November 11th-14th and 18th-20th, 2026
Free · Fully Online · Synchronous & Asynchronous
Check out the "Program" tab to register for Zoom sessions!
Access Forward Musicology is a free, fully online conference unconference taking place in November 2026. This gathering emerges from a shared conviction: access in academic musicology is not a logistical afterthought, but a defining value. It is also not a single-issue concern. Access is about opportunity, identity, and belonging. It is shaped by disability, race, gender, class, age, institutional affiliation (or its absence), caregiving responsibilities, geography, and the many other dimensions of our lives that the academy has too often treated as obstacles to participation rather than as the human reality of scholarship itself.
We take our name and our core orientation from Elizabeth McLain’s developing framework of access forward practice — an approach that centers disabled experience, refuses to treat inclusion as an individual accommodation problem, and understands leadership as collaborative care work. We are driven by the disability community and the disability studies tradition, and we are explicitly welcoming to all those excluded from or underserved by academic musicology for any reason.