*CFP* “GENDER AND CREATIVITY IN MUSIC WORLDS”, MUSICA FEMINA INTERNATIONAL 2020 SYMPOSIUM

Música Femina International Symposium

Gender and creativity in music worlds

8-9 de enero de 2020

Budapest, Hungría

Our invited keynote speaker is Ann Werner, Associate Professor, Gender Studies, Södertörn University.

As part of its Hungarian event series, Música Femina International is organizing a symposium and workshop in Budapest on 8-9 January 2020. The initiative, involving Austria, Hungary, Slovenia and Germany, is primarily aimed at creating the conditions for more balanced relations of gender in the various spheres and institutions of music production.

The Budapest symposium will provide a public forum for researchers and music professionals — including musicians, educators, critics and industry personnel — interested in the causes and modalities of gender inequalities and gendered power dynamics present in the multiple genres and worlds of music. The symposium is co-supported by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.

For music professionals and academics in post-socialist Europe opportunities to participate and share ideas concerning gender and music have been relatively limited in comparison with colleagues in Western countries. For this reason, we particularly welcome proposals from the Central and East European region.

The programme will include a keynote talk, three conference panels, a roundtable discussion with artists, and a workshop for musicians, music (industry) students and music industry professionals. Presentations at the conference panels detailed below will be selected by a committee of experts.

The conference panels will be organized around the following themes:

1. Gender (Studies), Education and Pedagogies

This panel will consider the intersection of gender studies and the field of music education and pedagogy. We welcome explorations of the ways in which theories and methodologies of gender studies have informed music education and pedagogical theory, methodology, as well as practice. We also invite studies of gender-based roles, hierarchies, relations of power and divisions of labour in music education. Furthermore, we seek general reflections on the relationship between gender and musical socialisation as well as studies of gender and musical learning in informal settings such as amateur learning.

2. Gender and Music in Central and East Europe*

Focusing on the Central and East European region, this panel will include papers that address topic with a geographically and/or historically informed perspective. In their recent history, popular music and music industry studies, musicology, sociology of music or media studies have been dominated by a Western, in particular, Anglo-American focus oriented towards the core of the global cultural industries. In order to counterbalance this orientation, we invite papers analysing the relations between gender and music — composition, music making, musical texts and genres, music consumption, education and learning, the music industry, music scenes and genres — in Central and East European societies, past and present. We also welcome gender and music studies of local scenes in terms of their position within global economic, political and social hierarchies, as well as explorations of regional particularities and differences.

3. Gender and the Music Industries

The recent years have seen many initiatives – international and local, academic as well as industry- or community-initiated – interrogating gender inequalities in terms of opportunities, participation, access and representation, as well as everyday sexism within the music industries.

The media events around the Harvey Weinstein scandal in the Hollywood film industry and the following “MeToo” social media hashtag campaign also generated multiple responses and actions from within the music industry. The panel invites papers discussing the visibility of women, unequal divisions of labour, sex segregation across musical professions, as well as explorations of working conditions, experiences and narratives of women in the music industries. We also welcome investigations of the relationship between gender and the digitisation of the music industries, such as, online (self-)representation; artist and fan relationships (including gender and fan labour); gender and the uncertainty of digital labour; digital curation – algorithmic as well as human, and gendered practices in the fields of composition, music making and digital plus online technology.

We invite scholars and experts in the field — musicians, educators, music critics, and music industry professionals — to submit proposals relating to the wide range of topics of “gender and music”. Abstracts of approximately 300 words (PDF format) presenting the subject, the conceptual framework and the analytical approach along with a brief CV (one page at most) should be sent to budapest@musicafeminainternational.eu by 20 September 2019. Applicants will receive a response regarding their submission by 20 October 2019.

This conference is being organised by MusicaFemina International, the Hungarian Artisjus Society, the Department of Sociology and Communication of Budapest University of Technology and Economics, the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology of Central European University, Budapest, the Liszt Academy of Music and Department of Media and Communication of Eötvös Loránd University. There is no participation fee and refreshments will be provided for participants.

For further inquiries please email us at budapest@musicafeminainternational.eu