[ANPPOM-Lista] "CFP: Locating Heavy Metal Music and Culture"

[Carlos Palombini]

*4th ISMMS biennial international Conference, 17-20 June 2019 “Locating
Heavy Metal Music and Culture”*


Five years have passed since the inception of the ISMMS (International
Society for Metal Music Studies), an international association that has
been triggering a new dynamic of collective research on hard rock, heavy
metal and metal within the humanities and social sciences. It was
officially launched during the first conference on “Heavy Metal and Popular
Culture
<https://www.bgsu.edu/arts-and-sciences/cultural-and-critical-studies/popular-culture/conferences-and-institutes/heavy-metal-popular-culture-conference.html>”
at Bowling Green State University (Ohio, USA) in April 2013. This founding
event which was followed in 2015 by the “Modern Heavy Metal: markets,
practices and cultures <http://www.modernheavymetal.net/>” at the Aalto
University School of Business in Helsinki (Finland) and in 2017 by the
“Boundaries
and Ties: the Place of Music Communities
<https://hcmc.uvic.ca/boundariesandties/index.php>” conference at the
University of Victoria (British Columbia, Canada).


Within that time span, academic research and events dedicated to metal
studies (books, scholarly journal issues, conferences, and workshops) have
multiplied all around the globe – a process confirmed by the creation in
2013 of *Metal Music Studies*
<https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-Journal,id=236/> (Intellect
Books)[4] <http://www.francemetalstudies.org/call-for-papers/#_ftn4>, an
interdisciplinary research journal.


Following the United States, Finland and Canada, France will thus be
hosting the 2019 edition of this reference metal studies conference. After
years of prosperous research and study, and six years after the birth of
the ISMMS, the time has come to review knowledge on metal music and culture.


With “*Locating* *metal*” as our core theme, we wish to discuss situated
analyses, stemming from fieldwork or corpus studies.


Locations and positions can be understood in the proper sense, that of the
geography, the territories or the physical spaces and places of metal
practices, communities and scenes, as well as in the figurative sense, as
social space.


 the 1980s, the first studies on heavy metal described the genre via ideal
types (and sometimes, stereotypes), and concluded that in practical and
symbolic terms, this electric guitar-based music was – in general –
appreciated by young, working class, “white”, Western, heterosexual men,
brought up within a Judeo-Christian environment, who lived in the suburbs
of major cities.


These first analyses served as milestones, but have been qualified or
deconstructed since, with heavy metal’s considerable evolutions since the
early days, as well as with the assertion of a great variety of metal
identities: indeed, the genre has always been appreciated by a broad array
of people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds, although it may not
appear to be so within public space. Thus, as metal music aged and its many
subgenres propagated all over the world, the fans’ perspectives on gender,
race, class, North/South relations, sexual identities or religious beliefs
were questioned anew.


http://www.francemetalstudies.org/call-for-papers/

-- 
carlos palombini, ph.d. (dunelm)
professor de musicologia ufmg
professor permanente ppgm-unirio