An update to keep track of my writing projects has become an annual event. Since my last update, on Dec. 16, 2023, which writing projects have progressed, which have been published, and which have seemingly stagnated? On my academia.edu page and also in my twitter (now X) @jefftoddtiton and bluesky @jefftoddtiton.bsky.social profiles I suggest that readers who want to know the answer to the question “What research and writing are you working on?” come to this blog to find out. Here is the list of publications and works in progress:
1. “Ecojustice and Ontological Turns: a Response to Marshall and DeAngeli.” Written in 2021, I drew on some earlier writing ("The Nature of Ecomusicology," 2013) on relationality and reciprocity by proposing that the concept of ecojustice includes social justice by extending respect to all living beings, not just humans. This is congruent with the writings of Indigenous scholars such as Robin Kimmerer and Zoe Todd in past dozen years or so as well even though they don’t use that term. It was published in Ecomusicology Review, Vol. 8 (2020-2021).
2. "Folklife, Heritage, and the Environment: A Critique of Natural Capital, Ecosystem Services, and Settler Ecology," was published in January of 2024 in the Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 137, No. 543, pp. 61-84. The article was derived from my 2021 oral presentation on folklife, heritage and environment for an American Folklore Society Fellows-sponsored webinar.
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| Coal loadout, near Hazard, Kentucky, 1996. Photo by Jeff Titon. |
3. In January of 2023 Ross Cole invited me to contribute a chapter on “Observing and Collecting” for The Cambridge Companion to Folk Music. I completed a draft in November. It took another year for all the authors to complete their draft chapters. Currently the book manuscript is under the usual external review process. Depending on the suggestions from reviewers, I will make revisions and return the chapter to Cole. I imagine publication will occur sometime in 2026.
4. In January of 2024, Portia Maultsby invited me to contribute a chapter on blues to the 3rd edition of the textbook, African American Music: An Introduction, edited by Maultsby and Cheryl Keyes. Before accepting the invitation I requested and received permission from the publisher Cengage, to write what might have seemed to be something similar (in subject) to my chapter on North America/Black America in the ethnomusicology textbook, Worlds of Music, which took on blues as a case study. I was careful to write it with a much different emphasis, completed the chapter shortly before Christmas and sent it to the book's editors.
5. Late in the spring of 2024 a Cengage editor wrote to ask for a 7th edition of the introductory ethnomusicology textbook, Worlds of Music. This book has been in print continuously since 1984, with the 6th edition having been published in 2015 and the shorter version of the 6th edition in 2017. I've been a contributor (3 chapters) and general editor ever since Dave McAllester, Jim Koetting, Mark Slobin, David Reck, and I wrote the first edition in the late 1970s. I polled the current co-authors to see whether they would be willing to revise their chapters for a new edition. I decided, additionally, that given my age it would be wise to become a co-editor for this edition, so I asked Tim Cooley (one of the co-authors) if he would be willing to share the task of editing, and he kindly said yes, he would. The upshot was that we needed two new co-authors to replace two from the previous edition, while five others were willing and able to continue. By November we had the two new co-authors in place, and in December the contract was completed. Cengage is eager to bring out the new edition and wants us to finish the revisions by the end of 2025. We will do our best, but I've warned Cengage that this would be an unusually quick manuscript completion time, given that the past revisions have taken from two to three years, and given that we will have two fully new chapters to replace two of the current ones.
6. In the fall of 2024 I accepted an invitation from Sabine Feisst to write a chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Ecomusicology, which in her words "brings together (ethno)musicologists, music theorists, and sound scholars to critically examine the interrelationships between music, sound, and human and more-than-human environments. It aims to consolidate existing knowledge about ecomusicology and significantly broaden the scope of ecocritical studies of music. The handbook also seeks to decenter the Western music canon and expand the geographical scope of ecocritical music studies." This is a re-start of a stalled project that was in the works about eight years ago when I'd also accepted an invitation to write. I said that I would most likely write about ecomusicology and a sound ecology, with some reference to the idea of a sound commons--ideas that I'd been developing for more than a decade.
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