Ethnomusicology and Policy

British Forum for Ethnomusicology One-day Conference 2015
International Centre for Music Studies (ICMuS), Newcastle University.
Saturday 31st October 2015

Ethnomusicology holds an extended and substantial history of engagement with, and contribution to, public policy. This conference acknowledges that history, and points to the growing role ethnomusicology plays in influencing how public policies are considered, constructed and revised. It emphasises the potentials and challenges in applied ethnomusicology, and encourages further dialogue around how ethnomusicology contributes to the public good.

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Musical and media connectivities: practices, circulation, interactions

Edited by Hélène Laurin & Andréane Morin-Simard

Kinephanos is a bilingual web-based journal. Focusing on questions involving cinema and popular media, Kinephanos encourages interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research. The journal’s primary interests are movies and popular TV series, video games, emerging technologies and fan cultures . The preferred approaches include cinema studies, communication theories, religion sciences, philosophy, cultural studies and media studies.

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Sonic Contestations of Nuclear Power

Noriko Manabe (Princeton) and Jessica Schwartz (UCLA) are preparing the edited volume, Sonic Contestations of Nuclear Power. This work will consist of academic essays or personal testimonials of approximately 5,000 words, as well as creative works. We have already received commitments from a number of notable authors and creators, and we are looking for a few additional essays to round out the volume. Our preliminary table of contents has met with great enthusiasm from a university press. We have also received substantial funding from the Centre for Human Values at Princeton University, which will host a workshop for contributors in late October 2015.

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Transposition: Listening lines, online listening

Issue 6 (2016): Listening lines, online listening

Transposition. Musique et sciences sociales
http://transposition.revues.org/

Coordination: Stéphan-Éloïse Gras et Peter Szendy

Since the 1990s, listening has been the subject of growing interest, in terms of not only its social history, but the related technical media and philosophical aspects. Research such as that presented by James H. Johnson (Listening in Paris, 1996), Peter Szendy (Écoute, une histoire de nos oreilles, 2001), Jean-Luc Nancy (À l’écoute, 2002), Jonathan Sterne (The Audible Past, 2003) and more recently, Martin Kaltenecker (L’Oreille divisée, 2010), Michael Bull (Sound Studies, 2013) and Veit Erlmann (Reason and Resonance, 2014) has given rise to a new field, although it is certainly not a homogenous field that can simply be contained in the category of “sound studies”.

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The Hidden Musicians Revisited

A conference organised by the Music Department at The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
11th-12th January 2016

Open University Professor Ruth Finnegan’s 1989 book The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town has been recognised as a landmark in the study of music and culture, a central concern in Open University Music research. In the preface to the 2007 edition, Finnegan identifies a number of new directions which have opened up since the time of her original study due to methodological and technological advances in the study of music. Her investigation of music-making in Milton Keynes (where the OU is based) focussed on amateur musicians, but there are numerous examples of professional musicians who remain ‘hidden’, perhaps because of biases related to gender, class, race and ethnicity, or owing to trends within musicology.

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Music History and Cosmopolitanism

Fourth Sibelius Academy Symposium on Music History
June 1–3, 2016 at Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts, Helsinki, Finland
http://www.uniarts.fi/en/cosmopol2016

Keynote Speakers (see below for abstracts)
Brigid Cohen, New York University, USA
Mark Everist, University of Southampton, GB
Franco Fabbri, University of Turin, IT

Conference Outline

The Third Sibelius Academy Symposium (2014) took as its theme the questioning of methodological nationalism in music historiography: the kind of historiography that, according to Beck and Sznaider, equates society with national society (“Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences,” 2006: 2). They called, instead, for a methodological cosmopolitanism, an alternative that has gained momentum within musicology, often alongside related concepts: the last two decades have seen increased attention to the conspicuous mobility of works and musicians; to cities as sites of cosmopolitan encounter; and to the transnational and global connections created and exploited by musicians.

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In Praise of Paul Weller…? Reflections on Popular Music Studies

Symposium, Wednesday 23 March 2016
Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research

‘What often passed the post-punk brigade by was Weller’s musical subtlety: the allusions to Motown and Stax, the willingness to experiment. That really came to the fore when he started the Style Council, which disgruntled fans wrote off as soulboys. Nor did they welcome the later house-music direction. But not for nothing has Weller referred to himself as The Changingman – a restlessness and impatience that makes him a much more compelling artist. Nice line in knitwear, too.’ Guardian Leader, Friday 27 August 2010

An enduring fixture of popular music culture for almost 40 years, Paul Weller and his work has been the subject of relatively little academic scrutiny. In attending to Weller’s work, the purpose of this symposium is to consider his longevity, musical path and identity as ways of raising questions about the history, historiography, direction, range and operations of popular music culture and its scholarly study.
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Rhythms of Life: Youth and Popular Culture in a Changing South Africa

13-14 November 2015, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town

Rhythms of Life: Youth and Popular Culture in a Changing South Africa is a two day symposium organized by the Human Sciences Research Council, the University of Helsinki’s discipline of Social and Cultural Anthropology, and the University of the Western Cape’s Centre for Multilingualism and Diversities Research. It is an interdisciplinary symposium that encourages contributions from across the social sciences and humanities.

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IASPM- UK & Ireland Postgraduate Conference 2015: Popular Music Futures

Cardiff University School of Music
10-11 September 2015, Cardiff University School of Music

This conference seeks to be an open forum for new and innovative approaches to all aspects of Popular Music Studies as well as an opportunity for the next generation of academics to present to peers.
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Gender and Music: Practices, Performances, Politics

16th-18th March 2016
School of Music, Theatre and Art, Örebro University, Sweden

From challenging the idea that music is an inherently democratic medium, to observing how we should approach music as a political tool, musicians, activists and feminist theorists have done a great deal to change the way people think about music. At the same time, the way in which gender has often been challenged and subverted through music has also fuelled political discussion about gender as performative, malleable and diverse.

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