IASPM Journal Reviews Call

REVIEWS EDITOR

IASPM Journal is looking for a new Reviews Editor. The role is open to all qualified members and ideal for an early-career researcher to learn about journal editing and publication. Each year, the journal publishes two issues and the Reviews Editor oversees the entire process from submission to publication. We work as a collaborative team and the Reviews Editor will be supported by the core editorial team, who meet regularly. Please send all enquiries to Abigail Gardner at [email protected]. 

REVIEW FOR IASPM JOURNAL

We are looking for reviewers! IASPM Journal seeks new reviewers to help with the review process. We are especially interested in hearing from a linguistically diverse group of scholars. Email [email protected] for details.

Affective Politics and the Policing of the Social Through Popular Music

Special Issue of the Journal of Extreme Anthropology, https://journals.uio.no/JEA

The ‘affective turn’ across the humanities and the social sciences suggests that we pay attention to how affects create subjectivities, build communities and shape new forms of politics in the making (White 2017, Desai-Stephens & Reisnour 2020, Gregg & Seigworth 2010 and Clough & Halley 2007, Goodwin et. al. 2001). In other words, it encourages us to study how affective bodies ‘act and are acted upon’ (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1) as people engage with each other and with sensory objects (e.g. musical sounds), politically and socially, within specific contexts. These insights have implications for our understanding of politics, of the social, as well as how we understand social control and the ‘policing’ of the social. Instead of excluding objects from the social and privileging theories modelled on structure and agency (e.g. Giddens 1984, Bourdieu 1984), scholars are now redefining agency as relational (Barad 2003, 2007; Latour 2007, 2013). This has led to new research on how sensory objects, such as sounds and music, shape subjectivities, build communities and instigate politics through affect, within and across, contexts (Bøhler 2017, 2021; Shank 2014; Guilbault 2019; Schiermer 2021a, 2021b; Muniagurria 2018; Duque and Muniagurria 2022; Stover 2017, 2017).

Read the rest of this entry »

See Me, Feel Me, Touch Me, Heal Me: Tommy, Rock Opera and Twentieth Century Britain

Call for chapter contributions to proposed book on The Who’s Tommy:
Edited by Keith Gildart and Benjamin Halligan

With “Tommy”, British rock group The Who audaciously scoped British social history across the middle decades of the twentieth century in order to engage with themes of youth culture, hedonism and alienation, family dysfunctionality, the horrors of war and its aftermath, stardom and psychic damage, sexual abuse and exclusion, and the permissive society. The rock opera concept of “Tommy” was one that resulted in multiple iterations: the original album (1969), the London symphony production (1972), Ken Russell’s glam-era film (1975), stage productions at the moment of the “Britpop” renaissance in British culture (in the 1990s, and a 2015 revival), and the music continuing to feature in the live sets of The Who. “Tommy” was a key moment in the development of the “concept album” – a trend in 1960s music that evidenced faith in the ability of rock to engage with serious themes. The film of “Tommy” was part of a cycle of 1970s British films that sought to visualise and expand upon the music: The Beatles (“Yellow Submarine”), Led Zeppelin (“The Song Remains the Same”), Pink Floyd (“The Wall”), The Sex Pistols (“The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle”), The Who (“Quadrophenia”), Slade (“Flame”), David Essex (“That’ll Be The Day”, “Stardust”), and Aswad (“Babylon”). In the light of recent releases that revisit this period, such as “Bohemian Rhapsody”, and “Rocketman”, combined with the revelations about the darker aspects of 1970s pop music culture that “Tommy” anticipated, we invite contributors working in a range of disciplines (History, Sociology, Music, Film, Literature, and Disability Studies) to propose chapters for a co-edited collection with an anticipated 2024 publication date. We invite specific chapters on Tommy and British History; Tommy and Youth Culture; Tommy and Rock Opera; Tommy and the Pop Musical; Tommy and Disability; Tommy and Sexuality; Tommy and Religion; Tommy and the Who; Tommy and Gender; Tommy and War; Tommy, Race, and National Identity; Tommy and the Rock Star Messiah; Tommy and Ken Russell; Tommy and the 1970s; Tommy the album, film and musical.

Read the rest of this entry »

Asia Pacific Business Review Special Issue on K-Pop

The Globalization of Postcolonial Pop Music: Putting the Success of the K-pop Industries into Theoretical Perspectives

Guest Editors:

Professor Jangwoo Lee, School of Business Administration, Kyungpook National University & Success Economy Institute, Korea
Professor Paul Lopes, Dept. of Sociology, Colgate University, USA
Professor Chris Rowley, Kellogg College, Oxford University & Bayes Business School, City, University of London, UK
Professor Ingyu Oh, Faculty of Foreign Studies, Kansai Gaidai University, Japan
Professor Lynn Pyun, Graduate School of International Studies, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea

Over the last two decades. the South Korean music market has grown into the seventh largest in the world, while its boy band BTS was ranked number one in 2021 as the most popular and best-selling global artist by IFPI (InternationalFederation of the Phonographic Industry). All these factsare simply confounding to many pundits of the industry as no postcolonial music market has achieved global breakthroughs as such other than South Korea. Only three countries in Asia are listed on the top 10 global music markets: Japan (2^nd), China (6^th) and South Korea (7^th). Among these, South Korea is the only postcolonial country that became independent from Japan after the Second World War.

