Music making is not a singular universal experience but an interwoven, relational practice that thrives on the dynamic interaction of difference. Whether between people, cultures, politics, or ecosystems, participatory music practices occur in an ongoing process of entanglement, interdependence, and co-creation—one that has potential to foster connection and transformation, but also holds potential for exclusion and oppression.
In a global landscape of intensifying conflict and division, how might community music be reimagined in terms of relationality and difference? What is the role of dialogue in enabling co-creation and reciprocity? What are the critiques and possibilities for community music that might help the field better respond to the global challenges of political conflicts, climate crisis, social isolation, oppression, and other complex issues?
This seminar invites community music scholars and practitioners to explore relationality within participatory music making—including (but not limited to) ways of listening and collaborating across differences, possibilities for music to bridge and negotiate cultural practices, and critiques that examine how dialogue can support navigating difference and conflict. Through arts-based presentations, workshops, listening circles, pecha kuchas, and research presentations, we invite proposals that respond to the following questions:

• How might community music research and practice operate within difference and conflict?
• How might intersectional, critical, and decolonial approaches strengthen and diversify community music practices and scholarship around the globe?
• How might contemporary and traditional Indigenous practices and epistemologies inform community music as a field?
• What is the potential of listening and dialogue in building relationality across difference and conflict, whether social, cultural, political, or ecological?
• What does co-creation look like across cultures, disciplines, and ecosystems?

In an era when divisive politics are intensifying, this seminar aims to explore contemporary community music research and practice that highlights difference, dialogue, and possibility. Rather than unity and consensus, we seek entanglement, reciprocity, openness, transformation, and possibility as core principles of participatory musical engagement.