K-pop and the West: Media, Fandom, and Transnational Politics

The Asia Research Institute, University at Buffalo (UB), the State University of New York October 27-28, 2023

The University at Buffalo’s Asia Research Institute will host its second annual Korean studies symposium, “K-pop and the West: Media, Fandom, and Transnational Politics,” on October 27- 28, 2023. The symposium aims at creating an opportunity to think about research, pedagogy, and methodologies in our critical study of K-pop in the West. There has been some debate about whether K-pop’s popularity in the U.S. market represents its status as a mainstream—as compared to an ethnic—pop genre. Some would argue that the current success of K-pop be viewed as a collective achievement of K-pop fans. In this view, American fans have, in particular, “fought against” the U.S. media industry’s commercial devaluation of K-pop and their racially discriminatory practices that adversely affect K-pop artists.

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International Conference on Media Industries

16-19 April 2024
Hosted by the Department of Culture, Media and Creative Industries, King’s College London

Paper, panel, and roundtable proposals are now invited for the 2024 ‘Media Industries’ conference (‘MI2024’).

After the success in 2018 of the inaugural conference ‘Media Industries: Current Debates and Future Directions’, unfortunately the planned 2020 conference had to be cancelled due to Covid lockdowns. We are therefore very pleased to announce the conference will return next year.

A key aim of MI2024 is to maintain an open intellectual agenda and provide a meeting ground for all forms of media industries research.

To this end, the conference invites proposals for papers, panels, and roundtables presenting research from across the full breadth of the media industries.

To energize interdisciplinary discussions, we welcome proposals presenting research from all intellectual and methodological traditions in media industries scholarship.

Additionally, to recognize the full scope and diversity of media industries, proposals may address industries in contemporary or historical contexts, and at global, transnational, national, or sub-national levels of analysis.

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Rhythm Changes: Jazz Encounters

The eighth Rhythm Changes Conference, Jazz Encounters, will take place at the Institute for Jazz Research (University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, Austria) from 3 to 6 April 2024. This conference is organised in conjunction with the fourteenth International Jazz Research Conference.

Keynotes
Keynote: Prof. George McKay (University of East Anglia, UK)
Keynote: Maite Hontelé (trumpet player, the Netherlands)
Closing address: Stephanie Vos (Stellenbosch University, South Africa)

We invite submissions for Jazz Encounters, a four-day multidisciplinary conference bringing together researchers, writers, musicians, critics, and others interested in jazz studies. The event will feature academic papers and panels.

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Retrofuturism 2.0 Symposium

The post-pandemic internet has seen a boom of micro-genres on platforms such as Tumblr and TikTok. Music, text, and images are combined to create audiovisual imaginaries with a look towards particular (pop)cultural niches at once nostalgic and utopian. Subcultures emerging during the 2010s have been joined by trends such as cottagecore and dark academia.

Following last year’s symposium on musical retrofuturism (https://musicalretrofuturism.wordpress.com), this online symposium widens our focus to encompass contemporary ‘nostalgiacore’ in music and audiovisual media. We use this term to refer to an aesthetic emerging from the archival, escapist, and remediating capacities of the internet. We are interested not only in memory, but also the intersections of media and imagination—the ways in which nostalgia and desire can be cultivated for an era that was not experienced directly.

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CUMIN Conference, London

On Friday 30th June, AHRC-funded network CUMIN (Contemporary Urban Music for Inclusion Network) will hold a conference at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London. The purpose of the network is to encourage discussion, recognition and change in regard to the educational, cultural and social status of contemporary musics such as hip hop, grime, EDM (and house, techno, dubstep, etc. etc.) that tend to get marginalised in many contexts despite actually being some of the most popular musics in the world.

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Eurovisions Conference

On 9th and 10th May the Eurovisions conference will be taking place at the Creative Campus, Liverpool Hope University.

