Music, Research, and Activism II: Solidarities and Urgencies

14–16 May 2025, University of Helsinki

How do music scholars engage with activist research? How are Black feminist and Indigenous perspectives applied in music research? How can music and music research advance equality, equity, human rights, or ecological sustainability? What could music researchers and practitioners do in our contemporary world characterized by climate emergency, ecocide, racism, gender and sexual discrimination, war, conflict, and humanitarian crises? How are solidarities being built and reimagined, and how is urgency present in music and among activists and researchers working with music?

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BFE and RMA Research Students’ Conference 2025

University of Aberdeen
Conference dates: 9^th to 11^th January 2025
Call for Proposals deadline: Friday 13th September 2024

The British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) and Royal Musical Association (RMA) Research Students’ Conference will be hosted by the University of Aberdeen, on 9^th to 11^th January 2025. This will be an in-person event to allow networking and social interaction to take place, and to foster connections across a variety of music sub-disciplines. However, there will be some limited online provision for those participants for whom it would be difficult to attend in person.

If you have any general queries, please contact  [email protected] 

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DC25: Preserving and Archiving Electronic Music and Dance Cultures

DC25 | Dancecult Conference
24–25 January 2025

We are delighted to announce the call for proposals for DC25, a Dancecult Research Network conference to be held at the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, 24–25 January 2025, in cooperation with the Audio Communication Group, Dancecult journal and CTM Festival. DC25 will host participants from the broad interdisciplinary community of research around electronic (dance) music and cultures who will converge, share and celebrate their ongoing research efforts. The conference is also an opportunity for graduate students and senior researchers alike to share insights on the questions of preserving and archiving electronic music and dance cultures. DC25 is a two-day in-person conference, where all presentations will be live streamed.

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Music and Online Cultures in a Changing Platform Ecosystem

International Conference
June 19–21, 2025, Lisbon, Portugal
Deadline: September 30

For around half of the world’s population, it is hard to imagine a day without being online in some way or another. The widespread adoption of internet technologies has ostensibly been in service of improving human connectivity, expression, and health. Yet technology companies face unprecedented criticism for the range of changes that internet platforms have wrought on everyday work and leisure practices. In few domains is this clearer than music.

As digital landscapes have shifted and evolved, music has often been the test subject for industrial change, and music cultures have accordingly negotiated the structures of online platforms. A lively body of scholarly and popular commentary has examined the power inequities, constraints, and affordances of online music platforms. In the mid-2020s, however, the formerly stable ecosystem of social media and streaming platforms is changing according to processes of platform decay.

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Most Wanted: Music Research

Most Wanted: Music Research is a new subconference format of Most Wanted: Music Convention on November 14, 2024 at Kulturbrauerei Berlin as a collaborative format with the GMM and other academic partners. MW:M Research is established as a new arena for encounters between artists, practitioners and researchers. The day will start with the Applied Knowledge Lab initiated by GMM, IMBRA & MW:M. For the afternoon we invite talks, presentations, papers, demos and discursive formats from the areas of music business, music culture, and music tech. Topics are organized in three tracks and may focus on, but are not limited to this year’s conference theme Monetize!

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Music and fascism 33 1/3 Europe

This is a brief and informal call for expressions of interest in contributing a book related to the evolving far-right for the 33 1/3 Europe book series.

Far-right nationalist (or fascist?) parties are rising across Europe. They won big enough in the elections for the European Parliament earlier this month to move the needle in the continent’s most powerful institution in the coming years. The relationship between music and politics cannot be conceived only or primarily in direct and causal terms. The two intersect in various ways—artists are sensitive to aspects of political culture, music is entangled in spaces and counter-spaces of fascism, and affective flows in political culture have a sonic dimension. There’s been a surge of interest in this topic. A research team in Germany and the Netherlands (involving the great Mario Dunkel and Melanie Schiller among others) has produced important research on music in rightwing populism. A CFP for a book titled “The Rising Right” was announced on this list a few days ago.

