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

Horizons of Punk: Punk-Rock Scholarship and its Methodologies

Posted: February 5th, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Horizons of Punk: Punk-Rock Scholarship and its Methodologies

A Collaboration Between Gustave Eiffel University (Laboratoire LISAA) and Punk Scholars Network UK & South Korea
When: 9th June 2023
Where: Auditorium, Georges Perec Library, Gustave Eiffel University, Champs-sur-Marne, France

“The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point […] A person who has no horizon is a man who does not see far enough and hence overvalues what is nearest to him. On the other hand, ‘to have a horizon’ means not being limited to what is nearby, but to being able to see beyond it.” (Gadamer, Truth and Method).

What are the horizons of punk-rock? What are the horizons of punk-rock scholarship? How are these horizons defined, and how do they operate in punk music, culture, and scholarship? As they evolve through time, history, and geography, what commonalities and contradictions emerge?

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The Journal of Beatles Studies

Posted: February 5th, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on The Journal of Beatles Studies

The Journal of Beatles Studies invites submissions for its second issue, to be published in Summer, 2023.

The Journal of Beatles Studies is an open-access, online journal publishing peer-reviewed articles drawn from leading interdisciplinary and international research on the subject of the Beatles encompassing criticism, historical and textual scholarship, legacy and influence.

The journal aims to bridge the gap between the study of the Beatles across disciplines such as musicology, cultural studies, history, sociology, music and creative industries, and fan studies, providing a focal point outlet for research undertaken to the very highest standards from around the world. Without privileging any particular critical approaches, methodologies, or theories, the journal welcomes all contributions that throw light upon the Beatles, their works, world, in their time and through to the present day.

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North American British Music Studies Online Symposium

Posted: February 5th, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on North American British Music Studies Online Symposium

Music and Ideas of the Popular: Reconsidering British Music and Musical Practices
August 10-12, 2023 on Zoom
https://nabmsa.org

The topic of the 2023 biennial online symposium is “Ideas of the Popular in British Music.” Despite the messiness involved in “popular” (or, for that matter, “art”) music, we propose a rethinking of “popular” and “popular culture” in British music, broadly construed, in local and global contexts.

We hope to address the following questions:  How are notions of the “popular” tied to assumptions about gender, race, national belonging, and social status? What values and ideologies are mobilized by the opposition of popular with elite culture? How has popular music been mediated, and how does its mediation shape the politics of space and place, empire and nation? What are the ways in which cultural producers, media makers, and fans have tried to break down the traditional elite / popular dichotomous models? How are all of these ideas discursively legitimated – and challenged (today and / or in the past)? What role has popular music played in British intellectual history, including but not limited to cultural studies thinkers, such as Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, Dick Hebdige, Angela McRobbie, Simon Frith, Paul Gilroy, and Richard Dyer?

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Sonic Ties: Rethinking Communities and Collectives

Posted: February 5th, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Sonic Ties: Rethinking Communities and Collectives

University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna Reichenau/Rax, Austria and online, 26-30 August 2023

Keynote Lectures by
Srđan Atanasovski, Center for Comparative Conflict Studies (CFCCS), Belgrade Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier, University of Alberta

Sumanth Gopinath, University of Minnesota
Ana Hofman, ZRC SAZU Institute of Culture and Memory Studies, Ljubljana

Sound and social relations are tightly interwoven and oftentimes contingent upon each other. ‘Sonic Ties’ offers a lens through which to study the qualities of connection and intersubjectivity that arise through sound. isaScience 2023 invites you to explore ‘Sonic Ties’ as a central mode of sharing communality and experiencing collectivity through music, dance, and other phenomena of performance and cultural expression.

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Vivid Versions: Cover Songs, Contexts, and Subjectivities

Posted: February 5th, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Vivid Versions: Cover Songs, Contexts, and Subjectivities

Edited by Mike Alleyne and Lori Burns

The covering of an iconic song has long been a popular music strategy for an artist’s expression of identity and musical subjectivity. Such song adaptations often entail the traversing of borders that articulate significant contexts for social and musical identities. We summarize these potential contexts in the following list, in no particular order of critical importance:

  1. place and space, history, and politics;
  2. gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, age and ability;
  3. authenticity, authority, and performative agency;
  4. influence, intertextuality, and lineage;
  5. genre, production, and sonic imprint.

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Probing the Borderland: Between Popular Music and Literature

Posted: February 5th, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Probing the Borderland: Between Popular Music and Literature
1-Day Symposium, Friday 9th June 2023 
Hosted by the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France)
(Hybrid event)
 
Abstracts of 200 words should be sent, along with a short biography of no more than 100 words, to Catherine Girodet ([email protected]) and Sylvie Mikowski ([email protected]) by 15th March 2023. Messages of acceptance will be sent by March 29th 2023.

Keywords: popular music, popular song, literature, song-writing, intertextuality, interartistry, aesthetic resonance, intermediality, hybridity, transformative space 

From the troubadour tradition to contemporary folk-blues and rock music, popular music and literature have long intermingled, notably because the popular song combines a musical line and a narrative songtext, hence Antoine Hennion’s formulation of the popular song as a “three minute novel” (Hennion 1983)

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EUPOP 2023: The Darkness Within

Posted: February 5th, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on EUPOP 2023: The Darkness Within

University of Stirling, Scotland, July 3rd – 5th, 2023.
Deadline: 17th March, 2023

Individual paper and panel contributions are welcomed for the tenth annual international conference of the European Popular Culture Association (EPCA), to be held at University of Stirling, Scotland, July 3rd – 5th, 2023.

With the overarching theme of The Darkness Within, EUPOP 2023 will explore European popular culture in all its various forms. This includes, but is by no means limited to, the following topics: European Film (past and present), Television, Music, Costume and Performance, Celebrity, The Body, Fashion, New Media, Popular Literature and Graphic Novels, Queer Studies, Sport, Curation, Digital Culture, the idea of European identity and its relation to popular culture. A special emphasis, this year, will be on topics such as crime fiction, true crime, film and television.

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“You are beautiful, no matter what they say” – Sentimental Ballads in Popular Music

Posted: February 5th, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on “You are beautiful, no matter what they say” – Sentimental Ballads in Popular Music

International Symposium
September 13-14, 2023, University of Siegen, Germany

Getting goosebumps while listening to “I Will Always Love You”, being moved to tears by “Un-Break My Heart”, being carried away by “Beautiful” – the sound of ballads may evoke affective as well as physical responses. Such somatic interactions with popular songs are apparently based on a common ground of cultural production of affect that parallels the cinematic “body genre” of melodrama (Meier 2008).

How are sentimental affects in ballads by, e.g., Whitney Houston, Toni Braxton, and Christina Aguilera produced aesthetically and performatively? How are songs by, for example, Celine Dion, Robbie Williams, or Lana Del Rey contextualized in movies, series, video games, or commercials? How are they visually staged in music videos or live performances? What everyday role can they play for recipients, for example, for mood management via Spotify playlists? Can ballads be political or even used for populist purposes? And to what extent must ballads (and their popularity) also be considered as a means of successful capitalist co- production of feelings and commodities (Illouz 2018)?

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