cfp.english.upenn.edu

Popular Music Fandom: A One Day Symposium

Binks Building, University of Chester
Northwest Popular Music Studies Network

Friday 25th June 2010

Keynote speaker: Matt Hills (author of ‘Fan Cultures’)

While a range of researchers in cultural studies - notably Henry Jenkins, Matt Hills and Cornell Sandvoss - have moved the discussion about media fandom forward, much less work has been done specifically on popular music fandom. We invite contributors from a wide range of disciplines to discuss topics associated with popular music fan culture at this free one-day study event in Chester. Themes for papers may include (but are not limited to):

* Defining fandom
* Stardom and celebrity, reading and textuality
* Fandom and the consumer marketplace
* Fans as musicians / musicians as fans
* Perceptions of the music industry
* Collecting and other fan practices
* Live music, local scenes and fandom
* Stereotyping, self-awareness and media representation
* Gender, age and disability
* Methodology and research practice
* Theorizing fandom: processes, practices, identities
* Issues of taste, social mobility and class
* Personal narratives and investments
* Case studies, ethnographies and histories
* Fandom, heritage and tourism
* Specific music genres: jazz fandom, metal, northern soul, electronic music
* Religion, modernity and the ‘cult’ analogy
* The fan community: insiders, outsiders and the ‘ordinary’ audience
* Fan culture and the paradigm of performance
* The ‘pathological’ tradition: questions of typicality and obsession
* Issues of race and nationality
* Power, psychology and symbolic economy
* Online participatory cultures

Papers will be twenty minutes in length. Please send an abstract of up to 200 words along with your name, affiliation, paper title, postal and email address to: Dr Mark Duffett, m.duffett@chester.ac.uk (marking your email title ‘fan symposium’).

The deadline for abstracts is Monday May 10th 2010.