We are pleased to announce the fourth KISMIF International Conference ‘Keep It Simple, Make It Fast! Gender, differences, identities and DIY cultures’ (KISMIF Conference 2018) which will take place in Porto, Portugal, between 3 July and 7 July 2018.
The submission of abstracts for this conference is open to academic researchers working in all areas of sociology, anthropology, history, cultural economics, geography, urban planning, media and cultural studies and cognate disciplines, such as design, illustration, popular music, cinema, visual and performing arts. The deadline for sending submissions is 6 March 2018.
This initiative follows the great success of the three past editions of the KISMIF Conference (held in 2014, 2015 and 2016) and brings together an international community of researchers focusing on underground music scenes and do-it-yourself culture.
The KISMIF Conference offers a unique forum where participants can discuss and share information about underground cultures and DIY practices. KISMIF focuses on cultural practices that are often pitched against more mainstream, mass-produced and commodified forms of cultural production. Aligned with this is an anti-hegemonic ideology focused around aesthetic and lifestyle politics. KISMIF is the first and so far, only conference to examine the theory and practice of underground DIY cultures as an increasingly significant form of cultural practice in a global context. The conference has a multidisciplinary approach, welcoming contributions from the global community of scholars and activists working on all aspects of underground scenes and DIY cultures, and based on various methodologies — quantitative, qualitative and mixed-methods analysis. The goal is to discuss not only music but also other artistic fields such as film and video, graffiti and street art, theatre and the performing arts, literature and poetry, radio, programming and editing, graphic design, illustration, cartoon and comic fiction.
Seeking to respond to the desire reiterated by researchers, artists and activists present at previous KISMIF conferences, the 4th edition of KISMIF will focus on ‘Gender, differences, identities and DIY cultures’, directing its attention on gender issues relating to underground scenes and DIY cultures, and their manifestation at local, translocal and virtual levels. Expressions of gender in local, translocal and virtual spaces constitute important variables to understand contemporary cultures, their sounds, their practices (artistic, cultural, economic and social), their actors and their contexts. From a postcolonial and glocalized perspective, it is important to consider the changes in artistic and musical practices with an underground nature to draw symbolic boundaries between their operating modalities and those of advanced capitalism.
In 2018, the scientific programme of KISMIF will once again be accompanied by a diverse social and cultural programme, characterised by a series of artistic events, with special focus on underground music and other artistic expressions. The aim is to provide a unique experience in terms of the transglobal DIY cultures.
The conference will be preceded by a summer school entitled ‘What difference do DIY cultures make?’ on 3 July 2018 in Faculty of Arts and Humanities of University of Porto. The summer school will offer an opportunity for all interested persons, including those participating in the conference, to attend workshops led by specialists in these fields. More information about the Summer School will be progressively disseminated in the KISMIF Conference website.
