Peripheries, Margins, and Ambiguities across Borders in SouthEast Asian Popular Music

IASPM-SEA 2025: National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
Dates: 6 – 8 August 2025

Tides of continued globalisation bring with it condensations of time and space that brought together previously separated and isolated cultures and communities. Whether it be by movements of people through migration, trade and voyages or by movements of objects and ideas through exchange, media or the internet – the question inevitably arises: can culture be owned by any community, nation or group? As cultures and people collide in unpredictable, asymmetric and chaotic ways, power dynamics emerge and offer some the opportunity to spread their culture further while threatening some with erasure, forcing communities to find new ways of integrating Into this connected world. As these varying power shifts and dynamics continue to play out in these regions, one asks how popular music highlighted the blurring, configuring and (un)marking of borders and boundaries in SouthEast Asia and beyond.

This conference is organised around resonations between Southeast Asian and Taiwanese

popular music — SouthEast Asian popular music. As waves of globalisation continue to crash on the shores of our lives, the reception, production and circulation of popular musics are shaped and moulded by the new centres, peripheries, margins, and hinter/borderlands that these currents create. These currents also come with changing and novel economic, cultural, and political forces that shape the way we receive, interact with and understand popular music. How do cultural encounter spaces or contact zones hybridise musical forms where global influences, colonial histories and local traditions converge? In what ways do contemporary and past listening practices catalyse mediations of power dynamics between dominant centres, frontiers and margins? Where and how can we see SouthEast Asian popular music traverse the hierarchies of centre and margin through commodification and rebranding? Who are the privileged and marginalised voices in negotiations of difference on the socialities engendered by music through forces of inclusion, change, and exclusion? We invite you to contribute voices and stories related to these themes and share them with all of us in Taiwan, in hope of finding new ways to turn and face these changes.

Suggested themes for this conference (but not limited to) are the following:

• Identity and Gender and/or Sexuality in Music and Spaces
• Local Music Commodification and Globalization
• Role of Media and Technology
• The Contact Zone and Cultural Hybridization
• Redefinition of Centres and Peripheries
• Representation and Marginalization
• Music as Accommodation and Resistance
• Regional Soundscapes: Power and Aurality
• Glocalised Musicking
• Other New Research

All proposals are subject to peer review. Individual papers will consist of a 20-minute presentation followed by a 10-minute question and answer portion, while organised panels will be given a total of 90–120 minutes (3–4 papers) and 120–150 minutes (4–5 papers). We also welcome Performance lectures, poster presentations, and video screenings. Proposals should include full name(s), affiliation(s), and contact details for presenter(s), and an abstract of no more than 300 words. For organised panels, please submit an overarching panel abstract and individual abstracts.

The deadline for submission is Saturday, 15 March, 2025. Please submit your abstract proposal to the link: https://forms.gle/JbHp1zUvXYePg5Ei9

Authors will be notified of their acceptance in April. A preliminary conference program and details on conference registration and accommodations will be released in May. The Local Arrangements Committee will announce the conference fee in due time.

For further inquiries, please contact [email protected].