This course will contextualize various types of music making from East Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Indigenous cultural groups. Drawing on interdisciplinary texts from ethnomusicology, anthropology, history, and political studies, we will explore diverse music practices including but not limited to American folk music, salsa, hip-pop, Hongkong protest music, American-Japanese drumming, Korean folk-pop, African pop, Australian Indigenous bands, and Ukrainian folk music. We will interpret these various music genres as artistic creations and social activism through reading assignments, in-class presentations, listening examples, film clips, and discussion. We will explore the meanings of the music by situating them in the social realities and by responding to emergent issues and crises related to democracy, social injustice, gender, social trauma, medical crises, and struggles of refugees. Along the way, we will also examine how artists are empowered by musicking to deliver extra-musical messages and how they employ sonic worlds as social spaces for individual or collective action, protest, and expression. This course thus aims to enrich students’ intellectual, educational, and aesthetic experiences by exploring holistic understandings of musicking as a sonic, aesthetic, and cultural phenomenon.