduate students, our education and training are crucial for identifying possible obstacles in the labor market and for envisioning structural correctives, from mentorship networks to graduate labor unions. Our broader aim is to address the serious work needed for music studies, from the classroom to the job market, to become more equitable by continuing to advocate and organize.Music studies in North America has seen an increase in students of color, international students, queer and trans students, students of various socioeconomic backgrounds, and students with disabilities, and yet, the departments and institutions that house the disciplines of music studies remain overwhelmingly white, cis, straight, able-bodied, and male.2 Feminist, Black, Indigenous, and queer/trans critiques of music studies suggest that even if the demographics of music studies have marginally changed, our methods, canons, and relations to labor have not.In this essay, we suggest that attention to our experiences of labor as early career scholars in diversity-focused music studies can open up new ways of imagining the field's possibilities and practices. We argue that the intellectual, social, and labor disparities felt and experienced among marginalized graduate students are interrelated and connect to broader trends toward critiquing the university structure. International students, for instance, frequently navigate a complex landscape of visa requirements and cultural adjustment—a form of demanding, yet rarely acknowledged, labor. This leads to a central question: How do graduate students with diverse backgrounds and experiences relate to music studies as laborers, intellectuals, and colleagues? The ongoing demographic shift in music studies necessitates a reevaluation of how graduate labor should be viewed from a nonmale, nonwhite, non-European, and nonheteronormative perspective. A part of this reorientation involves broadening our definition of graduate student labor to encompass aspects of graduate life that challenge conceptions of our work as reducible to output or pure transactions.We offer a capacious and critical rendering of the experience of graduate labor in music studies. As members of Project Spectrum and graduate students ourselves, we hope to highlight the here-and-now precarities of graduate work, expanding our definition of graduate labor in music studies beyond what is said to justify our stipends. We show how our unique experiences in our PhD programs—whether as parents, international students, LGBTQIA2S+ individuals, scholars of color, or otherwise minoritized academics—might lead us to form coalitional bonds to be in but not of the university and its strictures.3 First, we frame our discussion of graduate labor through critical race scholarship in music studies as well as decolonial feminist critiques of the university. We offer this framework, leaning on la paperson's notion of the “third university,” in order to imagine graduate experiences, within and outside of music studies, that resist colonial structures, expand possibilities for equitable academic life, and inform structural reforms and alternative models of academic work. Then, we turn to experiences of international students to nuance our discussion of power and work in music studies by disclosing the significant difficulties and precarities international students face. Finally, we offer solutions and reflections as members of Project Spectrum to help configure a holistic approach when imagining what music studies might become.Researchers are taught to address racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity on a theoretical level but often take little notice of this diversity in university staff and faculty. Danielle Brown detailed this issue in her open letter resignation from ethnomusicology: “It is very clear to me that although many white ethnomusicologists understand interpersonal and systemic racism on an intellectual level, they just don't get it.”4 Simply put, while academics might understand diversity, many overlook diversity as a natural outcome of a movement toward systemic equity and decolonization. This lack of meaningful adjustment to practices, policies, and structures that would advance equity is something many scholars have written about, including Guthrie Ramsey in Who Hears Here? On Black Music, Pasts and Present and Brittney Cooper in Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. Audre Lorde in “The Uses of Anger” and “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House” writes at length about the expectation of assimilation into academic spaces that simultaneously deculturates people of minority status. If faculty have shared such experiences in terms of these labor expenditures, they have done so only to expand this lens to look at similar phenomena among the graduate student population.Foundational decolonial texts recontextualize the American university's role not as a utopian beacon of hope founded upon accessible knowledge but as a manifestation of settler colonialism.5 Navigating the challenges of academic labor reveals systemic inequities tied to colonial and exclusionary practices in higher education. Scholars across the humanities have examined ways to use knowledge production, research, and pedagogy inside and outside of the university context to challenge interlocking systems of oppression such as white, patriarchal, neurotypical, and heteronormative supremacy.6 Lucie Vágnerová and Andrés García Molina critique the dominance of the Western art music canon in US music curricula, arguing that its persistence is sustained by inequitable academic labor structures, particularly for faculty whose undervalued service work often drives reform without meaningful recognition.7 This aligns with broader critiques of academic precarity, which emphasize the mental and emotional toll of “invisible” labor performed disproportionately by marginalized scholars. This literature also highlights the hidden costs of diversity work, often treated as a “labor of love,” further compounding the barriers faced by those from underrepresented groups.8 In A Third University Is Possible, la paperson warns against the distraction of diversity work that benefits the colonial university, claiming that “freedom's doppelganger is critical consciousness.”9Building on these analyses of colonial and exclusionary dynamics embedded within higher education, la paperson's A Third University envisions “third spaces” within academia where individuals repurpose institutional resources to resist colonial systems and foster intellectual sovereignty.10 Drawing from Black feminism, Indigenous sovereignty work, and cinema studies, la paperson articulates the complex relationship between the US-American university and land, violence, and colonial knowledge production and