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

Boundaries and Ties: The Place of Metal Music in Communities

Posted: October 19th, 2016 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

The Biannual International Society for Metal Music Studies Conference at the University of Victoria (Previously held at Bowling Green in 2013, and Helsinki in 2015)

June 9-11, 2017

Metal Studies at the University of Victoria and ISMMS are pleased to announce the following Call for Papers:

Metal music is a crucible for identity and community. At its core it aims to press boundaries. These boundaries, in turn, serve both to reinforce belonging and to exclude nonparticipants. The goal of this conference is to explore different ways metal music fans experience and create communal bonds, and the relationship of these bonds with other types of communal bonds (ethnic, religious, and national for example). How can these multivalent bonds reinforce or destabilize each other? How do lyrical and symbolic themes and communal bonds aid or hinder the process of or reclaiming identity or regaining voice?  How do artists grapple with and recontextualize some of the problematic origins of the genre?

The organizers would like to invite proposals for papers of twenty minutes devoted to any aspect of metal music, identity and community. We would also like to encourage students and postgraduates to submit an abstract.

We invite topics that include but are not limited to:

  • The relationship between local and global metal scenes.
  • The formation of and allegiance to specific sub genres with in metal.
  • Heavy metal and national or ethnic identity.
  • Margins and periphery within metal communities.
  • The role of “narrative(s) of origin” of metal or its sub-genres in fostering a sense of communal identity within metal.
  • Metal in First Nations communities
  • The interrelationships between metal music and sporting/leisure contexts
  • Metal music as political community
  • The relationship between embodying a cultural identity and heavy metal fandom
  • How developments in technology influence metal communities (such as the dynamics across online and offline metal            communities)
  • Metal and DIY/participatory archives
  • Lo-fi recording and the bonds between metal artists and audiences
  • The entanglements of analog and digital (re)productions of metal
  • Lyrics as a call for communal action
  • Plurilingual Metal as communal connections or divisive agents

Please submit a title and an abstract of 200- 250 words (if an accompanying reference list is included, it does not go towards the word count) to [email protected] by December 15, 2016. Applicants will be notified of acceptance by February 1st, 2017.



Leave a Reply