Singing About Architecture 105 Singing About Architecture: Disability and Language Diversity in IASPM-US Kevin Fellezs University of California, Merced When I was asked to speak on this plenary panel addressing diversity, my immediate questions were, “Why not?” and “Why now?” More pointedly, and less rhetorically, I wondered about IASPM-US’s history regarding diversity. As Deborah Wong notes in her opening remarks, IASPM-US can point to a strong record of scholarship that addresses issues of race and class with an encouraging increase in attention to issues of gender and sexuality. In my search through the programs of prior meetings on the IASPM-US Web site, I, too, noted the broad range of scholarship in conference listings and publication titles. 1 Still, I do not think it is in the interest of IASPM-US to simply think of diversity as an additional consideration on a roster of IASPM-US themes, topic subjects, or even scholarly participants (however important, and obvi- ous, those considerations are for IASPM-US’s commitments to diversity). For me, the question of “needing” diversity is: How does diversity become a foundational principle around which IASPM-US scholarship, membership, and mission cohere within the broader topic of popular music studies? The history of IASPM-US around issues of diversity suggests that we need not re-invent the wheel; although, as ours was the first panel devoted exclusively to addressing diversity within the organization, my guess is that there has not been much explicit attention paid to these questions before this conference. Are there, in fact, strategies or actions IASPM-US already has in place for practicing/performing/embodying diversity in as many ways as possible? Related questions: What are the subjects/objects that have tradi- tionally held center sway at IASPM-US? Does it reflect on an organizational or historical bias toward particular sites/objects/subjects of study? While there are clearly other issues related to diversity (as high- lighted by the other panelists), I want to speak to two areas of un- derrepresentation that address my concern about diversity as a principle around which IASPM-US might expand conventional definitions of popular music studies, particularly as practiced in the U.S.: differently abled/disabled