Ailsa Lipscombe

Ailsa Lipscombe is Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology, with a specialization in sound studies and critical disability studies. She holds a PhD in Music from the University of Chicago and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington in the School of Information Management. Her primary research explores intersectional experiences of medicalization, with a focus on reimagining listening praxes through embodiment, emplacement, relationality, and trauma. In her work, she considers how the medicalization of the everyday—the process by which symbols, sights, sounds, and attitudes of the medical sphere move into everyday spaces—shapes musical production, acoustic design, and sonic interpretation. Her research applies this framework of medicalization across a number of distinct contexts, including the COVID-19 pandemic, urban planning, and popular music to understand the influence of the medical world on everyday sonic experiences.
 
Her first monograph—titled Sensing Precarity: Viral Listening in Medicalized Worlds—is slated for publication in Spring 2027 with the University of Michigan Press and is to be published within their Music and Social Justice series.Sensing Precarity tunes into the sonic ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic to reveal how moments of crisis are commonly framed as moments of rupture. Lipscombe combines traditional ethnography with media analysis, creative writing, and poetry to explore the embodied resonances of medicalization’s influence, inviting readers to sense elsewise as they read.
 
In her postdoctoral position at Te Herenga Waka, Lipscombe built on her expertise in digital ethnography and the decolonization of research methodologies to explore ethical transformations of Indigenous archiving in Aotearoa New Zealand. She centered community engagement and an ethics of care, guided by her own intersectional positionality.
 
Her current research on the representation of mental illness and disability within the music of Taylor Swift was featured at the Second Annual Conference of the Taylor Swift Studies Association and is due to be published in an upcoming volume of Popular Music & Society. Her related work on contemporary clinical applications of Taylor Swift within mental health protocols brings together popular music studies and public health research and will be featured in an upcoming special issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies on popular music and depression.

Lipscombe regularly presents at conferences across North America and Australasia. She was awarded the 2021 Charles Seeger Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology for her paper "When Silence Is Heard: Embodied Listening in Medical Facilities' Competing Sonic Epistemes." Her work has been published in journals such as Ethnomusicology, JASIST, and IFLA's flagship journal, as well as in several edited collections, including most recently in Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans (Routledge 2025) and the Oxford Handbook of Ecomusicology (OUP 2027). 
 
Her work has been supported by the Fulbright Association, Te Tuapapa Matauranga o Aotearoa me Amerika, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Musicological Society, and the Society for Music Theory

PhD in Music: University of Chicago Chicago, IL, 2022

Master of Arts: University of Chicago Chicago, IL, 2017 (Music)

Master of Music: Victoria University of Wellington Wellington, New Zealand, 2015

Peer Reviewed Publications

Ailsa Lipscombe, Chern Li Liew  (2025). Affective encounters with digital knowledge collections: Towards supporting Indigenous wellbeing. IFLA JournalMore Information

Ailsa Lipscombe  (2025). When Silence Is Heard: Embodied Listening in Medical Facilities’ Competing Sonic Epistemes. Ethnomusicology, 69 (1) , 1-24More Information

Ailsa Lipscombe, Chern Li Liew  (2024). Communities, Conversations, & Care: A New Model of Archiving. Information Matters, 4 (2) More Information

Ailsa Lipscombe, Chern Li Liew  (2024). Centering Dialog and Care in Digital Indigenous Knowledge Stewardship: Of Relationality, Responsibility, and Respect. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 75 (6) , 671-685More Information

Book Chapter

Ailsa Lipscombe (2025). “I Can't Find a Pulse” Encoding Sonic Intimacy in Heartbeats and Heartbreaks. In Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans. Routledge

Paper Presentations

Ailsa Lipscombe (11-2024. ) On Heartbeats and Heartbreaks: Diagnostic Listening in the Era of Taylor Swift .Chicago, IL. Professional Meeting.

Ailsa Lipscombe (10-2024. ) The Ethics and Politics of Care in Music Studies .Online.

Ailsa Lipscombe (12-2023. ) Cripping Access: Pedagogical Improvisation and/as Disability Epistemology .Hamilton, NZ.

Ailsa Lipscombe (10-2023. ) Emplaced Displacement: Traumatic Listening at the Edge of Time .Ottawa, Canada.

Ailsa Lipscombe (10-2023. ) Dialogic Empathy as Praxis: Supporting the Culturally-Responsible Transformation of Indigenous Knowledge Collections .Québéc, Canada.

Ailsa Lipscombe (10-2021. ) Viral Sounds, COVID-19, and the Medicalization of Everyday Spaces .Online.

Ailsa Lipscombe (10-2020. ) When Silence is Heard: Embodied Listening in Medical Facilities’ Competing Sonic Epistemes .Online.

Ailsa Lipscombe (11-2018. ) Sensory Medicine / Sensory Mediation: Experiencing Hospital Acoustemologies .Albuquerque, NM.

Ailsa Lipscombe (11-2018. ) Music, Disability, and the Environment: Bridging Scholarship with Activism .San Antonio, TX.

Ailsa Lipscombe (10-2017. ) Disembodiment as Disempowerment: Indigenous Vocal Performance in Disney’s Frozen .Denver, CO.

Ailsa Lipscombe (11-2025. ) Charting Trauma’s Embodied Imprints: The Endemic Era and its Sonic Cartographies of Medicalization .Minneapolis, MN. Professional Meeting. Level:International