Music higher education institutions are increasingly recognising the educational value of intercultural learning experiences. Delivering such learning experiences in a way that provides music students with a rich cultural and musical learning experience, rather than a superficial one, can be a challenging task, particularly in the case of short-term ‘mobility’ or ‘study-abroad’ programmes. This article explores ways to address this challenge by reflecting on student learnings from a suite of international study experiences, or ‘global mobility programmes’, at one Australian tertiary music institution, run in collaboration with community partners, universities and nongovernmental organisations in the Asia Pacific. Focusing on how intercultural music-making in the context can enhance students’ musical practices and identities, we first outline the sociocultural contexts of our music global mobility programmes in Cambodia, China and India, and explore the different modes of music-making these experiences afforded. We then draw on Coessens’ ‘web of artistic practice’ to explore site-specific examples of the ways in which global mobility programmes can enhance students’ musical practices and identities. These findings hold particular relevance for music educators and higher education institutions in justifying, designing and carrying out such intercultural experiences to maximise student learning and success.

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This study presents an investigation into the multiple and often marginalised ways of being, knowing, educating, and performing the complex identity of migrant musicianship. It examines the lived experiences of migrant musicians in South East Queensland and is based on the premise that cultural diversity as experienced through music creates value in ways that are complex, particularly in the context of displaced lives. The article is built on the conceptual framework wherein 'capacitating' the self and other is an enacted aggregate of the following multidimensional affordances: emotional expression, social interaction, self-identity, and agency. It argues that the wide range of activities that migrant musicians undertake in their new homes not only builds capacity in them but also adds culturally-derived value to their lives and the lives of those that they encounter. By employing the methodology of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis, the migrant female participant-researcher unpacks the motivations, rewards, and challenges that a purposive selection of Brisbane-based migrant musicians articulate. The emergent themes reveal three key features as central to the lives and livelihoods of migrant musicians: connectedness, self-identity, and wellbeing. The findings of this study hold implications for future research in cultural value, music education, and migrant studies.

It is through voice that oftentimes individuals find themselves breaking with conventions and systematically ingrained injustices. In the recent literature in the burgeoning field of interdisciplinary voice studies, the phenomenon of voicing has been projected as a powerful process, across cultures, to represent human agency at its most potent, and this article is a critical discussion on this very uniqueness of voicing in relation to social equity, corporeality and cultural value. The author, a female singer-researcher of Karnatik music of South India, unpacks the burdens and privileges of voice in the light of cultural contingency, global mobility and interculturality. Following a discussion encompassing literature and theories on voice, historical ideas of voice and feminist critiques on voice and the voicing female body from a South Indian angle, the author proposes a Pentagonal Entanglement framework for equitable engagement with the voice ‐ across scenarios and cultures, to critically address the socially pressing issues of our time through the medium of voice.

One of the most striking features of Artistic Research is that apparently disjointed issues including pressing calls to action from social, ethical, political and cultural perspectives can organically unfold, evolve, and shape interdisciplinary academic discourses through the centralised lens of artmaking. It thereby creates a holistic picture of research in a manner that only an artist’s singular perspective can yield. A methodology approach that looks from the enmeshed and messy microcosms of ecologies at interplay to the broader macrocosms of the world, through the lenses of socio-cultural interrogation and ethical accountability, I argue, presents an sustainable model for a decolonised artistic research ethos to emerge. According in this publication, I offer "an ecomesh approach" to achieving a framework for "socio-culturally interrogative artistic research" with music and culture as my two key modes of inquiry. As a female native culture bearer of South Indian Classical music now also active within the sphere of Western academia, I feel that I have an ethical responsibility towards the ways in which culturally contingent aspects of my music and culture are represented in and communicated to the world (both in education and artmaking). I leverage my insider/outsider position to problematise aspects of power, belonging, and ownership in global ecologies of dissemination and reception of material and material labour.