Journal of Festive Studies

Issue 8

In addition to our guest-edited section described below, we always welcome submissions on a rolling basis, with no deadline for consideration. Please do think of us if your research or professional background touches on festive practices!

International borders affect you every day. They play a role in determining whether you are a birthright citizen or an unauthorized migrant. They showcase a nation’s ability or inability to guarantee your wellbeing. They factor into immigration, asylum, and national security debates. Media and political analysts often portray borders as places where pathos, illegality, and poverty thrive innately. Yet, they are also places where ordinary citizens make historical claims, or defend, criticize, and even parody immigration and security policy.

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K-popology: Music, Video, Choreo, Fandom

Uppsala, Sweden, June 8–11, 2025

K-popology: Music, Video, Choreo, Fandom is an international conference at Uppsala University (Sweden), June 8–11, 2025, covering artistic, cultural and industrial aspects of K-pop as a multifaceted global trend. Since the turn of the millennium, K-Pop has ventured into largely uncharted territories, giving rise to transmedial and transcultural phenomena that present unique challenges and opportunities for scholars, as well as for performers, composers, choreographers, promoters, and fans. The rapid evolution of K-Pop often outpaces scholarly efforts to fully comprehend its complexities. We encourage academics as well as artists, composers, choreographers and producers to propose presentations that deepen our knowledge of K-pop as both an aesthetic and a socio-economic phenomenon. The conference takes place after the K-pop Nordic Festival, June 7, 2025, in Stockholm which is ca. 40 minutes from Uppsala by train.

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Everyday Music Scenes: Pubs, Clubs and ‘Stutes

RMA Study Day – Call for Papers
International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University, 14th-15th April 2025

Back in 1957, Richard Hoggart highlighted ‘sing-songs and concerts in the pubs and clubs’ as the most indicative of working-class music tastes. Yet the everyday music scenes of familiar songs and/or communal singalongs, particularly around working men’s clubs, have been conspicuously absent from the worlds of musicology, ethnomusicology and popular music studies. This study day, supported by the RMA (Royal Musical Association), intends to stimulate challenging conversations about this research gap and explore rich avenues for the study of music in pubs, clubs and similar spaces of everyday, communal music experiences.

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Taylor Swift Companion

In 2023 Taylor Swift was recognised as the biggest selling recording artist globally; her recent Eras tour was the first to gross more than $1 billion. Beyond her music and live performances, she is known for her social media content (which has revealed her political viewpoints and, opinions on the business of music), merchandise and, other creative endeavours including filmmaking.

Academic interest and engagement with the work of Taylor Swift is not new, and naturally moves beyond musicology. Although those explorations are worth noting especially in relation to post-genre pop music aesthetics, which challenges universality and legitimacy in music, identity and experience (James 2017).  Whilst often recognised by academics as having a role in teenage identity construction especially (for example, Frith 1996 and, Tarrant et al 2002), popular music in the case of Swift demands further and more nuanced attention. For example, Chittenden (2013) notes the role Swift’s lyrics play in identity politics particularly in relation to romance: whilst seemingly reinforcing social norms and stereotypes, these lyrics also highlight the complexity of relationships particularly in the contemporary cultural context; and, these discussions about them on online fan forums help supports emotional wellbeing. This work arguably having some relationship with Jackson’s (2021) research on popular celebrity feminism and, the way teenage girls make sense of feminist subjectivities. Fan-led music events such as those discussed by Fuller (2018) makes it clear that the participatory cultures and practices of ‘Swifties’ are both personalised and collective, with affective resonance.

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Music, Research, and Activism II: Solidarities and Urgencies

14–16 May 2025, University of Helsinki

How do music scholars engage with activist research? How are Black feminist and Indigenous perspectives applied in music research? How can music and music research advance equality, equity, human rights, or ecological sustainability? What could music researchers and practitioners do in our contemporary world characterized by climate emergency, ecocide, racism, gender and sexual discrimination, war, conflict, and humanitarian crises? How are solidarities being built and reimagined, and how is urgency present in music and among activists and researchers working with music?

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BFE and RMA Research Students’ Conference 2025

University of Aberdeen
Conference dates: 9^th to 11^th January 2025
Call for Proposals deadline: Friday 13th September 2024

The British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) and Royal Musical Association (RMA) Research Students’ Conference will be hosted by the University of Aberdeen, on 9^th to 11^th January 2025. This will be an in-person event to allow networking and social interaction to take place, and to foster connections across a variety of music sub-disciplines. However, there will be some limited online provision for those participants for whom it would be difficult to attend in person.

If you have any general queries, please contact  [email protected] 

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DC25: Preserving and Archiving Electronic Music and Dance Cultures

DC25 | Dancecult Conference
24–25 January 2025

We are delighted to announce the call for proposals for DC25, a Dancecult Research Network conference to be held at the Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, 24–25 January 2025, in cooperation with the Audio Communication Group, Dancecult journal and CTM Festival. DC25 will host participants from the broad interdisciplinary community of research around electronic (dance) music and cultures who will converge, share and celebrate their ongoing research efforts. The conference is also an opportunity for graduate students and senior researchers alike to share insights on the questions of preserving and archiving electronic music and dance cultures. DC25 is a two-day in-person conference, where all presentations will be live streamed.

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Music and Online Cultures in a Changing Platform Ecosystem

International Conference
June 19–21, 2025, Lisbon, Portugal
Deadline: September 30

For around half of the world’s population, it is hard to imagine a day without being online in some way or another. The widespread adoption of internet technologies has ostensibly been in service of improving human connectivity, expression, and health. Yet technology companies face unprecedented criticism for the range of changes that internet platforms have wrought on everyday work and leisure practices. In few domains is this clearer than music.

As digital landscapes have shifted and evolved, music has often been the test subject for industrial change, and music cultures have accordingly negotiated the structures of online platforms. A lively body of scholarly and popular commentary has examined the power inequities, constraints, and affordances of online music platforms. In the mid-2020s, however, the formerly stable ecosystem of social media and streaming platforms is changing according to processes of platform decay.

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Most Wanted: Music Research

Most Wanted: Music Research is a new subconference format of Most Wanted: Music Convention on November 14, 2024 at Kulturbrauerei Berlin as a collaborative format with the GMM and other academic partners. MW:M Research is established as a new arena for encounters between artists, practitioners and researchers. The day will start with the Applied Knowledge Lab initiated by GMM, IMBRA & MW:M. For the afternoon we invite talks, presentations, papers, demos and discursive formats from the areas of music business, music culture, and music tech. Topics are organized in three tracks and may focus on, but are not limited to this year’s conference theme Monetize!

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Music and fascism 33 1/3 Europe

This is a brief and informal call for expressions of interest in contributing a book related to the evolving far-right for the 33 1/3 Europe book series.

Far-right nationalist (or fascist?) parties are rising across Europe. They won big enough in the elections for the European Parliament earlier this month to move the needle in the continent’s most powerful institution in the coming years. The relationship between music and politics cannot be conceived only or primarily in direct and causal terms. The two intersect in various ways—artists are sensitive to aspects of political culture, music is entangled in spaces and counter-spaces of fascism, and affective flows in political culture have a sonic dimension. There’s been a surge of interest in this topic. A research team in Germany and the Netherlands (involving the great Mario Dunkel and Melanie Schiller among others) has produced important research on music in rightwing populism. A CFP for a book titled “The Rising Right” was announced on this list a few days ago.

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