With great pleasure we would like to announce that the Urban Music Studies Network comes back to event activities started with the 2018 Groove the City Conferences.

And we have very good news: Groove the City is back! Save the date for „Groove the City – Move the Streets“ – our next International Urban Music Studies Conference that will be held in Vienna from Sept. 17th – 19th, 2026.

More information and Call for Papers will follow very soon…

This international, interdisciplinary conference will take place in Hong Kong, 5-6 December 2024. The conference aims to uncover emergent frameworks and methods for the interpretation and analysis of literary, filmic, and cultural texts relating to the profound transformation of cities around the world across the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

The starting point for discussion is cities in Asia and their dialogues with different cities in the world. While “urban” typically denotes a geographical location and its inhabitants, we use it to indicate a process and practice of co-existence. The urban, in this sense, is informed by socio-cultural, economic, ecological, political, and technological processes that may appear or aspire to be global but that are, in fact, diversely lived and experienced.

The framework “urban mediations” offers a way of thinking about “the urban” not as a bounded, stable object, but as an intermediary agency that is both specific to a particular milieu and connected to people and processes elsewhere. “Mediation” extends recent work on urban infrastructure – the physical systems of connectivity that keep cities moving – to include the social, affective, aesthetic, and material relations that bind the urban to itself and to myriad elsewheres. Like the urban, mediation “is not a stable thing but a way of seeing the unstable relations among dynamically related things.”

More information here https://rih.cuhk.edu.hk/news-and-events/cfp-urban-mediations-conf-dec2024/

Soundscapes profoundly connect listeners to the places they inhabit and thereby reveal the vibrant and resonant fabrics that lie beneath the delineated spaces of visual representation. In Resonant Fabrics, Marvin Heine explores and celebrates the many-layered and ambiguously undulating sense- and soundscapes as they shape and are shaped by urban cultures and particular ways of listening. By examining historical documents, contemporary accounts, and original empirical material through a combination of actor-network-theory, ecology, and sound studies scholarship, he embraces, in a stylistically embodied and often poetic manner, the sonic urban world in all its fragile, ephemeral, yet deeply affective sonority.

More: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-6643-4/resonant-fabrics/?c=311034657