EUPOP 2025: Europe – United in Diversity?

Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, France, July 3rd – 5th, 2025.
Deadline: March 14th, 2025

Individual paper and panel contributions are welcomed for the twelfth annual international conference of the European Popular Culture Association (EPCA), to be held at Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris, France, July 3rd – 5th, 2025.

The overarching theme of the conference will be United in Diversity, echoing the official motto of the European Union. Questions to be addressed will include: how is diversity represented, contested, and reframed within European popular culture? And how is European integration reflected in the production of popular culture, past and present? In addition to this theme, EUPOP 2025 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 popular culture borders, politics, forms of propaganda and influencing, and methodological framings within cross-disciplinary thinking.

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Neither Factory Records nor Madchester: Rethinking Manchester’s Musical and Subcultural Histories

A two-day international conference
Thursday 19th and Friday 20th June 2025
Manchester Metropolitan University

Cities tell stories about themselves. Manchester likes to tell a story about itself that’s often summed up in the alleged words of Tony Wilson, founder of post-punk label Factory Records: ‘We do things differently here’.

But do we really?

Recent research (Rose, 2024) suggests that Manchester might not be as much an exception as it is an illustration of broader urban trends. The city’s vibrant cultural legacy has played an important role in shaping its identity and has been used as a form of ‘place marketing,’ celebrating its creative spirit and contributing to its growth. Popular music and subculture have been key elements of this narrative. Yet in this process, popular music and subcultures often suffer. Certain people get to tell their stories; others don’t. Certain stories are told and retold and others forgotten. Even the stories we do hear become homogenised, easily digested clichés of friendly Northerners and historical firsts. When some stories dominate, others may fade or remain untold. Even the narratives we celebrate are often simplified and mythologised, focusing on familiar themes and collective historical milestones.

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Sounds of Fascism: Media, Practices, Imagination

Universty of Bonn, September 24-26, 2025.

The word “fascism” designates a political category with a disputed historical definition, as so-called “fascist” regimes and movements from the end of the First World War to the present day can differ widely in their forms and actions. Stanley Payne describes those of interwar Europe using a wide range of criteria that specify their ideology, aesthetics, organization and enemies (Payne 1980). For Roger Griffin, who extends his study to post-World War II movements, their fundamental and common characteristic is to be palingenetic ultra-nationalist political projects (Griffin 1991). However, this proposal for a consensual, root definition has not put an end to historiographical (Costa Pinto 2011; Costa Pinto & Kallis 2014) or political debates, as shown by the latest polemics concerning Trump’s indentification with fascism (Zerofsky 2024). Considering the central role sound plays in the mediation of politics, in political practices, and as a propaganda instrument, how could its study contribute to this debate and help us define fascism?

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Innovation In Music 2025

Innovation In Music 2025
Bath Spa University, Bath UK
13-15 June 2025

Please forward to interested parties in your networks.

Principal theme: New Beginnings: From ‘Tabula Rasa’ to ‘Rip It Up And Start Again’

Across the musical spectrum, from Arvo Pärt to Orange Juice, starting from zero is a common occurrence in the world of music.

Whether we’re starting with a blank slate, writing the rules over again, making it up as we go along, or coming up with a grand plan, the history of music is also a history of innovation. How often do we get the chance to build something exactly the way we want it, to make all those fine-grained adjustments that will make a project just right? The perfectly structured track, the perfectly balanced mix, the perfectly designed and executed performance. The new piece of technology that does exactly what we designed it to do.

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Revisiting resistance in mainstream music

Call for Paper for the 56^th Conference of the French Association of American Studies

General theme of the conference: “Resistance”

Title of the popular music panel: “Revisiting resistance in mainstream music”

The conference will be held at Université de Picardie Jules Verne, on May 20-23 2025.

From the 1970s onwards, under the impetus of the subcultural studies developed by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, many forms of popular music (rock, punk, rap, reggae, afrobeat, etc.) were seen as symbolic expressions of resistance to authority in all its forms, from political power to the capitalist system, via the military, school, the family, patriarchy, and so on. For George Melly, Dick Hebdige, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson and many others, by hijacking the products of the culture industry, music lovers were enacting “rituals of resistance” through which they affirmed their individuality and autonomy.

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Digital Futures for Chinese Music

28th CHIME International Conference, 4–8 July 2025
CHIME: Worldwide Platform for Chinese Music (https://www.chimemusic.net)
University College Cork, Cork, Ireland

In this conference we focus on the various ways new media (digital media especially) provide spaces for preserving, creating, playing, sharing, teaching, or discussing music, and the ways these spaces are impacting what musicians, culture bearers, and others do in the musical part of their lives. Prospective participants are encouraged to submit proposals that resonate with this theme. However, presentations of any new research in the broad area of Chinese music studies are also welcome, whether these engage with the theme or not.

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Timbre and Orchestration in Popular Song

June 5–7, 2025, McGill University, Montreal QC, Canada

Timbre and orchestration are essential aspects of musical experience in any culture or style. They enable us to effortlessly identify different genres of music and are particularly important in popular musics. This centrality is reflected in Timbre and Orchestration in Popular Song (TOPS), a three-day conference hosted by McGill University’s Schulich School of Music and the ACTOR (Analysis, Creation and Teaching of Orchestration) Partnership. The conference convenes scholars, producers, performers, and audiences of popular music for keynote lectures, workshops, posters, and papers, united under the theme of how timbre and orchestration give rise to critical and analytical accounts of genre, identity, performance, production, and perception.

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Song, Stage and Screen 2025

Meet Us in the Middle
June 25-28, 2025
Hosted by the College of Communication at DePaul University

Song, Stage and Screen 2025 will convene in Chicago, Illinois, at DePaul University’s College of Communication from June 25-28, 2025. Sometimes referred to as the “Second City” or “Heart of America,” Chicago is a vital (and often unsung) incubator for musical theater, dance, and opera productions.

The location of this year’s conference invites us to contemplate the notion of “the middle,” and to suggest ways that “middles” inform the creation, circulation, consumption and study of musical theater. In recent years, scholars in musical theater studies and adjacent fields have demonstrated that “middlegrounds” can be a robust site for analysis. Stacy Wolf and Jake Johnson have directed our attention to the existence and importance of musical theater in the “middle” of the United States, while Derek Miller has encouraged study of “average” commercial productions and theater careers that are neither especially glorious nor terrible, but that ultimately drive the industry. Colleen Rua has addressed how musicals like West Side Story and In the Heights portray quotidian aspects of Latinx life, while Koritha Mitchell has argued that low or fair-to-middling standards enable and elevate white mediocrity.

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Music and Mediation

Conference at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide
9-10 June 2025

Keynote speaker: Naomi Sunderland, Director, Creative Arts Research Institute, Griffith University
Deadline for abstracts: Monday 16 December 2024

Mediation, in all its senses, from transmission to conflict resolution, is particularly relevant in times of technological innovation, sustainability challenges, forced displacement and struggles for equality or survival. This conference, generously supported by the Musicological Society of Australia (MSA), is concerned with the ways music and the study of music may contribute to the many theories and practices around mediation.

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