Knowing community music today
Deadline: Monday 7 September 2026

In this issue, we will be spotlighting international research in community music. In a year that also brings together community music scholars, practitioners, and researchers through the International Society for Music Education (ISME) Community Music Activity Commission (CMA) conference in Toronto, Canada, this issue offers a timely opportunity to ask how community music is being known, researched, understood, and shared today.

We welcome submissions from researchers, practitioner-researchers, postgraduate students, community musicians, educators, activists, artists, and others working at the intersections of community music practice and research. We would love to hear from you if you have work to share on community music research in diverse local, national, and international contexts. 

We welcome submissions from researchers, practitioner-researchers, postgraduate students, community musicians, educators, activists, artists, and others working at the intersections of community music practice and research. We would love to hear from you if you have work to share on community music research in diverse local, national, and international contexts.

Submissions might explore the role of community music research in responding to contemporary social, cultural, political, ecological, educational, and health-related questions; the methods and ethics of researching with communities; participatory, practice-led, ethnographic, creative, activist, or community-led approaches; or the relationships between community music theory, practice, policy, and lived experience.

We are especially interested in articles that open up dialogue across international contexts, delve deeply into context specific or locally rooted practices, share emerging or ongoing research, reflect critically on research practice, or consider what community music research can help us understand about music-making, community, belonging, care, justice, learning, and social change today.

Whether your work is based in local projects, international collaborations, academic study, practitioner inquiry, or community-led research, we would love to hear from you!

Submissions do not need to be full academic papers; we encourage a range of formats, including reflective essays, personal essays, blog posts, videos, and any other accessible forms of writing or audio.

If you have a resource you'd like to share, or an idea for a story, article or interview for this issue, then please get in touch with our editor, Claire Francis on claire.francis@soundsense.org. 

We welcome submissions from Sound Sense members for this issue. You can share your thinking and practice in words, pictures, audio and/or video. You can find further information and advice on contributing to Sounding Board at soundsense.org/resources-and-publications