CFP: AMS Popular Music Study Group, AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting, Minneapolis, 6–9 Nov 2025

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Feb 24, 2025, 12:01:51 PM2/24/25
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CFP: Popular Music and/as Resistance (AMS Popular Music Study Group Paper Session)

The current moment offers an opportunity to revisit the politics and hermeneutics of musical resistance in an age of constant disruption. Scholars of popular music have long used the term “resistance” to interpret how musicians and consumers challenge dominant cultural hegemonies (e.g. Hall & Jefferson 1976, Rose 1994). More recently, scholars have adopted the language of vibes (James 2021), circuit bending (Hertz & Parikka 2012), algorithmic selves (Bishop & Kant 2023), or “perfect fit content” (Pelly 2025) to navigate the friction that artists, listeners, and users introduce to platforms that run on capitalist, masculinist, and white supremacist logics. Drawing on this work, we might ask: how does popular music and its scholarship provide spaces for unsettling nationalist and colonial imaginaries, amending exclusionary archives/records, and offering solidarity and safety when governments and institutions cannot or will not? How does or doesn't “resistance” capture this hard work? In what ways do popular music analyses “resist” or create friction with notation-based music theories? How is resistance made audible? And what are the limitations of resistance, unsettling, and friction as political and/or musical ideals?

The Popular Music Study Group of AMS, in collaboration with the Popular Music Interest Group of SMT, seeks paper proposals for a session on how popular musicians and listeners grapple with themes, actions, and critiques of resistance in times of intensifying constraints. Possible topics might include:

  • Embodied resistance
  • Sonic resistance, friction, and roughness
  • Archives, collections, and canons as sites of productive friction
  • Popular music analysis and/as resistance
  • Music venues as sites of resistance
  • Award shows and legacy
  • Music, migration, and borders
  • “Ugly publics” (Chana 2023)
  • Queer, BIPOC, and feminist scene histories
  • Disability, COVID, and collective care
  • Resistance with/in cultural institutions
  • Critiques of “resistance” as a political/artistic ideal

Please submit your abstract (350 words max.) by the end of the day (23h59) Friday, March 7 to session chair Morgan Bimm (mbimm -at- stfx.ca). This format allows each speaker up to 15 minutes for presentation, followed by 5 minutes for Q&A. All paper proposals will be reviewed for potential inclusion in the PMSG session at the 2025 AMS-SMT joint conference, to be held in Minneapolis from November 6-9, 2025.

For more information: https://amspop.wordpress.com/2025/02/19/call-for-papers-pmsg-panel-session-ams-2025/

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