Big Sounds from Small Places

IASPM Canada Annual Conference 2021 Call For Papers
Virtual Conference
7 – 18 June 2021

Submission Deadline: 15 January 2021

As we enter into a new decade it’s apt to question our place in the world. Almost sixty years ago, Marshall McLuhan notably coined the term Global Village to refer to the global spread of media content and consumption, and yet Canada still struggles with its position in the world as an imposing landmass with a relatively small population, and how that influences where and how its cultural texts are encountered. This conference seeks to address the concept of voice and sound as tied to space and place, in the broadest sense. In regards to popular music in Canada, we have established a strong identity, but one that is often defined in opposition to our more vocal neighbours to the South. As we continuously define and redefine Canadian cultural identity, and cultural outputs, this conference questions how our musical landscape has historically adapted, and will continue to adapt, to an increasingly globalized environment.

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“Climates of Popular Music”, 21st Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music

The most pressing issue for humanity in the 21st century is global climate, and thus IASPM’s 21st Conference turns its attention towards this subject. Whereas our 20th anniversary conference considered where we have been, we now ask where we are now, what we are doing as a species, and what impact it has on our communities and our world. On a planet increasingly interconnected by a dizzying array of media channels, such a discussion has to be broadly framed. Our planet’s climate is impacted by numerous forms of human activity, including those that are individual, personal, local, communal, institutional, commercial, corporate, cultural, political, and international. This conference invites presentations that ask how popular music relates to our climate, where climate relates to any part of the totality of surrounding conditions and circumstances affecting growth or development. By “climate,” we intend to include a range of definitions, including ecological climate, political climates, socio-political climates, and contextual and individuated climates. We ask presenters to consider the impacts of activities related to popular music and its cultures on variously defined climates, and the impacts of changing or changed climates on different popular music and its contexts.

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IASPM UK&I London Calling Conference

IMPORTANT INFO FOR THOSE PLANNING TO ATTEND THE ONLINE CONFERENCE:

1. If you haven’t registered on Eventbrite by 5pm UK time on Monday 18th May (Click Here To Register) we can’t guarantee we can process you in time for the first keynote on Tuesday with Mykaell Riley – although you will still be able to watch it on the website – just not participate in the discussion. You can continue to register after that and we will process people as quickly as we can.
2. On Tuesday morning we will email everyone who has registered with the conference login details. People who register later will be emailed separately.
3. We can only let 100 people into the keynote Zoom sessions but you can also watch the session live on the website and use the comments section to ask questions. (There are nearly 200 people registered at the moment and still rising). Details of the ‘door policy’ for the Zoom session will be announced in the login email on Tuesday morning.
4. Every week there will be some streamed performances after the keynote and, for the most part, they are musicians without other income so please support them by contributing something through the PayPal.Me links under the YouTube Live screens on the website.

The website for the event is here: https://london-calling-iaspm2020.com

Regional experiences and external influences: reclaiming identities by popular music in the digital era

Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń and International Association for the Study of Popular Music
Toruń, Poland June 18-20, 2020

Conference website: https://iaspm2020torun.wixsite.com/website

The main objective of the conference is to exchange the experiences of studying popular music regional scenes. Such panorama tends to functionally and structurally reflect the specific and diversified character of cultural regionalism itself, including music and its social functions. We shall examine local popular music scenes in three varied but overlapping perspectives located mainly in the fields of musicology, sociology, anthropology, literary studies, cultural studies, political science, but we do not limit the academic areas of research. Thus, the experts of the enumerated fields covering the research on popular music are welcome.

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Transformational POP

Transitions, Breaks, and Crises in Popular Music (Studies)
4th Biennial IASPM D-A-CH Conference, 22–24 October 2020

Paderborn University/Germany, Faculty of Humanities and Arts, Department of Music – Popular Music and Media

Organizational Committee: IASPM D-A-CH Executive Committee and Advisory Board +  Jun.-Prof. Dr. Beate Flath, Prof. Dr. Christoph Jacke, Manuel Troike (Local hosts)

Pop music cultures, in their entire breadth, are seismographs of social, political, economic, ecological, media, artistic, and technological transformations. In and through them, fields of tensions, disruptions, and lines of conflict become not only visible, audible and perceptible, but also communicable and thus, negotiable. Economic and ecological crises, social structural changes, political shifts, communicative-media discourses, atmospheric moods, and disturbances of the most diverse kind cannot be appreciated in isolation from specific sounds, performances, lyrics, images, stars, genres, etc. Therefore, these are always changing in the process: pop music cultures transform and are themselves transformed. “Pop is transformational, always. It is a dynamic movement in which cultural materials and its social environments mutually reshape each other, crossing previously fixed boundaries: class boundaries, ethnic boundaries or cultural boundaries [own translation].“ (Diedrich Diederichsen, Pop – deskriptiv, normativ, emphatisch (1996). In: Charis Goer, Stefan Greif, Christoph Jacke (Eds.): Texte zur Theorie des Pop, 2013: 188)

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