This paper presents a critical analysis of ethical and methodological issues within cross-cultural music science research, including issues around community based research, participation, and data sovereignty. Although such issues have long been discussed in social science fields including anthropology and ethnomusicology, psychology and music cognition are only beginning to take them into serious consideration. This paper aims to fill that gap in the literature, and draw attention to the necessity of critically considering how implicit cultural biases and pure positivist approaches can mar scientific investigations of music, especially in a cross-cultural context. We focus initially on two previous papers (Jacoby et al., 2020; Savage et al., 2021) before broadening our discussion to critique and provide alternatives to scientific approaches that support assimilation, extractvism, and universalism. We then discuss methodological considerations around cross-cultural research ethics, data ownership, and open science and reproducibility. Throughout our critique, we offer many personal recommendations to cross-cultural music researchers, and suggest a few larger systemic changes.
This paper is a written account of the ICMPC-ESCOM 2021 workshop “Cross-Cultural and Decolonized Research,” and an opportunity to dig deeper into some of the topics that were discussed over the course of organizing and presenting the workshop. The paper is divided into four sections: 1) why we organized the workshop, and our reflections on it; 2) a summary and critique of two previous papers (Jacoby & Margulis et al., 2020; Savage, Jacoby, Margulis et al., forthcoming) with recommendations about cross-cultural work in music science; 3) a summary of the responses to five questions we posed to experts in cross-cultural and anti-colonial/imperial research, prefaced by a discussion of how we chose who we wanted to approach; and 4) our reflections on future steps music science can take to engage cross-cultural and anti-colonial/imperial research ethically.
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