A statement of support for the School of Music at Cardiff University

The Executive Committee of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music’s UK & Ireland Branch would like to offer our support to the School of Music at Cardiff University and to register our opposition to its proposed closure.

Cardiff University has announced the start of a consultation whose proposals, if realised, would entail the closure of the School of Music by the end of 2030.  With 234 students Cardiff is the largest university School of Music in Wales and one of the largest in the UK.  Staff and students were given less than 24 hours’ notice of the news, and were offered no opportunity to challenge its evidential basis or put forward counterproposals.

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Special Issue of Rock Music Studies

Rock in South America: Argentina, Chile, and Peru

Guest Editors:
César Albornoz, Pontificia Universidad Católica, Chile.
Lisa Di Cione, Universidad de Buenos Aires; Universidad Nacional Arturo Jauretche; Instituto Nacional de Musicología “Carlos Vega”, Argentina.
Sergio Pisfil, Universidad Peruana de Ciencias Aplicadas, Perú.

Contact: [email protected]

Rock Music Studies invites article proposals for a special issue exploring the unique characteristics of rock music written, produced, and performed in South America, with a particular focus on music created in Argentina, Chile, and Peru from the second half of the 20th century to the present.

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Performativity(ies) of Memory(ies) Interdisciplinary Conference

Performativity(ies) of Memory(ies) Interdisciplinary Conference
23-24 October 2025
School of Education
Polytechnic Institute of Viana do Castelo
Viana do Castelo, Portugal

The Performativity(ies) of Memory(ies) Interdisciplinary Conference is organized by the School of Education of the Polytechnic Institute of Viana do Castelo and by the Research Institute for Design Media and Culture (ID+) in cooperation with the Polytechnic University of Cávado and Ave. 

About the event

The Performativity(ies) of Memory(ies) Interdisciplinary Conference aims to address the role of memory in contemporary creation by discussing:
– the process of creation and its relationship to memory work;
– memory as a territory under construction (bodies, texts, sounds, images, narratives) through artistic research; and
– the politics of memory in today’s societies and new forms of creation.
The objective of the conference is twofold: firstly, to convene a diverse range of interdisciplinary perspectives; and secondly, to bring together artists whose creative approaches bring their research practice closer to memory.

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Ethnomusicology Ireland

Ethnomusicology Ireland is the open-access, online, and peer-reviewed journal of ICTMD Ireland. We are now accepting contributions for the planned publication of EI 11 in 2026. For this issue, EI welcomes new research on the topic of broadcasting music and dance (contributions addressing any form of traditional or new media broadcasting are encouraged). We are particularly interested in contributions that address one or more of the following themes:

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Progressive Rock Today: Music, People, Politics

The 7th Biennial International Conference of the Progect Network for the Study of Progressive Rock
May 27-29 2026
Université de Strasbourg (FRANCE)

What is progressive rock today, and what is its relationship to its half-century-plus-long history? What are the connections between music, audiences, and cultural industries in the world of progressive rock? Knowing that it is impossible to answer these questions with simple formulas or definitions, we look forward to welcoming at the University of Strasbourg researchers from a variety of disciplines – musicology, social sciences, political science, economics, cultural studies, philology and so on – who can provide new perspectives to illustrate the countless articulations of the “prog phenomenon.”

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2025 IASPM Book Prize

A public award will be given by IASPM for outstanding first books by a single author on popular music, in the categories of English and any other language, at the 2025 IASPM Conference in Paris, from July 7-11, 2025.

Nominations are invited from IASPM members for books they consider to be possible contenders for the award. Authors nominated should preferably already be members of IASPM or must become members of IASPM after being nominated to be eligible. Send your nominations to both of the Chairs of the Book Prize Jury, Daniel Fredriksson ([email protected]) and Beatriz Goubert ([email protected]), by March 31st at the latest.

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Popular Music and/as Resistance

AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting – Minneapolis, MN – 6-9 November 2025
Application Deadline: 7 March 2025

The relationship between popular music and politics is louder than ever. At the 2025 Super Bowl halftime performance, an ostensibly politically neutral platform, Kendrick Lamar offered a socio-economic critique of racial inequity in the United States when his all-Black dancers performed in the shape of the American flag. Similarly, queer pop icon Chappell Roan’s 2025 Grammy acceptance speech took aim at the industry’s failure to offer artists a living wage and pledged $25,000 towards healthcare for developing musicians—a donation matched by Noah Kahan and Charli XCX. Northern Ireland rap group Kneecap also received several accolades at the 2025 BAFTAs despite consistent (and scathing) lyrical indictments of British imperialism and their role in the recent construction of a “Free Palestine” mural in West Belfast. As evidenced by the swell of online discourse in the aftermath of these statements, artists and other cultural intermediaries are never exempt from criticism regarding the limitations of their efforts to combine performance and politics. Still, these same musicians—and by extension, their audiences—are always operating within the constraints of a profit-driven and politics-averse music industry.

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Queer Survival, Organizing, and Worldmaking

Inaugural Summer School of the LGBTQ+ Music Study Group
22nd – 25th July 2025, Humboldt University, Berlin

School’s out for summer, or is it? The LGBTQ+ Music Study Group is excited to announce its inaugural Summer School, to be held from 22nd to 25th July at Humboldt University, Berlin in collaboration with the Emmy Noether research group “Sound System Epistemologies: Knowledge engendered through practice”.

This event will celebrate the rich histories of queer organizing and mutual aid, with a focus on the politics of LGBTQ+ worldmaking. Thinking through the politics of place, we seek to amplify Central and Eastern European queer sonic histories in one of the globe’s so-called “gay havens,” attuning to Berlin’s famously queer electronic dance music and nightlife, though submissions are welcome on any queerly musical encounters.

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Rock Music, Belonging and Citizenship in the English-speaking world (1950s-2020s)

In the first chapter of the Resistance through Rituals volume (1975), Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts essentially approach rock music and its associated “subcultures” in neo-Marxist terms as a mode of cultural resistance of the working class against capitalist hegemony. They view the various rock “subcultures” of their time – the Teddy Boys, the Mods, the Rastas- as vanguards of a renewed class consciousness, heralding emerging forms of political mobilisation that could ultimately pave the way to revolution. While this perspective was of course proved wrong, and in fact was heavily criticized from the start, including by members of Hall et als.’s own Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies group (CCCS), it has remained influential, if only because it construed the academic study of rock music through a socio-political lens, attributing as it did a central place to the question of belonging and citizenship in XXth century liberal democracies.

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Editorial Board & Book Reviews Editor for Popular Music History

We are currently inviting scholars to join the new editorial board of Popular Music History, and we would be delighted if you would consider applying or sharing this opportunity with colleagues.

We are looking for scholars with expertise in popular music or adjacent fields, demonstrated through quality publications, who are interested in actively contributing to the journal’s development. Scholars from any part of the world are welcome, and given the journal’s focus, an interest in historical perspectives on popular music is particularly desirable. We strongly encourage applications from scholars based in the Global South and from underrepresented groups in academia.
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Re­think­ing Mu­sic Her­itage con­fer­ence

Research Institute, Sibelius Academy. The conference addresses the various forms of music heritage and is the closing event of the research project “Diversity of Music Heritage in Finland.”

About the conference

The University of the Arts Helsinki is pleased to announce an international conference on the various forms of music heritage. The conference is the closing event of the research project “Diversity of Music Heritage in Finland”, funded by Kone Foundation in 2023–25. The conference is co-organised by the History Forum and the Seinäjoki Unit of the University of the Arts Helsinki.

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