[ecrea] CFP: Notes on Deconstructing Popular Music (Studies): Global Media and Critical Interventions

CFP: Notes on Deconstructing Popular Music (Studies): Global Media and 
Critical Interventions

As the director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at 
Birmingham, Stuart Hall (1932-2014) called for a groundbreaking critical 
practice that takes seriously the political heart of popular culture, 
“one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the 
powerful is engaged: it is the stake to be won or lost in that 
struggle.” From the contours of digital video’s gendered representation, 
to the politics of ethnicity in the recording studio, to the affect of 
co-movement on the dancefloor, the sounds and styles of popular music 
both reproduce and trouble the cultural status quo. Popular music 
studies itself also unfolds on contested political terrain, as we 
struggle to transform–rather than reproduce–pop’s place in the 
discourses and practices of dominant world systems.
Hall outlines a popular cultural studies that offers an intervention 
into established regimes of representation, and the 2015 IASPM-US 
conference takes up his mandate for “the deadly seriousness of 
intellectual work” on popular culture. In a neoliberal age in which the 
substance of political struggle organizes around unequal flows of global 
capital and the elusive politics of everyday empowerment and 
disempowerment, popular music studies becomes an amplifier by which the 
radically contested and otherwise fugitive strains of musical practice 
become audible. Here, the study of Black aesthetics, youth culture, 
disability, socioeconomic class, postcoloniality, queer identities, and 
Third World feminisms, among others, hangs together with attention to 
the textures of musical composition as well as the patterns of global 
media markets.
Hall locates the struggles of power in the realm of aesthetics and 
politics. Central to this work is a nuanced consideration of the ways in 
which media (for McLuhan, “any technology by which the human body is 
extended”) serve both to reproduce established discourses and to 
generate new possibilities for artistic liberation, decolonization, 
self-authorship, and the imagination of alternative futures. Popular 
music studies mobilizes an inclusive concept of media studies that 
acknowledges dominant global digitalities alongside subcultural, 
stylistic, and other “off-label” engagements with media technologies. In 
order to account for the breadth and depth of musical practice, the 
field binds together an engagement with aesthetics, the textures of 
technology, and the politics of difference.
The 2015 IASPM-US conference will revisit the genealogies of critique 
that shape popular music studies’ longstanding intervention into 
discourses on culture, media, and power. An approach that takes into 
account the radical contexts of musicmaking is key to documenting 
processes of empowerment and disempowerment in pop. It calls for an 
understanding of, in Hall’s words, “the effect of the unseen ‘work’—that 
which takes place out of consciousness, in the relationship between 
creative practice and deep currents of change.” The field honors Hall’s 
legacy by practicing popular music studies while simultaneously 
reflecting on its theoretical and critical arcs. We enthusiastically 
welcome proposals that creatively engage both popular music and the 
broader field of cultural and media studies, particularly through these 
key discourses:

1. Roots and Routes
While popular music studies continues to critically mine the genealogies 
of genres, lyrics, styles, and sounds in pop, we ask how the field can 
also better foster a complex, multilinear engagement with globalization, 
diaspora, and the mobility of musical practices. Reflexively, what 
continuities does pop music studies have with other modes of engaging 
music, culture, politics, and history, and how can attention to these 
strengthen critical work? Who are we as a body of scholars who converge 
at IASPM-US, whom does the field currently include and exclude, and who 
do we hope to be?


2. Defining the Struggle
What populations exist on the periphery of or fully outside dominant 
world systems that control the flow of money, availability of vital 
resources, and ease of mobility? When these populations make popular 
music, what does it sound like, how does it circulate, and what 
interventions become possible through these sounds? How has/does this 
music fit into the field of popular music studies? In what ways might 
popular music studies take up the political work of contributing to the 
empowerment of the subaltern?

3. A Detour through Theory
What happens when we apply Hall’s mode of conjunctural analysis--a mode 
of studying culture that takes into account the intersecting histories, 
polyvalent meanings, cultural genealogies, media technologies, politics 
of place and time, and other radical contexts that reverberate in a 
given pop genre/scene/style? How can the field of popular music studies, 
which so often draws from theories generated in literary studies, sound 
studies, gender and sexuality studies, ethno/musicology, anthropology, 
sociology, multicultural studies, philosophy, science and technology 
studies,  and communication and media studies, articulate a theoretical 
legacy from within?

4. Pedagogy and Intervention
The demands of work in the academy and contemporary media challenge pop 
music scholars to balance theoretical rigor and readability that, like 
popular music itself, reaches wide audiences. How can intellectual work 
about popular music circulate in formalized, institutional settings as 
well as in public venues? What are the opportunities and pitfalls of the 
growing acceptance of popular music studies within academia? What role 
do popular music scholars play in light of widespread de-funding of 
higher education and the increasingly corporate model of university 
administration?

5. Digital Media and Representation
How can popular music studies engage new developments in technology and 
globalization both in terms of the increasing speed and thickness of 
their networks, and in terms of their contested, polyvalent, and 
problematic work in perpetuating global inequality? How do complex forms 
of musical communication and representation shoot up through the 
established regimes of representation and make space for new musical 
possibilities?

Please submit proposals via Word document [last name_first name.docx] to 
(iaspmus2015 /at/ gmail.com) by 15 October 2014. Individual presenters should 
submit a paper title, 250-word abstract, and author information 
including full name, institutional affiliation, email address, and a 
50-word bio. Panel proposals, specifying either 90 minutes (three 
presenters) or 120 (four), should include both 125-word overview and 
250-word individual proposals (plus author information), or 250-word 
overview and 50-word bios (plus names, affiliations, and email 
addresses) for roundtable discussions.  Please indicate any audio, 
visual, or other needs for the presentation; each room will have sound, 
projector, and an RGB hookup. We also welcome unorthodox proposals that 
do not meet the above criteria, including ideas for workshops, film 
screenings, and other non-traditional formats.  All conference 
participants must be registered IASMP-US members (it’s okay to register 
after one’s proposal is accepted).  For membership information visit: 
http://iaspm-us.net/membership/. For more information about the 
conference, go to http://iaspm-us.net/conferences/ or send email 
inquiries to
(iaspmus2015 /at/ gmail.com).

Program co-chairs: Ali Colleen Neff (College of William and Mary) and 
Justin D Burton (Rider University).
Program committee: Rebekah Farrugia (Oakland University), Luis-Manuel 
Garcia (Freie Universität Berlin), Anthony Kwame Harrison (Virginia 
Tech), Nadine Hubbs (University of Michigan), Elizabeth Lindau (Wesleyan 
University), Larisa Mann (New York University), Shana Redmond 
(University of Southern California), and Barry Shank (Ohio State 
University).

--
Justin D Burton, PhD
justindburton.wordpress.com
Assistant Professor of Music
Rider University
School of Fine and Performing Arts
371 Fine Arts Building
Lawrenceville, NJ 08648
Executive Board, IASPM-US
iaspm-us.net
501-230-1271

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