Mainstream popular music studies are based on binary modes of thinking such as the West vs. the rest, centre vs. periphery, academic researcher vs. pop artist, and so on. Clear boundaries are drawn between Anglo-American popular music that is placed at the center and flows unidirectionally to different parts of the world while other musics are relegated to the periphery. This model perpetuates colonial ways of knowing and inequalities in global dialogues about the types of popular music studied, research methods, circulation of music, as well as essentialism perpetuated by ethnonationalist states. This panel aims to show how scholars of Southeast Asian popular music have attempted to disrupt the prevailing paradigm in popular music studies by challenging the rigidity of binary borders and interrogating unequal power relations through the blurring of geographical, gender, political, cultural, and digital boundaries. The presenters show that local musicians exercise agency as they domesticate Anglo-American sounds, technologies, and media, as well as cross borders to negotiate conflicts and the politics of in/visibility and in/audibility in Malaysia, Burma, and Taiwan.