The panel, “Negotiating the Personal and Professional: Ethnomusicologists and Uncomfortable Truths,” presented at the Forty-third ICTM World Conference in Astana, Kazakhstan, grew out of informal conversations common among ethnomusicologists. As practitioners in our discipline, we are involved in complex webs of experience, relationships, and representations focused around music, broadly defined. Our work is inherently social and, when in the field, we develop close relationships with our teachers and consultants as we become comfortable in our sites of research. We are grateful for priceless access to communities and individuals. The intensity and combination of certain relationships and circumstances, however, can lead to conflicting expectations, unanticipated misunderstanding, and situations of personal and professional conflict