It was in 2020 that mdw alumna Josipa Bainac-Hausknecht first worked at the Exilarte Center for Banned Music. The topic of music in exile, still as current as ever, occupies an important place in this Croatia native’s academic and artistic doings.

News about climate change, species extinction, wars, and the like confront young people in particular with entirely new questions: How does it affect me and my surroundings? Can I just continue on as if nothing were amiss? Won’t everything change? What has to change?

With an eye to communities and collectives ranging from social movements to artist groups and from ethnic communities all the way to “sonic ties” of the non-human sort, the 2023 isaScience conference zeroed in particularly on the interrelations between sound as such and power structures that exist in sound, music, and the performing arts at large.