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KISMIF Conference 2016

Posted: February 5th, 2016 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on KISMIF Conference 2016

We are pleased to announce the third KISMIF International Conference “Keep It Simple, Make It Fast! (KISMIF) DIY Cultures, Spaces and Places” which will take place in Porto, Portugal, between 18th July and 21st July 2016.

The submission of abstracts for this conference is open to academic researchers working in all areas of sociology, anthropology, history, cultural economics, geography, urban planning, media and cultural studies and cognate disciplines, such as design, illustration, popular music, cinema, visual and performing arts.

This initiative follows the great success of the two first KISMIF Conference editions (held in 2014 and 2015), seeking to voice the will of the many researchers who have sought to promote an annual scientific meeting for the discussion of underground music scenes and do-it-yourself culture at the highest level.

KISMIF Conference 2016 is once again focused on underground music, directing its attention this time towards the analysis of DIY cultures’ relationship to space and places.

Thus, we challenge students, junior and senior teachers/researchers, as well as artists and activists, to come to the KISMIF International Conference and present works which explore the potential of the theoretical and analytical development of the intersection of music scenes, DIY culture and space under a multidimensional and multifaceted vision. We hope with this to enrich the underground scenes and DIY cultures analysis by producing innovative social theory on various spheres and levels, as well as focusing on the role of DIY culture in late modernity.

Indeed, the role of music and DIY cultures is once more an important question – taking place in a world of piecemealed yet ever-present change. The space, spaces, places, borders, zones of DIY music scenes are critical variables in approaching contemporary cultures, their sounds, their practices (artistic, cultural, economic and social), their actors and their contexts. From a postcolonial and glocalized perspective, it is important to consider the changes in artistic and musical practices with an underground and/or oppositional nature in order to draw symbolic boundaries between their operating modalities and those of advanced capitalism. Territorialization and deterritorialization are indelible marks of the artistic and musical scenes in the present; they are related to immediate cosmopolitanisms, to conflicting diasporas, new power relations, gender and ethnicity.

As in previous KISMIF Conferences, it is our intention to welcome reflexive contributions which consider the plurality that DIY cultural practices demonstrate in various cultural, artistic and creative fields and to move beyond music in considering artistic fields like film and video, graffiti and street art, the theater and the performing arts, literature and poetry, radio, programming and editing, graphic design, illustration, cartoon and comics, as well as others.

In 2016, the stimulating scientific KISMIF Conference program will once again be accompanied by a diverse social and cultural program, embodied by a series of artistic events, with special focus on underground music and other artistic expressions. The aim is to provide a unique experience in terms of the DIY cultures present in Portugal, Porto and its unique diasporas. (Check here the social and cultural program of KISMIF Conference 2015.)

The conference will be followed by a summer school entitled “Mappin’ Your Own Underground!” on 22nd July 2015 in Faculty of Arts and Humanities of University of Porto. The summer school will offer an opportunity for all students, including those participating in the conference, to attend specialist master classes and discuss their research in seminars led by top academics in the field.

For more info, visit: http://www.kismifconference.com/en/call-conference-2