Crises at Work: Potentials for Change? (2021)

Special Issue Editors: Michael Ahlers and Jan Herbst

This Special Issue is motivated by, but not limited to, the current processes and effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global civic rights movement related to “Black Lives Matter”, which highlights systemic racism as an epidemic in many societies around the world. Only a selection of topics is shown here, which is also historically part of personal, systematic or infrastructural crises of popular music cultures. The Special Issue of the IASPM Journal aims to gather a broad range of scholarly and artistic perspectives on crises in popular music composition and production, labour, business, education, societies and cultures.

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The Best Side of Capitalism? The Life, Death, and Afterlife of the Record Store

Gina Arnold, Christine Feldman-Barrett, John Dougan, and Matthew Worley, eds.

This book explores, from a variety of perspectives and methodologies, how record stores became such important locales. As an agora, a community center, and a busy critical forum for taste, culture, and politics, the record store prefigured social media. Once conduits to new music, frequently bypassing the corporate music industry in ways now done more easily via the Internet, independent record stores (in direct opposition to rock radio programmed by corporate interests), championed the most local of economic enterprises, allowing social mobility to well up from them in unexpected ways. In this way, record stores speak volumes about our relationship to shopping, capitalism, and art. The editors of this volume believe that record stores are spaces rife for examination because their cultural history is in some ways the story of the best side of capitalism seen in microcosm. To that end, this book employs three motifs: cultural history, urban geography, and auto-ethnography to find out what individual record stores meant to individual people, but also what they meant to communities, to musical genres, and to society in general. What was their role in shaping social practices, aesthetic tastes, and even, loosely put, ideologies? This book will collect stories and memories, and facts about a variety of local stores that will not only re-center the record store as a marketplace of ideas, but also explore and celebrate a neglected personal history of many lives. Read the rest of this entry »

Punk Scholars Network Annual Conference

12th – 19th December

A virtual, online, global conference spanning eight days is being brought together by the Punk Scholars Network – be a part of it.
Punk is a truly global phenomenon that manifests in myriad ways in different scenes, political regimes, cultural contexts and individual experiences. Punk is many things to many people and seldom remains static over a lifetime. Increased globalisation, changes in connectivity and technology, and shifts in both capitalism and populism have impacted punk for better and worse. International and intranational punk scenes and connections are growing and finding commonality and conflict through music, education, mutual aid, performance, political activism and human behaviours. The global Coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the differences people face accessing resources and how governments respond. How have, and how will, various local punk scenes respond to this crisis, and what does their response tell us about punk as a global phenomenon?

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Tracing Disgust: Cultural Approaches to the Visceral

Article Proposals for an edited collection edited by Max Ryynänen, Susanne Ylönen & Heidi Kosonen.

We often recoil at the thought of mold gathering at the dishes used for eating, of bad breath on a person we do not specifically like, or of a spider walking across our body. Disgust, exemplified in these classic illustrations, is probably the most visceral of the basic human emotions. Some argue that it engages in particular the so called lower senses — taste, smell and touch —with a function for an organism’s preservation. It is also one of the recognized ”moral emotions,” functioning symbolically on social and cultural scales and serving, for example, as an instrument of political discourses. This can be traced in different examples, such as the discrimination of sexual minorities or the populist rhetorics of racist and fascist movements.

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Edited Collection on “New York City in Song”

New York City has one of the richest musical histories in all of the US, and has been the subject of an astonishing number of songs – something that has so far not been comprehensively addressed in academic works.

Thus, the proposed volume under the working title “New York City in Song” wants to analyze songs written about New York City, and engage with the depiction of the city within them, but also use it as a way to deal with several musical genres that the city has been home to, and was instrumental in developing. These include the vaudeville and musical theater scene on Broadway and beyond, but also hip hop, disco, punk, folk, jazz, swing, rock or pop music. It will therefore contribute to both the fields of urban studies and popular music studies, which have become well-developed areas of study over the recent years, but are still lacking specialized literature – especially such that considers their intersections.