Read the rest of this entry »

Telling Stories – Issues and Opportunities for Digital Music Archives

Date: 17-19 November 2022
Place: Manchester Metropolitan University

This three-day international conference is open to academics, heritage, cultural institutions and interested individuals and will provide a platform to address current societal and technological issues of heritage preservation in digital music archives. These issues include aspects of underrepresentation, digital literacy and inequality, access and public engagement, narration, memory work and many more. Bringing together heritage practitioners and scholars, the conference interrogates digital archiving methods and their impact on music heritage for both traditional institutions and community archives. New tools and engagement mechanisms in the digital sphere will be explored, and participants are invited to report on, develop and discuss creative solutions to the issues they encounter(ed).

Read the rest of this entry »

The Subcultures Network International Conference

Date: 13 April – 14 April 2023
Venue: Frenchay Campus, UWE, Bristol
Venue Location: https://www.uwe.ac.uk/life/campus-and-facilities/frenchay-campus/frenchay-campus-map
Time: TBC

The Subcultures Network wishes to celebrate the diversity of disciplines, scholars, researchers and writers who have been involved in the Network over the past twelve years. But we also aim to encourage those who haven’t been to one of our events before to submit abstracts and come and share their ideas, research and knowledge with us.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sounding Space and Place: New Directions in the Geography of Sound and Music

Organizers:
Luke Leavitt (Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison); Arun Saldanha (Department of Geography, Environment and Society, University of Minnesota);
Rashad Shabazz (School of Social Transformation/School of Geographical Science and Urban Planning, Arizona State University)

Though geographers have been doing research on music for decades, there has recently been a flourishing of new perspectives emerging between cultural geography, popular music studies, and sound studies. This series of panels builds on the momentum at previous AAG meetings to create community and exchange. “Space and place” are more than just the “where” of the production, dissemination, and consumption of particular sounds. When we listen to music and other sounds we’re hearing history, migration, power, industry, race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, climate, language, and a host of other social and environmental factors. No musician, listener, or sound-maker lives outside these forces, and the experiences of music and sound in turn help shape these contexts. How do the multiple crises heaping up in the world today come to inflect soundscapes and the sonic arts? This series of panels provides cases and concepts for demonstrating how music and sound are spatialized.

Read the rest of this entry »

Politics in Music and Song

Queen’s University Belfast, 8-10 September 2023

Music at Queen’s University Belfast in collaboration with the network ‘Songs of Social Protest’ is hosting a conference from 8-10 September 2023 that will explore the great variety of musical and lyrical expression within the field of protest song.

Over the past few decades protest song has become a burgeoning field of academic study. Significant publications have captured the international variety of protest song, such as Dillane, Power, Devereux and Haynes (2018), Friedman (2017), Illiano (2015), Kutschke and Norton (2014) and Peddie (2020, 2012). Other work has been more nationally focussed, such as that of John and Robb’s The 1848 Protest Song Tradition in Germany (2020), Millar’s Sounding Dissent on Irish rebel songs (2020), and Lebrun’s Protest Music in France (2009). As well as ‘Songs of Social Protest’ (Limerick, 2015) other networks have arisen with publications reflecting both national and international perspectives such as ‘To the Barricades. Popular Protest in Europe 1815-1850’ (Warwick, 2018) and ‘Our Subversive Voice. The History and Politics of the English Protest Song’ (UEA, 2021). We invite papers from a wide international field and additionally welcome case studies on transnational protest song.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sounds of the End of the World

III International Conference on Sonorities Research (CIPS)
June 7th to 9th, 2023
Fluminense Federal University (UFF) – Niterói/RJ – Brazil

In recent decades, we have witnessed changes on a global scale that can be seen as threats to human existence itself – threats caused by ourselves, as the Anthropocene theories demonstrate. Climate change, pandemics, food shortages and wars are the result of the brutal exploitation of the planet, the struggle for control of natural and economic resources, as well as the denial of the ongoing crisis.

The end of the world means, of course, not only a nuclear or climatic hecatomb, but also the end of worldviews, models of knowledge or even cognitive, affective and social patterns. A new world emerges outlining its creative powers and its dystopias of control, automation and depletion of natural resources necessary for technological development.

Read the rest of this entry »

Global Digital Music Studies

A Conference in honor of Dr. Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie
Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale RILM
New York City, NY, USA
April 12–13, 2023

UNESCO has argued that the Covid-19 crisis is a reminder “that we should nurture the socially-beneficial applications of digital technologies and focus on improving access and uses in countries where it is lacking.” Building on this and keeping true to its mission, Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) seeks to bring together researchers, educators, and librarians interested in the ways digital technologies intersect with music studies worldwide and in its broadest sense, encompassing all branches: historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, as well as popular music studies and other fields.

Read the rest of this entry »