CfP: Popular Music and/as Resistance. AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting (06.-09.11.2025, Minneapolis) Deadline: 07.03.2025
CFP: Popular Music and/as Resistance
AMS-SMT Joint Annual Meeting – Minneapolis, MN – 6-9 November 2025
Application Deadline: 7 March 2025
The relationship between popular music and politics is louder than ever. At the 2025 Super Bowl halftime performance, an ostensibly politically neutral platform, Kendrick Lamar offered a socio-economic critique of racial inequity in the United States when his all-Black dancers performed in the shape of the American flag. Similarly, queer pop icon Chappell Roan’s 2025 Grammy acceptance speech took aim at the industry’s failure to offer artists a living wage and pledged $25,000 towards healthcare for developing musicians—a donation matched by Noah Kahan and Charli XCX. Northern Ireland rap group Kneecap also received several accolades at the 2025 BAFTAs despite consistent (and scathing) lyrical indictments of British imperialism and their role in the recent construction of a “Free Palestine” mural in West Belfast. As evidenced by the swell of online discourse in the aftermath of these statements, artists and other cultural intermediaries are never exempt from criticism regarding the limitations of their efforts to combine performance and politics. Still, these same musicians—and by extension, their audiences—are always operating within the constraints of a profit-driven and politics-averse music industry.
The current political moment offers an opportunity to revisit the politics and hermeneutics of 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 and Jefferson 1976, Fiske 1989, Rose 1994). More recently, some scholars have adopted the language of vibes (James 2021), circuit bending (Hertz and Parikka 2012), algorithmic selves (Bishop and 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 music and its scholarship provide spaces for doing the hard work of unsettling nationalist and colonial imaginaries, amending exclusionary archives/records, and offering solidarity and safety when governments and institutions cannot or will not? Does “resistance” and its synonyms capture this hard work? In what ways do popular music analyses “resist” or create friction with more traditional modes of engaging with music theory and histories? How does resistance make itself audible? And what are the limitations of resistance, unsettling, and friction as political ideals in popular music?
The Popular Music Study Group of AMS, in collaboration with the Popular Music Interest Group of SMT, seeks paper proposals for a focused session on how artists, scholars, and other political subjects grapple with themes, actions, and critiques of resistance in times of intensifying constraints. As a guide, 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 and limits of “resistance” as a political ideal
We define popular music broadly, including (but not limited to) pop, rock, R&B, hip-hop, EDM, country, blues, parlor songs, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz, as well as non-western popular musics. We seek papers from a variety of disciplinary, historical, methodological, and personal perspectives, and strongly encourage SMT members to participate. We also especially encourage submissions from junior and contingent faculty, in addition to graduate students.
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[dot]ca). The format of this two-hour session is a keynote speaker/paper (TBA) supported by three to four focused papers. 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.