The founders of the research cluster, Prof Eoin Devereux and Drs Aileen Dillane and Martin J. Power have established the ‘Popular Musics Matter: Social, Political and Cultural Interventions’ series with Rowman & Littlefield International.
The series will publish internationally informed edited collections, monographs and textbooks which engage in the critical study of popular music performances (live and recorded), historical and contemporary popular music practitioners and artists, and participants and audiences for whom such musics embody aesthetic, cultural and particularly socio-political values.
The series sees music not only as a manifestation of global popular culture, but also as a form that profoundly shapes and continually seeks to redefine our understandings of how society operates in a given location and era.
Theoretically, books in this series are envisaged as:
• Interrogating the potential of popular music to both foreclose and promote alternative / hegemonic frameworks of understanding within the public consciousness.
• Analysing the creative processes and outputs in terms of the social, political and historical moment in which popular music is produced.
• Extending discussion of live and recorded performances of popular music within critical reception theory frameworks and fandom studies as a means of appreciating consumption as a form of secondary production (prosumption) and creation.
• Honouring, but also moving beyond the Anglo-American hegemony evident in the majority of Popular Music Studies.
Empirically, the series editors are particularly interested in publishing work which:
• Engages with the politics of performance, production, consumption and circulation that is informed by fieldwork and ethnography.
• Seeks to synthesise critically engaged musicological analysis with deeply textured and nuanced readings of the broader socio-cultural context from which popular music(s) emerge.
• Includes popular music genres from different geographic locations and epochs in order to broaden discussions of the role that popular music plays in shaping and (re)defining our understandings of how society operates.
Methodologically, the series will welcome texts which:
• Address key ontological and epistemological debates within the broad field of popular musics analysis of societal issues.
• Provide new and creative ways of interrogating popular musics that blends close textual and textural analysis of performances with approaches informed by fieldwork and ethnography.
• Map different approaches to the analysis of popular music ‘texts’ by modelling interdisciplinary approaches that also view music/songs as ‘process’ in the elucidations of social meaning.
This interdisciplinary series will include texts located in sociology, (ethno)musicology, cultural studies, political science, socio-linguistics, media and communication studies, musicology, social psychology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, postcolonial studies, feminism, gender studies, and queer studies and more. A range of theoretical perspectives are anticipated, including but not limited to critical theory and cultural theory, music and ethnography, performance theory, sociology of music, musical semiotics, queer theory, transnational theory, music and hybridity and migration theory.
Further information is available here.
To submit a proposal for a monograph or edited collection, please download and complete the Proposal Form from Proposal Form and submit it by email to the series editors at pmpc@ul.ie, together with a sample chapter.