The recent “infrastructural turn” in the humanities offers music studies promising new perspectives in music historiography. This roundtable seeks to use this infrastructural perspective to generate critical reflection on our pedagogical and outreach practices as musicologists whose work engages with East Asia.

Roundtable panelists proceed from a view of higher education as an important form of global infrastructure that “make[s] mobility and an exchange of humans, goods, and ideas possible” (Pestel & Rempe 2025). Participants draw on their experiences as music educators positioned as mediators in (and between) Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and the USA, to open discussions about the opportunities that arise when we pay attention to the layers of “hidden and inaudible infrastructures” (Stokes 2018) that shape our pedagogies and research. The roundtable begins with five position statements that variously unpack, dismantle and challenge dominant ideologies and economic logics of global musical infrastructures. Reflecting on how changing geopolitics and neo-liberal economies affect and re-shape historical networks and future-oriented education, panelists and invited discussant pose open-ended questions as a way to critically engage with and spark audience discussion regarding the implications of teaching music in and about a globally connected and rapidly changing East Asia in the 21st century.