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

Andrew Goodwin Memorial Prize

Andrew Goodwin was a key figure in the development of popular music studies. His background was in media and cultural studies: he received his Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of Birmingham and taught for many years in the Department of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco. He was a pioneer of the scholarly analysis of music video (in his book, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture, for example, which drew on his previous work on television) and an astute critic of the use of postmodern theory in popular cultural studies. But his work also reflected his experiences as a working musician and critic (experiences explored in his entertaining Professor of Pop blog), and his articles on such topics as music technology and the concept of world music remain models of clear-eyed common sense and analytic insight, informed as much by practice as theory. As a teacher, colleague and friend, Andrew was an untiring source of ideas, enthusiasm and support, and his untimely death, in September 2013, was a huge loss to all of us in IASPM. The Andrew Goodwin Memorial Prize was established in 2014 as a fitting tribute to his generosity to younger scholars.

Aim: To promote popular music research and to support new scholars.

Eligibility: Postgraduate students who are currently registered at universities and colleges in the U.K. and Ireland and who are members of IASPM. Current students and IASPM UK-I members who submitted essays for the AGMP in previous years but were unsuccessful may apply again; however, they are not allowed to submit the same essay (or essay topic) twice. Previous winners of the AGMP may not apply again.

Awarded for: Essays may take the form of 3000-4000 word written submission, or video essay of duration 10-20 minutes.

Dates: Submissions to open 7th December 2023 and close 3 May 2024. Prize awarded at IASPM-UK and Ireland conference (or at the time of the IASPM international conference in alternate years when the UK and Ireland conference doesn’t take place). The 2023-24 panel of four judges will be Dr Adam Behr (Newcastle University), Dr Ian Garwood  (University of Glasgow), Dr Sarah Raine (University College Dublin) and Dr Nikki Moran (University of Edinburgh).

Prize: First prize is £1,000, with the runner-up receiving £500. Both the winner and runner-up essays will be published on the Andrew Goodwin Memorial Prize web page on the IASPM UK and Ireland website.

Guidelines for submission:

Written submissions should be in either a Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) or .RTF document file format, with double-spaced, 11-point in Arial font text (quotations larger than 40 words indented, in 10-point text).

The student’s name and institution should appear on a title page as part of the essay document. PDF files cannot be accepted.

All written submissions should follow the Harvard Referencing Guide.

Video submissions should be uploaded to Vimeo, YouTube (or other stable video sharing website) with an ‘unlisted’ setting prior to the judging. (This can be amended to ‘public’ after the award has been made). The videos themselves can use whichever form of referencing is apt – e.g. spoken references, written text visible on a slide or similar – but you must provide a full bibliography/discography/filmography (Harvard format) alongside the video submission. Please submit in the form of Word or RTF document with:

  • Student’s name and institutional affiliation
  • Title
  • ‘Unlisted’ link to the video
  • Full reference list

ALL submissions (written or video) should be pieces of work that have not been previously published.

Essays should be submitted by Friday 3 May 2024 to the following e-mail address: [email protected].

2023

WINNER

Emma Longmuir: ‘The ‘Ageless Voice’: Exploring Age and Agelessness in Annie Lennox’s 2020 and 2022 Performances of ‘Here Comes the Rain Again’

Emma Longmuir is currently a third year part-time PhD in Music candidate at Newcastle University and is a recipient of the Clara Whittaker Music PhD Scholarship. Her PhD research focuses on age, time and ‘the uncanny’ in Annie Lennox’s work and this year she has concentrated on Lennox’s COVID-19 lockdown and post-lockdown performances. Emma’s research interests are situated within age studies, persona studies and popular music studies, particularly around work which seeks to creatively examine age and ageing within popular music performance.

RUNNER-UP

Leandro Pessina: Music Tourism at the Border: Sharing the Traditions of the Oriel Region

Leandro Pessina is an Italian PhD student undertaking doctoral studies at Dundalk Institute of Technology in Ireland, under the supervision of Dr Daithí Kearney (DkIT) and Dr Ioannis Tsioulakis (QUB). A geographer interested in music, he is funded by the Irish Research Council, and his research examines the role of music in tourism enhancement of Co. Louth, the smallest county of Ireland, located on the eastern side of the island. The aim is to recognise this region as a valuable territory for music encounters, that may be inserted within future regional tourism promotional strategies.

Previous winners

2022 – Rowan Hawitt: Musical ecologies of grief: breathing and environmental justice in Love Ssega’s ‘Our World (Fight for Air)’

2021 – Rachael Drury: A constellation of inconsistencies: questioning the blurred lines of music copyright infringement

2020 – Sophie Frankford: Music, censorship and the state: the case of Egypt’s Musicians’ Syndicate

2019 – Raquel Campos: Musicking on Social Media: Imagined Audiences, Momentary Fans and Civic Agency in the Sharing Utopia

2018 – Maisie Hulbert: “Respect is just a minimum”: Self-empowerment in Lauryn Hill’s “Doo-Wop (That Thing)”

2017 – Ellis Jones: “I do it for the love”: Pop music and aspirational labour

2016 – Alexander C. Harden: A World of My Own

2015 – Ben Assiter: Basic Channel and Timelessness: Negotiating Canonisation, Resemblance and Repetition in House and Techno