provides a helpful analysis of power through which members of academia might fashion a resistant response. He defines a “third university” as “an interdisciplinary, transnational, yet vocational university that equips its students with skills toward the applied practice of decolonization.”11 These spaces offer a framework for transforming oppressive structures from within, highlighting the potential for agency in higher education through curricular and structural reform.In response to oppressive power systems within music academia and throughout the broader academy, graduates have begun to explore alternative ways to use their degrees outside of music studies. These efforts could include museum and archival work, public scholarship and organizing, or scholarship combined with other artistic expressions.12 For example, Project Spectrum alumna Krystal Klingenberg uses her expertise as curator of music at the National Museum of American History.13 Eric Hung is the executive director and cofounder of the Music of Asian America Research Center, which seeks to “advance knowledge about and social justice to Asian Americans through Music.”14 Stephen Lett has written profound reflections on his own strategies outside of the academy to describe how “we might be accomplices in leveraging these professed values to steal whatever paltry resources we get through being included in order to continue building and nourishing the otherwise, abolitionist worlds where we take care of one another outside of the extractive logics foisted upon us all by one overrepresented mode of being human.”15 Inspired by the party of 1925 that “stoked the embers” of the Harlem Renaissance, Ambre Dromgoole, assistant professor in Africana studies at Cornell, was vital in organizing Ithaca's inaugural “Freedom Party”—“a space for resource gathering and sharing, storytelling, artmaking, and community building.”16 Additionally, of course, Danielle Brown's long-standing organization, My People Tell Stories, has provided a model for how we might “promote and validate the knowledge produced by people of color and subsequently create an education system that is more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.”17 This labor, powered by skills and resources acquired in the academy but ultimately repurposed to foster alternative knowledge narratives, builds the third university both within and outside of the traditional academy.The act of constructing the third university through the refashioning of academia's prestige and resources could be described using la paperson's idea of the “scyborg,” which he defines as a student of the third university who has “picked up colonial technologies and reassembled them to decolonizing purposes.”18 Using the privilege, knowledge, and accreditation that the university provides, the scyborg attempts to construct glimmers of liberation throughout an otherwise colonial project. One does not need to remain in the academy to disrupt the constant accumulation and expansion of the university. Rather, intellectual labor that speaks to diverse audiences and connects with injustice creates, as bell hooks wrote, “communities of resistance [and] coalitions that are not conventional.”19 Building the third university involves deep study and knowledge production in unlikely places, fugitive pedagogies, and a willingness to view that labor not as removed from the academy but as a site for intellectual possibility. Scyborgness manifests in various ways, including but not limited to the prioritization of community partnerships, public scholarship, and channeling one's university resources outside of the university. Collaborative and coalitional efforts—much like the professional networks that Project Spectrum has created between academic societies, faculty mentors, and a diverse group of graduate scholars—make the third university possible by repurposing the concept of collegiality from a disciplining procedure of a colonial academy to a means for insurgent collaboration.In this section, we outline the concerns about the conditions of labor expressed by graduate student workers who come to the United States and Canada to work on their PhDs, many of whom feel isolated and tokenized by having to represent their culture to the music disciplines. International students often find themselves navigating layers of unfamiliarity and uncertainty, from the complex processes of gaining access to graduate programs at North American research institutions, obtaining visas, adapting to new academic norms, and overcoming language barriers to the persistent condition of their experiences once enrolled, where cultural dislocation, isolation, and the burden of representation frequently shape their scholarly lives.20 Students often respond to these challenges by forming intentional networks of care—communities of solidarity that provide emotional, academic, and material support in spaces that can otherwise feel isolating or unsafe. Yet even within these networks, a sense of fragility persists. Legal status remains contingent on institutional approval, continued enrollment, and complex documentation processes, making the threat of disruption a constant undercurrent. Participation in advocacy or political expression—such as labor organizing or human rights demonstrations—can further complicate a student's standing, intensifying the emotional and logistical stakes of life in the academy.21International students build lives marked by mobility and impermanence, striving to succeed while remaining structurally unrooted. Within the “education-migration industry,” this condition can be considered academic migration, a term we use to capture the ongoing negotiation of belonging, risk, and aspiration required of those who must leave home and community to pursue educational opportunity in often extractive institutional contexts.22 Layered onto the broader experience of estrangement as nonresident immigrants, international students are placed in impossible positions of self-reliance and self-affirmation. As participants in US-American and Canadian higher education, international students are compelled to serve as representatives and experts of their own realities, marked as perpetual foreigners whose voices are diminished by an enduring status as noncitizens.Yet, beneath this veneer of diversity, many students of color, particularly those from international backgrounds, encounter significant challenges that reveal persistent inequities. Universities rely on international students’ embodied knowledge and lived experiences to frame institutional engagement with global epistemologies in many ways, from relying on international students’ ability to “naturally” diversify curricula to using minoritized students to provide mentorship to international undergraduates and fellow graduate