Volume 5 – Call for Proposals – Popular Music Ethnographies

Riffs Vol 5 Issue 2: Popular Music Ethnographies

Guest Editors: Shane Blackman and Robert McPherson

This special issue of Riffs on Popular Music Ethnographies aims to bring together ethnographic writing from any discipline, theoretical perspective or methodological approach. We welcome submissions from writers from academic and non-academic backgrounds. We also encourage short contributions; these could include written, visual, and musical elements and/or interrogate traditional and experimental forms of communication of ideas and arguments. We also welcome collaborations between writers, poets, musicians, composers and visual artists. In-keeping with the Riffs aim, we hope to include work from a variety of contributors.  Explore our website for previous publications and journal issues.

Explorations of Popular Music Ethnographies could consider the following themes:

* The spectacle of live music performance          * Festivals, zine creation and distribution 

* Off- and online listening experiences                * Music scene production and participation 

* Places, objects, sounds & bodily experiences  * Historical & geographical music locations

* Visual or audio materials and technologies      * Audiences, music collections, fandom

* Biographical reflections                                  * Musicians’ futures under Covid19

* Genres: grime, rap, rai, soul, jazz rock, folk metal, punk, reggae, slam poets or ambient minimalists.

Popular music ethnography transports and immerses people into new and unfamiliar worlds. The sights, sounds, smells, and emotions of making and experiencing music – carefully curated – sow the seeds of critical insights and we step into and through a scene, an industry, a performance, a particular moment in time or an amalgamation of years watching, listening and taking part. For a moment, we are there. We travel with the narrator and are called upon to do our own part of the intellectual labour. As a creative and experimental space, Riffs encourages critical engagement not only with popular music as a topic, but with the ways in which we analyse and communicate our observations. We welcome traditional, experimental or multimedia engagements with ethnography as a research approach and as a way of writing. 

Deadlines: 15th of November 2020 proposal deadline: to include a title and 300-word synopsis, your name(s), a short bio and contact email. Full submissions (2000-7000 words / visual (to not exceed 8 A4 pages) are expected by 15th May 2021. All visual and audio content must have a Creative Commons License, be owned by the contributor or with full owner permissions. All proposals submitted to Riffs will be considered by the editorial panel and invited contributions will be peer reviewed before publication.

Please send your proposal to: info@riffsjournal.org  

All papers are subject to anonymous review and will be published online (Open Access). The Special Issue in Popular Music Ethnographies will be published late in 2021. Authors must follow the Riffs submission guidelines here.

Image credit: Sarah Raine.