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Journal of Music, Health, and Wellbeing

The Role of Music during COVID-19: Short-term Challenges through Technology, Wellbeing, Industry, & Education.

Note: Many thanks to those who have already submitted: we currently have a prospective collection of around 20 accepted articles (subject to peer-review). We are now looking to improve the span of the studies across 4 distinct areas (see below). An up-to-date list of our forthcoming related project outputs can be accessed via the ‘New Research’ Tab, at: www.musichealthandwellbeing.co.uk/new-research

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“Melodies and Maladies: Musical Responses to Plagues and Pandemics”

Call for Chapters
Editors Dr. Brent Keogh and Prof. Phil Hayward

Equinox Publishing

Chapter proposals are invited for a collected edition on the theme of musical responses to plagues and pandemics. This book will chart a historical trajectory of musical responses to plagues and pandemics, providing a critical historical perspective on the lived experiences in the present. By focusing on major plagues, outbreaks, and pandemics, such as the Black Death, the Spanish flu, SARS, and Zika virus, we aim to historically contextualise musical responses to such disasters. In addition to charting historical contexts, this collection will address ways in which musicians have harnessed digital technologies to create forms of patronage, connect with fans, rehearse with band members, and network with peers and industry. The volume will also discuss musical responses in terms of the intersections of class and race, where social distancing is virtually impossible for some classes of people due to their specific living conditions, or where the prevailing Government policy is to “let it rip”, to allow a virus to sweep through the population for reasons of “herd immunity”, economic stability, or an under-resourced medical system. This edition will provide a timely work that not only accounts for the exceptional times we are living in, but sheds light on this time by thinking historically through musical responses to plagues and pandemics and suggesting manners in which future ones may be navigated by cultural producers and audiences.

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The Handbook on Music Business and Creative Industries in Education  

Call for Book Chapter Proposals
Editor: Daniel Walzer, Ph.D.

Creative arts professions remain in a period of flux. As the music industry and related fields adapt to changing business models, student interest in training for a career in the entertainment sector continues to rise. Though the expansion of global degree offerings in the creative industries expands each year, a “state of the field” on educational and pedagogical issues in the music business and the creative industries has yet to be created.

University educators serve a crucial purpose in preparing future graduates for a highly competitive path in the gig economy. The Editor invites proposals from a broad range of scholars and industry professionals working in the creative arts for the compendium, tentatively scheduled for release in early 2022. Discussions are underway with a publisher with details to be completed this summer. Topics might include:

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“Climates of Popular Music”, 21st Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music

The most pressing issue for humanity in the 21st century is global climate, and thus IASPM’s 21st Conference turns its attention towards this subject. Whereas our 20th anniversary conference considered where we have been, we now ask where we are now, what we are doing as a species, and what impact it has on our communities and our world. On a planet increasingly interconnected by a dizzying array of media channels, such a discussion has to be broadly framed. Our planet’s climate is impacted by numerous forms of human activity, including those that are individual, personal, local, communal, institutional, commercial, corporate, cultural, political, and international. This conference invites presentations that ask how popular music relates to our climate, where climate relates to any part of the totality of surrounding conditions and circumstances affecting growth or development. By “climate,” we intend to include a range of definitions, including ecological climate, political climates, socio-political climates, and contextual and individuated climates. We ask presenters to consider the impacts of activities related to popular music and its cultures on variously defined climates, and the impacts of changing or changed climates on different popular music and its contexts.

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The Punk Scholars Network website

The Punk Scholars Network is celebrating 8 years of punk scholarship by launching our brand new Punk Scholars Network website https://www.punkscholarsnetwork.com/

Please go visit the fantastic new website where you  can view all the interesting and insightful work the Punk Scholars Network has been involved in since its inception in 2012, including publications and events as well as our new blog that features announcements about new punk research and other creative work. You can even buy affordable PSN merch direct from the website to help support the not-for-profit Punk Scholars Network.

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