students. In exchange for funding and opportunity, international students contribute labor to the enrichment of these academic spaces yet remain caught in a paradox: Their subjectivities and diverse experiences perpetually circulate within institutions that both depend on and marginalize them.International students from outside the Global North have identities and experiences that require thoughtful and intentional support. They must be recognized and treated with nuance in order to foster campus climates that value their contributions as integral to the academic and cultural fabric of an institution. This complexity is limited when international students have their experiences tokenized, flattening the rich lives of young academics into a regurgitation of the “native informant.” Compounded within the marginalized demographics by geography and often race, they navigate cultural dissonance, linguistic barriers, and acculturative challenges, engendering a distinct set of adversities. Educational institutions, therefore, must be unwavering in their dedication to creating an enabling environment that is not only capable of meeting these students’ needs but also of equipping them with the social and academic skills necessary to thrive in an increasingly complex global landscape. The academic, social, and professional success of international students hinges on the ability of these institutions to adopt a holistic and intersectional approach to student support. The implementation of strategies and policies that facilitate a rewarding educational and social experience for international students is not merely a matter of providing generic support services, such as a one-time orientation or general writing center, which, while beneficial, often fail to address deeper, systemic issues like the chronic social isolation and “othering” that the and unique to their and the academic that fail to for diverse linguistic and cultural that take the support of their international student workers must be in a to equity and through and in curricular that we at Project Spectrum have our in to contributions to and from members and affiliate board members and to the experiences, and we in this students in music studies often encounter the emotional labor of having our and within academic knowledge and profound cultural our voices are frequently marginalized or in of academic that and international students as cultural is in the power dynamics of academic institutions, where epistemologies In such the knowledge produced by the academy is over lived experiences, even when with to the scholars the This knowledge international students to of study on our cultural practices, rendering our and or We are to show up when the from our to provide scholarly or to a traditional for cultural but our critiques of the theoretical applied to that music are in we often the of or of our cultural This academic and a form of cultural violence, and the very we to and The to us as culture not only our voices but also a of that ultimately the being taught and of academic institutions and their faculty to our expertise as cultural a broader issue within and a resistance to over the Scholars who have their on cultural resist their work, even when with of or This resistance to new often as a to academic or frequently an with to those of us who have experienced the our contributions a significant we offer into our providing or new contribute resources to academic Our lived experiences can the of music and cultural practices, providing a more and representation that benefits both the academic community and the and our expertise is not only an act of academic but also an that more and scholarship in with the potential to reform and what academic labor we and community support are they the need for systemic reform within academic meaningful necessitates the implementation of policies, of of curricula, and the of spaces that the voices and experiences of students of institutions must efforts and in as we have and to structures of power and privilege that as they through the through institutional can we beyond toward an academic environment in equity and a PhD often involves navigating a by social institutional and For many students, this beyond academia and and community As members of Project we the faced by those from underrepresented or minoritized backgrounds in music with and and have to many when graduate graduate students often and emotional for as their toward definition of success from obtaining a PhD often navigating academic social and their emotional, and status not only graduate students but and faculty and staff as that might the working conditions for these university members have and can be in unions. labor advocate for equitable and for all students, including international provide a for benefits such as and research or funding while also solidarity across systemic inequities through help graduate study more for marginalized students. In institutions without graduate labor leave students without a or In such students often to like or stipends. efforts to or individuals, whose limited rarely leads to The between institutions with and without graduate labor their in the to for conditions and graduate can a role in creating equitable, academic that students to such structures, the burden of navigating remains disproportionately on the students Spectrum to advocate for more in university professional and solidarity among graduate students. As an that graduate students in music studies, we that relations and graduate labor more is to the holistic and intersectional approach of our work. The persistent systemic challenges of academia many to leave the in of in museum work, and yet, we that outside the academy is not a student's to but that graduate education in music offers a of possibilities that we be for and by and Spectrum is by and for graduate students and the experiences and knowledge of graduate students We take a by on the lived experience of being a graduate the the research, the and even the to the academy we a professional which an on the job market that graduate students with and strategies to navigate job and career them for both academic and This concerns about graduate student needs from our own of labor, a holistic and intersectional approach to what academic work in music might all labor in our of is and in the mental and emotional toll that students of color, LGBTQIA2S+ students, students with students, students, and international students in for their own that another music studies is one that can the of a diverse graduate student As members of Project we offer our into graduate labor in music as one for this if we are to this we on our coalitional networks across and beyond the academy to music studies work for

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