Symposium: Music, cities and popular memory: a “very messy cultural archive”?

10-5pm, Friday 29th March 2019 : Solent Spark (TS414), Southampton

Solent Music | So:Music City | Culture, Media, Place @ Solent

The relationship between popular music, cultural memory and the city is currently experiencing renewed attention, both in research and in practice. We invite researchers across the humanities and social sciences to share knowledge, methods and case studies that shed light on their intertwined histories.

The following issues are of particular interest:

• motivations, methods, technologies and ethics of researching, documenting, storing, re-presenting and valuing these histories
• the full range of sites and objects making up the “city as a very messy cultural archive”
• the collective ownership and organisation of urban cultural memory

We welcome contributions from scholars of popular music and consumer culture more broadly, alongside non-music researchers engaged in studies of heritage, memory, museums, libraries and archives. This might include sociologists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, geographers, historians, urbanists and others working on issues of culture in communities, institutions, cities, regions and beyond.

We are also very keen to support contributions from practitioners with no academic affiliation to share experience or professional expertise in any of these areas, especially with relevance to local knowledge. A limited budget is available for those without institutional support available to go towards costs of travel or (where relevant) freelance time.

Contributions are not limited to the traditional academic paper format but should aim to catalyse and facilitate discussion.

Please contact [email protected] with a title, abstract (300 words) and short bio by Friday 1st March 2019.

This event is part of the Southampton as Popular Music Archive research project and funded by Solent’s Research, Innovation and Knowledge Exchange scheme.