Music at the Edges: Peripherality in the practices of popular music

June 29 – July 1, 2026
University of Aberdeen, Kings College, Aberdeen, Scotland

For this meeting of the UK and Ireland branch of IASPM we invite scholars to explore and reflect on the conceptof peripherality as it relates to the diversity of practices undertaken in relation to music making anddissemination. We consider peripherality here in both its literal (spatial and geographical) forms and in themore metaphorical ways that attitudes and behaviours are shaped by a perceived distance from an impliedcentre. To this end, we encourage considerations of the ways in which peripherality may influence how musicis created, performed, recorded, and disseminated within and from such locales. This may include locationsthat are geographically isolated, taking into consideration the positive and negative influences on the localmusic scenes and their functioning. Peripherality may also refer to the ways in which the music markets withinsuch locales might be considered satellite markets for other centres of production. We also recognise theways in which specific genres of music may be considered ‘underground’ when positioned in relation to‘mainstream’ genres and hence are considered peripheral within specific markets. Furthermore, we recognise the ways in which digital and internet technologies can break down traditional barriers between the centre and the periphery and the tensions which may arise as a result of this.

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IASPM UK & Ireland Postgraduate Conference

Popular Music and Crisis
University of Leeds – 4/5 of September 2025

The UK and Ireland Branch of IASPM is delighted to announce the return of the postgraduate conference hosted this year by the University of Leeds. The postgraduate conference offers a chance for PGR/PGT students to share their work in a friendly positive environment and gain feedback on ideas and arguments. These might include a PhD chapter, an overview of research thesis or other work in progress. Postgraduate contributions will be accompanied by a series of workshops to develop insights into publishing and to explore career progression both inside and outside of academia.
The conference is open to all postgraduate students studying within (or creating work that supports) the field of popular music studies, and the proposed theme for 2025 is Popular Music and Crisis. All those submitting abstracts must be current MA, MRes or PhD researchers. Submissions are not limited by author location; however, all those accepted to present must already be or willing to become IASPM members in time for the conference. There will be no conference fee.

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Peripheries, Margins, and Ambiguities across Borders in SouthEast Asian Popular Music

IASPM-SEA 2025: National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
Dates: 6 – 8 August 2025

Tides of continued globalisation bring with it condensations of time and space that brought together previously separated and isolated cultures and communities. Whether it be by movements of people through migration, trade and voyages or by movements of objects and ideas through exchange, media or the internet – the question inevitably arises: can culture be owned by any community, nation or group? As cultures and people collide in unpredictable, asymmetric and chaotic ways, power dynamics emerge and offer some the opportunity to spread their culture further while threatening some with erasure, forcing communities to find new ways of integrating Into this connected world. As these varying power shifts and dynamics continue to play out in these regions, one asks how popular music highlighted the blurring, configuring and (un)marking of borders and boundaries in SouthEast Asia and beyond.

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2025 PopCon/IASPM-US Joint Conference

March 13-16, 2025
University of Southern California

BABY, IT’S A LOOK
Pop Music, Fashion, and Style at the Edge
Proposals Due: Friday, November 15th, 2024

There’s an enduring relationship between popular music, style, and fashion. As an example, in the past five years, the cowboy hat has once again gone viral, after figures like Gene Autry and Herb Jeffries helped make it a country music staple many decades ago. Iconic album covers, visual albums, music videos, and platform visualizers use looks to tell the story of the music, while fashion runways from Paris to Rio de Janeiro to Johannesburg embrace pop music to stage the fantasy of a designer’s vision. Earlier connections between pop music, fashion, and style range from the likes of Josephine Baker and her banana skirt to Billie Holiday’s gardenia hair pin, to the Beatles’ mop-top haircuts, to the 70s glitter and glam of groups like Queen and Labelle, to the activist traditional attire and make up of Nigeria’s Fela Kuti and Lagos 70. Pop musicians design fashion and streetwear collections, and pop music genres produce all kinds of subcultural media and other alternative means of expression through street style and beyond.

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Musical Translations & Transformations

International Association for the Study of Popular Music – Australia-Aotearoa/New Zealand
2024 Branch Conference

Dates: Dec 4-6, 2024
Hosts: Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University and Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington
Venue: Massey University Pukeahu Campus, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa.
Local Organising Committee: Catherine Hoad, Geoff Stahl, Kimberly Cannady, Oli Wilson

Those who engage with music-making—as teachers, researchers, practitioners, and critics— transform, translate and integrate popular music practices and scholarship across varied contexts. This can be a deliberate political act, taking the form of activism, resistance, negotiation or advocacy. This transformation and translation is also an increasing characteristic within academic research contexts, whereby researchers may be encouraged and/or expected to demonstrate forms of impact and engagement across different communities, sectors, platforms or spaces.

