CfP: Sounds, Songs, and Politics, Ljubljana, 29-31 August 2019

Deadline: 20th of April 2019

You are warmly invited to submit abstracts for the international ethnomusicological symposium Sounds, Songs, and Politics in Ljubljana, Slovenia, on 29-31 August 2019, which is a part of our annual music festival Nights in the Old Ljubljana Town. This year, the thematic foci are: 1. Lingual intertwinings in songs as expressions of coexistence and conflicts, 2. Music, politics and affect 3. Music and transcultural identifications 1. Lingual intertwinings in songs as expressions of coexistence and conflicts Presence of two or more languages in a single song or the change of language as the song travels to other geographic and cultural spaces have not received sufficient scholarly attention so far. Such lingual adaptations reflect mutual relations among people with different identities on a continuum between peaceful coexistence and conflict. How folk music researchers and other scholars treated such phenomena in the course of fieldwork and in their writings? In which ways and to what extent ideological issues and political influences affected and continue to affect processes of lingual intertwining or distinctions, as well as scholarly understanding of these processes and the resulting products? We invite contributions with focus on lingual intertwinings at various periods and creative fields. 2. Music, Politics, and Affect Recent approaches to the political aspects of music performing and listening tend to go beyond the representational and discursive towards the sensorial, emotional and affective capacities of music and sound. They aim to offer new insights into the role music and sound play in the processes of radical reshaping of the political realm at the beginning of the 21st century, which is commonly defined as the time of "crisis of political agency." Within this theme, we invite paper and panel proposals that focus on new tendencies in thinking, practicing, and imagining music's and sound's capacities in political acting, with particular focus on affect, body and senses. The expected topics include musical activism, music and everyday politics, music and infrastructure, and music and (self)care. 3. Music and Transcultural Identifications This theme puts to the forefront the transcultural nature of the processes of creation, performance and reception of music and dance on both individual and collective levels, when the carriers are characterised by ethnic markers (traditional minorities, migrants, refugees, diasporas, and more) or other differently defined identity codes. We invite presentations focused on theoretical treatment of transculturation, transnationality, (dis)identification and other related concepts linked to music and dance, as well as those based on empirical study of complex identifications within the music and dance related processes. Please join us with an individual paper or with a panel consisting of several thematically related papers that fit into any of the three symposium themes. Your proposal of 200 to 300 words should reach us by 20th of April 2019 at the electronic addresses ursa(at)zrc-sazu.si and marija.klobcar(at)zrc-sazu.si.