CFP: Mixing Pop and Politics: Subversion, Resistance and Reconciliation in Popular Music

IASPM-ANZ 2017 Conference

December 4-6, 2017

Masey University, Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Forty years ago, the story goes, punk broke. Not for the first time, and not the last. History provides us with ample examples of the power of popular music to speak to, through, and against various political moments. The contemporary situation also offers countless opportunities to explore how popular music revisits, reconstitutes, rewrites and reconciles itself to this past. At the same time, it also points to new directions informed by the complicated position popular music occupies in relation to the shifting paradigms of power in which we currently find ourselves. This IASPM-ANZ conference aims to explore the complex politics of resistance, subversion, containment and reconciliation from now and then, as well as points in-between.

We are seeking papers and panel proposals that touch on, but are not restricted to, the following areas:

• (We’re) Stranded: Punk and Post-Punk in Australia, New Zealand and Beyond
• I Will Survive: The Politics of Pleasure and Popular Music
• You Don’t Own Me: Cultivating, Codifying and Commodifying Resistance
• You’ve Got the Power: Populism, Authoritarianism, Anarchy and Popular Music
• This Machine Kills Fascists: Technologies, Politics and Popular Music
• The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Popular Music on Screen(s)
• Here’s Where The Story Ends: Alternate Histories of Popular Music
• Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: Of DJs, Dancefloors and Discos
• We Are the Robots: Resistant, Reconciled, Reconstituted, Recombinant Bodies in Popular Music
• If You’re Feeling Sinister: Affect, Emotion and the Subversive Power of Popular Music
• Playing With a Different Sex: Otherness and Othering in Popular Music
• A Whisper to a Scream: Silence, Distortion, Amplification and the Politics of Sound

Abstracts should be no more than 250 words, and should include 3-5 keywords. Please submit abstracts in doc, docx, rtf format, and send as “last name.xxx” to iaspmanz2017@gmail.com.
Deadline for abstract submission: June 1st 2017.
All participants must be members of IASPM. If you are not a member, details on how to join are available here: http://iaspm.org.au/membership/.

We encourage all members of IASPM-International to consider attending.