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Listening to Mainstream Popular Music in Europe: A Snapshot from the Early 2020s

Call for Articles: “Popular Music” Special Issue
Guest Editors: Bernhard Steinbrecher, Ondřej Daniel, and Jakub Machek

This special issue takes a comparative, transnational snapshot of popular music, using the idea of the mainstream to examine prevailing aesthetics, acts, and actors within a particular time and place. Specifically, it focuses on mainstream(ing) processes in Europe at the beginning of the second decade of the century. It explores how popular music’s globally circulating sounds and practices have recently been received, adapted, and negotiated in different European contexts against the backdrop of late modern global capitalism (Taylor et al. 2013, p. viii) and dominant (cross-)local conceptions and ideologies.

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ReSounding Loss: Music, Grief, and Culture

Call for Chapter Proposals

Grief is an emotional response that arises in the wake of a significant loss. While it is often thought of as an individual experience, it can be collectively experienced as well. Grief is closely associated with the death of a person, but it can result from any significant loss, including, for example, the loss of a relationship, a homeland, or a dream for the future. In light of the many losses and potential losses currently facing humanity – from war to climate change, and from extremist politics to mass casualties – a discussion of grief feels both timely and urgent.

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RESONANCE: The Creative Thrust of «Deep Zouk»

2nd INTERNATIONAL COLLOQUIUM ON ZOUK
23-25 October 2024, Lamentin, Martinique, FWI

Caribbean music is a haven of resonance. Martinique and Guadeloupe, the two «nations of Zouk», are also the countries where Deep Zouk was born and from which its aesthetics began to spread. They are, therefore, places of resonance. This concept of «resonance» addressed by the writer Patrick Chamoiseau in Le Vent du Nord in Les Fougères Glacées, is closely linked to the notion of the self-taught episteme. This notion involves learning by oneself and not having a master. It also echoes the Hobbesian Instasis: «Read in yourself». In this perspective, we may believe that the Caribbean self-taught artist, commonly called «Mizisyen lari,» frees himself from all constraints or all rules and that a kind of total freedom of creation governs him, as that of an adventurer marooned on a wasteland, exploring an implex universe of creation. In the case of Zouk, one should note that many singers, singers, and musicians do not come from formal schools or classical music backgrounds. Many of them were formed on the job, participating, here and there, in vocal group or choir experiences.The same goes for the audience-receiver of the dancefloors. Over time, new body movement poetics developed and adapted their relationship to dance rhythm in resonance with the time and sensations of the artist. The aesthetic codes and molds released over the period from 1979 to 1995 (or even today with groups such as Kassav, Zouk Machine, Expérience 7, Taxi Kréol, Kwak, Rubicolor) demonstrate the use of a wide range of sounds, rhythmic, harmonic and melodic, a great diversity of Zouk used by composers. The common point with these large groups is that they follow (in)consciously the call of the drum, the call of the sound of the country hills, the culture of bèlè/bélya communities, the fieldwork songs of plantations, the resonance of ancestral tales, the African trace, the cosmic energy funneled by its profound and multiple vibrations, the sing-drum dynamics, until the emergence of a language suitable to the creation essence of Zouk. Hence, the metalanguage, the codes, and sub-codes of Deep Zouk, which is a reborn, hybrid structure in motion, an ontic agenda allowing unforeseen results, mentioned by Patrick Chamoiseau: «The drum had traveled in the body of these uprooted, its charge of power and sacred had fallen dark in our mixed blood»,.

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4th Conference of the International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ)

International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ)
Communities of Practice
October 3-5, 2024
JAM MUSIC LAB Private University for Jazz and Popular Music
Vienna, Austria

The International Network for Artistic Research in Jazz (INARJ) was founded in 2019 in reaction to the increasing relevance of artistic perspectives in the academic discourses in jazz research. INARJ organizes regular symposia as a platform for knowledge exchange and connection between artistic jazz researchers worldwide. The specific focus for the fourth conference is artistic research and communities of practice ranging from geographic communities and the role of place-making and curatorship, networks inside and outside of jazz, communities of pedagogy and education, social communities and marginalized groups, and economic and business communities, to discuss status, strategies, and transformation.

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