MUSICultures Special Issue Call for Papers

MUSICultures solicits articles for publication in a special theme issue: Sustainable Futures in Popular Music: The Pandemic and Beyond, guest edited by Dr. Alexandra Boutros (Wilfrid Laurier University) and Dr. Brian Fauteux (University of Alberta).

Contemporary discourse is fraught with concerns about sustainability as we reckon globally with climate change, resource depletion, and more. How can we think about sustainability in intersection with popular music? Sustainability is often associated with ecological discourse, where concerns about waste and the depletion of natural resources may shape how we understand everything from music festivals and music related travel, to streaming services. However, sustainability is also implicated in the social dimensions of musical life. A discussion about music and sustainability may ask; What is the role of popular music and musicians in the cultural shifts made necessary by climate change? But may equally query how claims of sustainability figure alongside local music production and consumption framed by ephemeral archives and sometimes fragile cultural memories? Labour, venues, teaching and pedagogy, live performance, production and dissemination, capital and funding, and a host of other music related practices, systems, and infrastructures impact the sustainability or unsustainability of music.

Dear all,

I am writing to share a call for abstracts for an upcoming special issue of the Journal of Sound and Music in Games, focusing on the sound and music of Supergiant Games’ 2020 video game, Hades:

https://www.sssmg.org/wp/tag/jsmg/

Call for Papers:

Affective Politics and the Policing of the Social Through Popular Music (deadline to submit abstracts, 15th of December)

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).