Welcome to The International Association for the Study of Popular Music UK and Ireland Branch

Fringes, outsides and undergrounds: The aesthetics and politics of unpopular music

Posted: December 12th, 2015 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

One-day conference to be held at Goldsmiths on 7 May 2016  

Musical forms such as noise, extreme metal, performance art, experimental techno, free improv and more take inspiration from both popular and art traditions without being fully identifiable with either.

These forms exist either on the fringes of, or outside, these commercial and cultural mainstreams, both in conventional musical centres such as London and Berlin and further afield, in South America, Japan and China.

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EUPOP 2016

Posted: December 8th, 2015 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, July 20th – 22nd, 2016

Individual paper and panel contributions are welcomed for the fifth annual international conference of the European Popular Culture Association (EPCA), to be held at the Université Paris Ouest in Nanterre, just outside Paris (Faculty of Foreign Languages and Cultures), July 20th – 22nd, 2016.

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Popular Culture Association of Canada (PCAC) 6th Annual Conference

Posted: December 7th, 2015 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

In association with McGill Institute for the Study of Canada
May 12-14, 2016

The sixth Annual Conference of the Popular Culture Association of Canada will be held in Montreal, Canada from Thursday, May 12 to Saturday, May 14, 2016.

We invite proposals for papers and/or panels on theories of popular culture, research methods in popular culture, the teaching of popular culture, forms and genres of popular culture, and any epiphenomena of popular culture, past or present. We also invite presentation and exhibition proposals from visual and multimedia artists whose work engages with popular culture.

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Dark Leisure and Music Symposium

Posted: December 1st, 2015 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

16th September 2016
Leeds Beckett University
Headingley Campus, Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK

Deadline for submissions: 15th May 2016

‘Dark Leisure and Music’ is an interdisciplinary symposium, hosted by Leeds Beckett University, Centre for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, that aims to address issues related to dark leisure research and encourage dark leisure scholarship in music. Dark leisure may be defined as leisure activity that sits on the fringes of modern society tastes, and activity that rejects the mainstream. Around the turn of the century, Chris Rojek started looking at dark leisure as ‘deviant’ and chose to interpret this type of leisure mostly as detrimental to the individual, in line with criminological approaches. While dark leisure has been investigated by criminologists and psychologists as abnormal behaviour, recent scholarship in this area such as the works of Karl Spracklen, Philip Stone, and D. J. Williams has shown the need to take dark leisure from a different moral perspective than previous research. Moreover, this type of leisure has been scarcely explored in relation to music cultures. Music worlds ‘on the edge’ could be important spaces for dark leisure activity which have Habermasian communicative rationality at heart; and in effect, they could provide essential channels for performing liminal identities.
We invite submissions addressing following issues and others:

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Music, Health and Wellbeing: African Perspectives

Posted: December 1st, 2015 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Special Issue of the Legon Journal of the Humanities (LJH)

Knowledge about the relationship between music, health and wellbeing is probably as old as humanity itself. Ritual specialists across the African continent and elsewhere have been making use of the therapeutic and curative potential of music and dance for millennia, just as ordinary people have used song, dance and play to enhance individual and collective wellbeing. Various philosophers have tried to come to terms with the healing powers of the performing arts, emphasising the close connection between art and human nature. More recent research in musicology, dance and performance studies, psychology, neuroscience, and medicine – to mention but a few of the relevant fields – has added much to our understanding of the socio-cultural, psychological as well as biological foundations of human-music interaction, shedding light on the influence of music on affective behaviour and our basic brain chemistry. Against this backdrop, music, dance and related art forms are increasingly employed in both informal and formal therapeutic settings to treat illness, alleviate pain, cure mental disorders and, more generally, to promote wellbeing.
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