Popular Culture Association of Canada (PCAC) 6th Annual Conference

In association with McGill Institute for the Study of Canada
May 12-14, 2016

The sixth Annual Conference of the Popular Culture Association of Canada will be held in Montreal, Canada from Thursday, May 12 to Saturday, May 14, 2016.

We invite proposals for papers and/or panels on theories of popular culture, research methods in popular culture, the teaching of popular culture, forms and genres of popular culture, and any epiphenomena of popular culture, past or present. We also invite presentation and exhibition proposals from visual and multimedia artists whose work engages with popular culture.

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Dark Leisure and Music Symposium

16th September 2016
Leeds Beckett University
Headingley Campus, Leeds, West Yorkshire, UK

Deadline for submissions: 15th May 2016

‘Dark Leisure and Music’ is an interdisciplinary symposium, hosted by Leeds Beckett University, Centre for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, that aims to address issues related to dark leisure research and encourage dark leisure scholarship in music. Dark leisure may be defined as leisure activity that sits on the fringes of modern society tastes, and activity that rejects the mainstream. Around the turn of the century, Chris Rojek started looking at dark leisure as ‘deviant’ and chose to interpret this type of leisure mostly as detrimental to the individual, in line with criminological approaches. While dark leisure has been investigated by criminologists and psychologists as abnormal behaviour, recent scholarship in this area such as the works of Karl Spracklen, Philip Stone, and D. J. Williams has shown the need to take dark leisure from a different moral perspective than previous research. Moreover, this type of leisure has been scarcely explored in relation to music cultures. Music worlds ‘on the edge’ could be important spaces for dark leisure activity which have Habermasian communicative rationality at heart; and in effect, they could provide essential channels for performing liminal identities.
We invite submissions addressing following issues and others:

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Music, Health and Wellbeing: African Perspectives

Special Issue of the Legon Journal of the Humanities (LJH)

Knowledge about the relationship between music, health and wellbeing is probably as old as humanity itself. Ritual specialists across the African continent and elsewhere have been making use of the therapeutic and curative potential of music and dance for millennia, just as ordinary people have used song, dance and play to enhance individual and collective wellbeing. Various philosophers have tried to come to terms with the healing powers of the performing arts, emphasising the close connection between art and human nature. More recent research in musicology, dance and performance studies, psychology, neuroscience, and medicine – to mention but a few of the relevant fields – has added much to our understanding of the socio-cultural, psychological as well as biological foundations of human-music interaction, shedding light on the influence of music on affective behaviour and our basic brain chemistry. Against this backdrop, music, dance and related art forms are increasingly employed in both informal and formal therapeutic settings to treat illness, alleviate pain, cure mental disorders and, more generally, to promote wellbeing.
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Hip-Hop Activism and Representational Politics

Proposed Special Issue for Journal of World Popular Music
Guest Editors: Adam Haupt, H. Samy Alim & Quentin Williams

Hip-hop has mixed and sampled languages, dialects, styles, sounds, and media from diverse sources and localities. Beyond its ability to articulate resistance to hegemonic discourses and practices, it has also been able to support activism for positive social change – from activism for the upliftment of youth in post-apartheid South Africa to hip- hop activism in Palestine

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Sound Thought 2016

Dialogues: Sound and Music across the Arts
Centre for Contemporary Arts
March 30th – April 1st, 2016

Sound Thought, the University of Glasgow’s annual postgraduate conference and concert festival, will exhibit the work of researchers and contemporary practitioners exploring the intersections of music, sound, and other artistic genres.

This year’s festival, “Dialogues”, will take place between 30 March and 1 April 2016, primarily at Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, and at select other performance venues throughout the city. This year’s festival is being programmed in collaboration with GLEAM (Glasgow Audiovisual and Electronic Media), LUX Scotland, the Pipe Factory, and the Red Note Ensemble.
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Corrupting Desires! Technique, Performance and Control

We are currently accepting submissions for Issue 2 of Cesura//Acceso, to be published in June 2016.

We want to think about how music is made and experienced – revealing limits, exclusions, desires, strategies, optimism and pessimism. Frustrations, constraints and manipulations of makers and listeners often condition the ways we can feel or think through our engagements with music. We want to prise these contradictions in music open, revealing some of its fractures, as well as its generative and emancipatory possibilities. Some of these might be related to:

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Occupied! Popular music, capital, state and society

In the times of privatization, regulation and bureaucratization, the main problem, regarding activities related to music, is who controls music in terms of its digital sharing, international free-trade and diminishing power of society in shrinking nation-states.

The main streams and potential topics of the proposed conference, though not exclusively, are:

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Classical Music ‘Hyper-Production’ and Practice-As-Research Conference

30th Jan. 2016

As the culmination to the AHRC funded project on Classical Music ‘Hyper-Production’ and Practice-As-Research, are hosting a combined live/online conference which will include live panel discussions from leading record producers, sound engineers, performers and composers, streamed online from London College of Music, University of West London.

The online conference comprises a series of peer reviewed online paper presentations and a blog. The paper presentations will take the form of a 3000 word text contribution, a 20 minute video presentation, or a slide show with spoken commentary. The blog-based panel discussions will be led by the invited speakers who will respond to the questions and comments of
the online participants.

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Mysterious Ways: U2 and Religion

Bloomsbury Studies in Religion and Popular Music
Edited by Scott Calhoun

I invite proposals for chapters in an edited collection with an interdisciplinary focus on U2 and religion for Bloomsbury’s series on Religion and Popular Music. U2’s art, inclusive of its songs, videos, live concerts, concert films, graphic design, live staging and production design, performance visuals, material artifacts, and activism, has long sought to investigate and present the human experience as also a religious endeavor, with metaphysical and physical concerns, and as such U2’s art is various, extensive, and culturally engaged.
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Resonancias – Musical Research Journal

Issue 38 (June 2016)
Guest editor: Víctor Rondón.

The journal Resonancias, published by the Music Institute at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile’s Faculty of Arts, invites specialists in musical research and/or related disciplines to send articles of their authorship presenting unpublished and relevant contributions in their areas. Articles written in Spanish, Portuguese and English will be accepted.

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