[Commlist] cfp: Popular Music and Wellbeing Conference

*Popular Music and Wellbeing Conference *

*St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London*

*14 and 15 September 2023*

**

*Call for papers – New Deadline*

Popular music and wellbeing are both common terms in everyday talk, yet 
each of them escapes straightforward definition. Popular music culture 
comprises a wide range of practices, spaces, and discursive and material 
forms. Wellbeing, meanwhile, has become a buzzword for (post-)pandemic 
times, capable of generating multiple inflections depending on the 
settings in which it is deployed. There are differences, for example, 
within and between notions of, /inter-alia/, psychological and emotional 
wellbeing, social and community wellbeing, and the term also has 
multiple meanings when it is applied across fields such as therapeutic 
intervention, charity work, social care and public health. As a result, 
attempts to describe the interrelationships between popular music and 
wellbeing are bound to be amorphous and contested.Nonetheless, we 
believe that exploring connections between the two terms is a 
potentially timely and valuable pursuit. After all, popular music 
culture continually seeks to create states of individual and collective 
joy, ecstasy, transcendence and belonging, as well as spaces in which 
subjectivities can be composed, transformed and/or radically 
(re)imagined. As dance music producer Theo Parrish once remarked, 
‘people who say that the dancefloor is about losing yourself, that's the 
outsider view, the dancefloor is about solidarity’. Moreover, in the 
last decade the pairing of pop music with clean living has seen the 
mainstreaming of ‘sober raving’ and ‘conscious clubbing’. On the other 
hand, popular music also produces widely circulating discourses about 
the reverse of wellbeing, such as anxiety, alienation, abuse, isolation, 
depression and self-harm. This two-day conference seeks to approach 
these and other issues from a plurality of conceptual and methodological 
angles of vision. Key themes to explore will include but are not limited to:

  * grassroots music spaces as sites of community organisation
  * histories of popular music as a discourse of identity and belonging
  * the use of music as therapeutic intervention
  * the pairing of pop music and ‘clean living’ as a form of practice
    and commodification
  * pop music as a commentary on mental health awareness and problems
We welcome contributions from colleagues working across disciplines in 
history, the humanities, health and human sciences, social sciences, and 
performing arts. We are also keen to include studies of popular music 
and wellbeing from outside as well as inside the Anglophone world.

Those interested in taking part in the conference are asked to send in 
abstracts of 300-500 words either in docx or pdf format to 
(mark.donnelly /at/ stmarys.ac.uk) by April 14^th 2023. We will consider both 
proposals for individual papers and panel sessions. Please send the 
overall panel proposal and individual papers in the same application 
(all following the 300-500 words limit per paper).

*Conference organisers:*

Mark Donnelly

Richard Mills

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