Conference: VIENNA PERSPECTIVES – Art, Urban Space and Social In-/Equality (MUK Vienna)

GROOVE THE CITY – International Scholars’ Study Sessions
VIENNA PERSPECTIVES – Art, Urban Space and Social In-/Equality 
Urban Music Studies and Digital Humanities
Nov. 16th – 18th, 2022 +++ MUK Vienna 

Artistic interventions in public space, the relocation of cultural events and festivals from the city center to the outskirts as well as the intention to achieve an all-encompassing social equality through music and the arts remain a central motive of urban cultural policy. Therefore, the concept of class and various mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion - in  Luhmann's sense - still operate as parameters for measuring social equality and inequality. In the field of music and urban culture, this situation continually leads to discourses about participation, access and interpretive power – until today and especially after the rupture of the cultural fields caused by the pandemic and since the beginning of the war happening in Ukraine.

In this discourse, the City of Vienna continues to play a paradigmatic role during the last 100 years. Since 1918, as a model of a city governed by social democracy, Red Vienna offers – not without nostalgic recollections – varied scenarios of a desired social and cultural assimilation. Based on fundamental explorations of the concepts of equality and inequality, the international study sessions will draw on the case of Vienna presenting and discussing models of utopian (and less utopian) concepts of local urban politics and the organization of musical life before and after Covid as well as facing the current socio-political tension across and beyond Europe. 

Panels:
I. Music and the City
II. The Sociality of Urban Music – Locality, Place & Cultural Policy  
III. Utopian City – The Cultural Projection of the Viennese Social Democracy 
IV. Recomposing the City – Viennese Approaches
V. Visual Analytics and the City Metaphor
VI. Urban Space – Inequality and Diversity – Spatial and Social Difference

Confirmed Speakers:
Wolfgang Aigner; Alenka Barber-Kersovan; Jens Dangschat; Wolfgang Fichna; Velitchko Filipov; Yvonne Franz; Lisa Gaupp; Volker Kirchberg; Sabine Knierbein; Robin Kuchar; Simon Mc Veigh; Silvia Miksch; Robert Musil; Edouard Neversal; Michael Parzer; Robert Sablatnig; Werner Michael Schwarz; Georg Spitaler;Manuela Waldner; Susana Zapke; Ingo Zechner; 

Languages: German and English
Film and Music: Students of the MUK
Organisation: Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna (MUK) in cooperation with the Leuphana University Lüneburg and the Vienna University of Technology (Technische Universität Wien -TU Wien)
Concept: Susana Zapke (MUK)
Location: MUK – Johannesgasse 4a – 1010 Wien 
Registration: s.zapke[at]muk.ac[dot]at

More information here.