The Social and Cultural Study of Music: Then and Now 

A Symposium in Honour of John Shepherd

Carleton University, Ottawa, 24–25 Nov. 2017

During the late 1970s and early 80s, an emerging body of literature based in sociology, popular music, feminism, cultural and critical theory began to infiltrate the study of music, challenging the objects and methods of conventional music theory and musicology, on the one hand, and questioning Western classical music as the primary musical text, on the other.  Issues of class, identity, race, gender and sexuality, technology, industry, values and aesthetics came to the fore and popular musics, genres and fandom slowly gained status as legitimate areas of study. Today, these issues continue to inform much writing and theorizing about music but new areas of inquiry – ethnography, music in everyday life, sound studies, music and the moving image, cities and scenes, disability studies, digitalization and others – have added to the increasingly inter-disciplinary character of music as an area of cultural study.

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2017 IASPM Postgraduate Student Conference

Dear colleagues,

I’m delighted to announce the call for papers for the 2017 IASPM UK&I Postgraduate Students’ Conference on the theme ‘Negotiating Popular Music’. This two-day conference takes as its starting point the position that encounters with popular music involve a dialogue between varied forces and agencies. It offers an opportunity for research students to come together to interrogate these myriad interactions with popular music as analysts, makers, tastemakers, and so on.

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‘Imagining Kingston’: A Conference on the Regeneration of a City

November 9-12, 2017

The restoration of old, historic, depressed or derelict quarters of cities is a common feature of social, economic, aesthetic and environmental development strategies around the world.

Restoration and regeneration are often used as the basis to catalyse and to chart pathways for economic growth and renewal, to pioneer new sectors of social and economic endeavours, and to cultivate pride and civic feeling in a people’s existential journey. The scholarship and expertise in this area are growing globally and providing governments/policy makers, investors/entrepreneurs, citizens and various publics with knowledge, advice, training/agential capacity, building facilities and skills for urban renewal, regeneration and a multiplicity of possibilities, including imagining and realizing new exciting urban spatial creations alongside the iconising of spaces.

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Transnational Fields of Production and Consumption

RC14 Sociology of Communication, Knowledge and Culture (host committee)
Language: English

According to Meulemen and Savage (2013: 232), Bourdieu’s work on cultural consumption employs a “Franco-centric” model of cultural hierarchy, and most empirical studies of cultural consumption still focus on nationally-based fields (Meulemen and Savage 2013). This emphasis on the national at the expense of the transnational has been repeated in many analyses of cultural production. For example, many previous Bourdieusian analyses of popular music focus on fields at the local and/or national level of analysis and do not focus on the diasporic and/or transnational character of fields.
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Football, Politics and Popular Culture: 2017 Annual Conference of The Football Collective.

Hosted by the Popular Music and Popular Culture Research Cluster, University of Limerick.

‘The Football Collective’ is a dedicated International network of over 200 academics and practitioners across a range of disciplines (Sociology, Musicology, Business Management, Economics and Finance, Political Science, Gender Studies, History, Social Media and Fan Studies, Corporate Governance etc.). Through sharp analysis and research it has provided a platform for thought provoking critical debate in football studies.

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IASPM Journal 8/1 (2018) –– Gender Politics in the Music Industry

Special Issue Editors: Catherine Strong and Sarah Raine

Gender in music has been considered in terms of performance, genre, and audience cultures, yet gender politics within the music industry itself remains under-researched. Offering an opportunity to engage at the intersection between musical production, the creative industries and gender politics, this call for papers aims to bring together research that considers the gender politics of the music industry itself: of work relationships; the spaces of production; the processes of decision making; the creation of musical experiences in festivals and tours.

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Filming African Music

18 November 2017
Bath Spa University, Newton Park campus

This interdisciplinary study day is a partnership between Bath Spa University, the African Musics Study Group UK branch (AMSG-UK), affiliated to the International Council for Traditional Music, the Afrika Eye Film Festival, Bristol (10-12 November 2017), and the British Forum for Ethnomusicology.

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Symposium for Digital Musicology

1^st September 2017
Senate House W1CE 7HU London UK
http://digitalmusicology.com

Symposium for Digital Musicology is a one day event that aims to bring together scholars from various musicological fields and computer scientists in order to generate a discussion about digital musicology – an interdisciplinary field in which new technologies are applied to musicological research. Digital techniques have been used more often within humanities in fields outside of musicology, for example in palaeography, history, art history, and many others. The field of digital musicology remains an active field with research done by computer scientists and programmers who have built a broad range of tools that could be used by musicologists and ethnomusicologists, but these tools do not usually meet their potential on this side of the research spectrum. These digital tools could both be timesaving and provide opportunities to new methodologies (e.g. big data, timbral analysis, automated transcription, etc.).

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Long Beach Indie International Film, Media and Music Festival

August 30-September 3, 2017
www.longbeachindie.com

Submission Deadline: June 1, 2017

Celebrating global diversity, the Long Beach Indie International Film, Media and Music Festival (August 30-September 3, 2017) is looking for scholars, journalists, and entertainment industry professionals to bring their intellect, art, and energy this year’s Film, Media, and Music Conference.

We invite individual papers and full panels representing any topic (e.g. theory, production, history, criticism, preservation, etc.) related to film, television, gaming, music, virtual and augmented reality, mass communication, digital media, or the entertainment and music industries broadly defined. Read the rest of this entry »

Special Issue on Global Tastes: The Transnational Spread of non-Anglo-American Culture

Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts

Deadline for abstracts: 15 September 2017

Guest editors: Simone Varriale (University of Warwick, UK), Noa Lavie (The Academic College of Tel-Aviv Yaffo, Israel)

Globalization’s cultural effects have gained significant attention in the sociology of culture. Especially from the early 2000s, a growing literature on transnationally-connected cultural sectors has started exploring the asymmetries of economic and symbolic power between ‘centers’ and ‘peripheries’ of cultural production, the role of gatekeepers and organizations in mediating globalization processes, and the limits of cultural imperialism as an exhaustive framework for interpreting cultural globalization. Similarly, consumption studies have started focusing on preferences for globally spread cultural products, suggesting that theories of cultural hybridity need to pay more attention to how class and other inequalities influence practices of appropriation.

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