Teaching Popular Music Studies: Pedagogy and Curriculum

American Musicological Society Popular Music Study Group
Submission deadline: February 21, 2023
Conference Dates: November 9–12, 2023, Denver, CO
Keynote Speaker: TBD

Now, decades after the founding of popular music studies and the new musicology debates, (almost) no one questions popular music’s place in our curricula. But what exact part does popular music play in the curriculum?

At a moment where many departments are revising program requirements and course offerings with the aim to diversify and decolonize the curriculum, popular music offers its own solutions and challenges. For example: Popular music may already be an antidote to the elitism of Western classical music, but the ubiquitous “History of Rock” and “History of Jazz” classes also threaten to calcify into canonic lineages of great men. In our curricula, popular music classes (alongside world music) present the greatest diversity of musicians of color, queer artists, and working-class audiences, yet most popular music textbooks rarely go beyond the borders of the US and the UK.

How might we identify and solve such challenges? What might popular music studies learn from its own pedagogical past? What pedagogies might popular music studies learn from or teach other subdisciplines of musicology?

The Popular Music Study Group seeks proposals for a special session at AMS for papers that explore topics related (but not limited) to:

• Histories of popular music studies in the curriculum
• Decolonial, anti-racist, and queer pedagogies
• Genre, canons, and national frameworks
• Intersections of musicology and performance in pedagogy and the curriculum
• Technology and popular music pedagogy
• Public musicology and community-oriented teaching
• Innovative pedagogical approaches and course design

The session format allows each speaker 10–15 minutes for presentation, followed by a joint Q&A for the entire panel. Send proposals of no more than 300 words as a Word document to mikkel.vad -at- bucknell.edu. In your email, please include your name, affiliation (if any), and any audio, visual, or other needs for the presentation.

for more information see: https://amspop.wordpress.com/2023/01/20/call-for-papers-pmsg-panel-session-ams-2023