One’s strength and flexibility can be trained and developed, superiors can lead in a way that builds resilience, and organisations themselves need to be culturally and structurally stable and agile in order to deal with present and future challenges.

Be it a concert for hospitalised cancer patients, a neighbourhood forum in a newly developed residential area, or making music together in a park: community outreach can take on all kinds of shapes.

And for around 20 years, now, we’ve used the terms “applied” or “engaged ethnomusicology” to also imply “outreach”. It has hence long been a central point in ethnomusicology (rather than being a recent development, like in other disciplines) to ensure that research has a reciprocal impact on society—an impact that, in turn, flows once again into research findings.

Dietmar Flosdorf, Axel Petri-Preis, and Rineke Smilde teach at the Department of Music Education Research, Music Didactics and Elementary Music Education (IMP). mdw Magazine spoke with them about the community work they pursue.

With projects like Musethica, the All Stars Inclusive Band, and Musik am Krankenbett [Music at the Sickbed], the mdw champions free access to the arts and culture—thereby elevating social responsibility to a central commitment.

One needn’t to look far to see how things like undue political influence, state interventions, economic conditions, national borders, and lots more can infringe upon human rights, whose enjoyment thus by no means goes without saying.

For months now, students in Budapest have been protesting undue political influence. Their demand: greater autonomy for their university. Just what is academic autonomy, and what can endanger it?

Excerpt from the public lecture “Does every crisis justify a crisis of human rights? Crisis-related considerations” by Ruth Wodak at the mdw on the occasion of the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (10/12/2020).

It was even before the Ibiza Affair—that is, under a different Austrian government and political situation—that we first formed the idea for a series of events on populist politics and their critique by scholars and artists.