Attendance is free of charge and pre-registration is not required. More information can be found at the conference website: https://www.eurovisions.eu/edition-6

Punk Symposium in Berlin

22 September 2023
In cooperation with the international Punk Scholars Network

PANK! – (German) language in zines, punk art and punk rock

„Haste ’ne Macke?!“ (Engl. „you nuts?!“) – That is how Nina Hagen begins her song “Pank”, which she recorded in 1978, self-ironically written the way Germans usually pronounce the English word “Punk”. Youth slang, everyday language, humor, and directness characterize early German punk songs in the late 1970s—a departure from internationalized and slick mainstream pop lines à la ABBA. Political communication was also further radicalized in German punk rock. When the Hamburg band Slime loudly postulated in 1980 that they didn’t want any „Bullenschweine“ (Engl. “bull pigs”) and thus polemically commented on the constant confrontation between law enforcement and punks from their point of view, the 10-year-old slogans of radical left-wing bands like Ton Steine Scherben seemed almost well-behaved. Back to the concrete, back to reality, namely the low, grim, and dreary reality—but this reality is then, in turn, violently and solemnly torn apart. A graphic equivalent of this frenzy of expression can be found in the fanzines of the time—Do It Yourself (DIY) magazines in self-publication, made possible by the spread of the photocopier—which also turn the tables with ironic wit, chaotic layout, and humorous appropriation of the narrow-mindedness in contemporary German advertising.

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Exploration of Class, Distinction, and Habitus in Popular Culture of Central and Eastern Europe

6th Conference of the Centre for Study of Popular Culture
Conference organised by the Centre for the Study of Popular Culture, Charles University and the German Historical Institute in Warsaw

27–29 October 2023, Prague, Czech Republic

Class, distinction, and habitus have a contested position in the political and social sciences. No less controversial are the concepts in the humanities, even though the study of class in cultural studies seems to be long past its prime. Since the 1960s, Western youth and working class popular and urban cultures have received wide scholarly attention. Minority groups and people on the margins ridiculed and stigmatised by popular culture experienced a research boom several decades ago and a renewed interest owing to research into reality TV shows. Representations of white upper-class heterosexual male domination in popular culture has been interrogated with the finest critical tools in the last years. The research agenda of Central and Eastern European popular culture looks a bit different. Due to the allegedly different path to modernity, exploration of class, distinction, and habitus in popular culture offersinteresting stimuli even today. A closer look at the political and socioeconomic changes that the region has undergone shows that these phenomena were closely linked to the development of industrial capitalism and the rise of the bourgeois society in the 19th century on the one hand. On the other, class often dissolved into nationalist and even racist ideology. Unique group’s distinctions were melted into the cult of the common people. A specific habitus was suppressed by the all-encompassing folksiness. Mass movements in the interwar period placed the removal of the enemy class and distinction at the centre of their politics. The socialist dictatorship after the Second World War declared that it had done away with class and group-specific distinctions; differing habitus was to be replaced by uniformity. However, in the post-Stalin period, even the mildest proclamations concerning a classless society had to be revised. New social differentiations and subtle distinctions among people became more visible and found not infrequent reflection in literature, film, music, and visual arts. In late socialism, power elites gradually abandoned the banner of egalitarianism and the new class manifested in a showy manner its distinctions and habitus.

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Diversity in Popular Music Spheres

IASPM-Australia/New Zealand
University of Auckland and Wintec | Te Pūkenga
Tāmaki-Makaurau (Auckland) and Kirkiriroa (Hamilton), Aotearoa
5-8 December 2023

Popular music has long existed as a space for the sharing and fostering of marginalised voices and stories, despite its equal position as a hegemonic economic and cultural tool of capitalism and Western imperialism. This conference invites papers on popular music and popular music studies that consider or celebrate aspects of non-mainstream politics, identities, creatives and practices; as well as interrogating the power structures related to our field that emerge from patriarchal white, cisgender, heterosexual and ableist ideologies and values. We especially look for work around indigenous studies, gender and queer studies, disability studies and colonialism or any other intersectional perspectives, in relation to any aspect of popular music consumption, production and people.

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Pop after Communism. The Transformation of Popular Culture after 1989/90

Place: Berlin
From-To: 15 – 17 Nov. 2023
Deadline: 31 May 2023

The social changes that went along with the political upheaval of 1989/90 in the countries of state socialism were not limited to the political system, economic structures or social conditions. The late phase and the end of state socialism were marked by a far-reaching transformation of popular culture, with global cultural changes becoming an important driver of the post-communist transformation. Up to now, there have been some individual studies on the history of pop in the 1990s and early 2000s with a particular view to the united Germany, the countries of East-Central and South-Eastern Europe and the states that emerged with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, but no comprehensive overview of the globally entangled transformation processes in pop culture. The conference hence aims to bring together researchers in the broader field of “pop history” to examine the overarching tendencies of this fundamental socio-cultural change and the protagonists and institutions that determined it from a comparative perspective. The focus of the conference is on pop music and the entire range of pop cultural forms of expression (e.g. film, fashion, literature).

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