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

See also the conference website for more details http://www.iaspm2021.org

Call for Presentations

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. 

call for papers

Transformational POP

Transitions, Breaks, and Crises in Popular Music (Studies)

4th Biennial IASPM D-A-CH Conference, 22–24 October 2020

Paderborn University/Germany, Faculty of Humanities and Arts, Department of Music – Popular Music and Media

Organizational Committee: IASPM D-A-CH Executive Committee and Advisory Board +  Jun.-Prof. Dr. Beate Flath, Prof. Dr. Christoph Jacke, Manuel Troike (Local hosts)

Pop music cultures, in their entire breadth, are seismographs of social, political, economic, ecological, media, artistic, and technological transformations. In and through them, fields of tensions, disruptions, and lines of conflict become not only visible, audible and perceptible, but also communicable and thus, negotiable. Economic and ecological crises, social structural changes, political shifts, communicative-media discourses, atmospheric moods, and disturbances of the most diverse kind cannot be appreciated in isolation from specific sounds, performances, lyrics, images, stars, genres, etc. Therefore, these are always changing in the process: pop music cultures transform and are themselves transformed. “Pop is transformational, always. It is a dynamic movement in which cultural materials and its social environments mutually reshape each other, crossing previously fixed boundaries: class boundaries, ethnic boundaries or cultural boundaries [own translation].“ (Diedrich Diederichsen, Pop – deskriptiv, normativ, emphatisch (1996). In: Charis Goer, Stefan Greif, Christoph Jacke (Eds.): Texte zur Theorie des Pop, 2013: 188)