CALL FOR PAPERS:
MUSIC, SOUND, AND LIMINALITY
Carleton University’s Music and Culture Graduate Student Society is pleased to announce this year’s annual symposium, Music, Sound and Liminality, that will take place in-person, on Friday March 15th and Saturday March 16th, 2024. We are pleased to welcome Dr. Katherine Meizel (Bowling Green State University) as our keynote speaker!
The term liminality has been developed and applied within diverse fields including anthropology, cultural studies, geography, and education, wherein it is often associated with concepts such as performativity, transformation, transgression, subversion, power, marginality, and more. Derived from the Latin līmen, meaning threshold, liminality invokes in-betweenness, ambiguity, possibility, and uncertainty. Like sound’s constant ‘flux,’ liminality allows for transition and transformation in relation to concepts and experiences such as space, emotion, aesthetics, design, being, texture, and time.
This graduate conference invites proposals for paper presentations, roundtables, panels, and lecture recitals exploring music, sound, and liminality. It welcomes papers that interpret sonic expressions of liminality across a range of contexts (i.e., soundscapes, audiovisual media, etc.), as well as those applying liminality as a theoretical perspective within the realm of music and/or sound studies. We encourage interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary engagements with the theme of liminality. Contributions may include topics that address processes of being and becoming (i.e., embodiment, materiality, etc.), highlight extremes (i.e., past/future, utopia/dystopia, positive/negative, etc.), contemplate histories and temporalities, explore aesthetics, and (re)envision realities. Proposals addressing other topics or themes are also welcome.
Submission Guidelines
- All submissions should include a title and 250-300-word Please ensure no identifying information is on the proposal as submissions will undergo anonymous peer-review.
- Paper presentations will be allotted twenty minutes, followed by a ten-minute question period.
- Roundtable, panel, and lecture-recital proposals should indicate the title and duration of the session, the number of participants, and their contributions.
- Proposals must be emailed to mcgss@cunet.carleton.ca by 11:59 p.m. EST on Friday December 15th, 2023. In your correspondence, please indicate any accommodations required for participation.
- Notifications of acceptance will be distributed by Friday January 12th, 2024.
- Any questions can be emailed to mcgss@cunet.carleton.ca.
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Katherine Meizel
Katherine Meizel is Professor of Ethnomusicology at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her book Idolized: Music, Media, and Identity in American Idol (IU Press) was published in 2011. The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies which she co-edited with Nina Eidsheim, was published in 2019, and her monograph Multivocality: Singing on the Borders of Identity was published in early 2020. With the nonprofit label Little Village Foundation, she co-produced the album Raise Your Voice: The Sound of Student Protest to document the 2018 protests against gun violence. Her writing has also appeared in public venues such as Slate, NPR.org, The New Republic, and The Conversation.