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Building Collective Futures: Communities Thriving Through Music

IASPM Canada Annual Conference 2024: Call for Papers
University of Regina: Regina, Saskatchewan
September 27-29, 2024
Submission deadline: 1 April, 2024

Submit proposals through: https://forms.gle/qVgRUoGyF1frMcX98

We live in a time of uncertainty: multiple theatres of war and conflict, refugee movements across the globe, rampant technological change, political polarization, cultural upheaval, and a global climate crisis threaten individual and collective futures at every turn. At this unprecedented point in time, how can we envision and build thriving, alternative futures? And for whom? Does Canada have a special place in all of this: how do we transition from the inequities of our past relationships (to Indigenous populations and to the earth) to building respectful, inclusive, and sustainable futures? What role(s) does popular music play in such projects? Is it sometimes, also, a part of the problem? How does digitality help or hinder efforts to elevate humanity through musicking? How do new methodologies provide insight in changing times? How are musicians working collectively to build thriving futures?

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Metadata: Popular Music and its Metamorphoses

The German-speaking branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music is pleased to announce its biennial conference, which will take place at the University of Zurich from 07-09 November 2024.

In recent years, the term metadata has evolved from a technical IT term to a commonplace and buzzword referring to fundamental cultural semantics and technological dynamics of the present – also and particularly regarding popular music. In the context of digital systems, machine learning (AI), ubiquitous internet availability in the global North, streaming possibilities, etc., “data about data” and the labelling of other data are of considerable importance for the infrastructures of popular music. At the same time, they also affect the production side because genre boundaries and other conventions are shifting – and act as a heuristic starting point for attempts to intellectually explore and criticise respective processes. Streaming services and their music recommendation algorithms are a prime example for the current significance of metadata. Musicologists and scholars of cultural studies have recently increasingly studied such digital systems and their effects. Both ethnographically and using quantitative methods, substantial insights have been gained into the technical (infra)structures, ideologies, and redistribution effects in the environment of platform capitalism – although many (research) questions remain unanswered.

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Place, Perspective and Popular Music

Venue: International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University
Date: 4-6 September 2024
Format: In-person

Theme: Place, Perspective and Popular Music

For this meeting of the UK and Ireland branch of IASPM, we invite colleagues to consider the fruitful relationships between music, place and perspective. Our use of these terms is intended to encourage discussion around how, where and when we situate our work in the broad discipline (and multiple subdisciplines) of popular music studies as we understand it here and now as well as then and there.

Place is physically located, for example in the spaces and places it represents, in the locations it emerges from and travels to, and in the material aspects of live music ‘ecologies’ – relations between venues, transport routes and their polities, the physical spaces in which recorded music is produced – institutional and domestic). Place is also imagined – both backwards (through nostalgia, tradition and memory) and forwards (through planning, urban and rural policies, ‘placemaking’, cultural initiatives).

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Human and More-than-Human Entanglements:  Popular Music Performance, Education, and Technologies

Location: Bansomdejchaopraya Rajabhat University, Thailand
Dates: 25-27 July 2024
Organisers: International Association for the Study of Popular Music – Southeast Asia and Inter-Asia Popular Music Studies Group

Currently, there is a wealth of research on how humans engage with each other in popular music. However, less has been explored in popular music studies regarding interactions with non-human or more-than-human entities. The more-than-human is understood as one that is both internally and externally experienced, with an emphasis on positionality within and beyond the human body. In music studies, explorations of the more-than-human can be observed in the growing interdisciplinary fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, ecomusicology and multispecies ethnography (Allen, 2013; Titon, 2013; Allen & Dawe, 2016) – especially that of indigenous sonic worlds, traditional music, and current discourses on virtual world(s). As such, this call poses the following query: How does Southeast Asian popular music directly deal with more-than-human relationships as a fundamental part of being in the world alongside producing and performing strategies of place-making and musicking?

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Diversity in Popular Music Spheres

IASPM-Australia/New Zealand
University of Auckland and Wintec | Te Pūkenga
Tāmaki-Makaurau (Auckland) and Kirkiriroa (Hamilton), Aotearoa
5-8 December 2023

Popular music has long existed as a space for the sharing and fostering of marginalised voices and stories, despite its equal position as a hegemonic economic and cultural tool of capitalism and Western imperialism. This conference invites papers on popular music and popular music studies that consider or celebrate aspects of non-mainstream politics, identities, creatives and practices; as well as interrogating the power structures related to our field that emerge from patriarchal white, cisgender, heterosexual and ableist ideologies and values. We especially look for work around indigenous studies, gender and queer studies, disability studies and colonialism or any other intersectional perspectives, in relation to any aspect of popular music consumption, production and people.

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