10th Conference of the Royal Musical Association Music and Philosophy Study Group
Department of Music, Dublin City University; Thursday and Friday, 9th-10th 2026
Call for Papers for Themed Sessions
Themed Sessions invite papers centred on a shared topic. These sessions run in addition to Free Paper Sessions and Associate Sessions. The MPSG committee and the session convenors invite proposals for 20-minute (in person) papers related to the three Themed Sessions below.
To propose a paper, please send a paper title and abstract of no more than 350 words to the session convenor by the deadline of Friday 31st October. The decision regarding the acceptance of proposals will be communicated in December.
Themed Session 1: 鈥�Recession Pop: Music in the Ruins of Neoliberalism鈥�
Session convenor: Dr Jacob Downs (jacob.downs@music.ox.ac.uk)
What happens to commercial music when economies collapse? To speak of music 鈥榠n the ruins of neoliberalism鈥� (Brown 2019) is to register a contemporary world in which the economic and cultural project of neoliberal capitalism has buckled but not fallen. While the 2008 financial crash and its aftermath certainly exposed neoliberalism鈥檚 contradictions, its familiar infrastructures鈥攑recarious labour, financial volatility, and austerity鈥攅ndure: too broken to function, yet too entrenched to dismantle. We might say that neoliberalism persists today as a cultural wasteland of hollowed-out futures, littered with the debris of capitalist realism (Fisher 2009).
Pop music made during and soon after the crash often registered these conditions. Hits such as Kesha鈥檚 鈥楾iK ToK鈥�, Lady Gaga鈥檚 鈥楯ust Dance鈥�, and the Black Eyed Peas鈥� 鈥業 Gotta Feeling鈥� offered alcohol-drenched anthems of excess鈥攕ongs of abandon launched into a world of foreclosures and lay-offs. A decade later, a second wave has emerged: Gaga and Kesha have returned with an updated sound, joined by newcomers: Charli XCX, flaunting hedonism edged with exhaustion; PinkPantheress, pulling hooks from the vestiges of UK garage; Chappell Roan, staging extravagance as both mask and release; and many more. This new wave is haunted by Y2K aesthetics鈥攕hiny surfaces and millennial optimism recycled just as their promises of prosperity ring most hollow. Why this return, and why now? What futures, if any, can pop sound in these ruins?
This session positions recession pop as a category demanding conceptual labour in the form of interventions that mobilize continental philosophy, critical theory, and related traditions to interrogate its aesthetics and politics. What is recession pop? What does it mean for pop music to aestheticize austerity, to recycle its past, or to imagine futurity from within collapse? How might we grasp the contradictory pleasures and anxieties encoded in recession pop? And what, if anything, can this music tell us about the possibility of survival, critique, and speculative futures in the ruins of neoliberalism?
Themed Session 2: 鈥楳usic and Philosophy Studies in Contemporary China: Dialogue between West and East鈥�
Session convenor: Prof. Luna Sun (sunyue@shcmusic.edu.cn)
In recent decades, the field of music and philosophy has undergone significant expansion worldwide, and China has become an increasingly dynamic participant in these conversations. The session 鈥淢usic and Philosophy Studies in Contemporary China: Dialogue between West and East鈥� seeks to explore the distinctive approaches, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks emerging from Chinese scholarship, as well as the interactions between global traditions and local intellectual resources.
Music and philosophy in China today unfold across multiple dimensions: the re-reading of classical Chinese thought (Confucian, Daoist, Buddhist) in relation to aesthetics of sound and musical practice; the reception and transformation of Western philosophical perspectives (from Kant and Hegel to Nietzsche, Adorno, and contemporary theorists); and the interdisciplinary dialogues between philosophy, musicology, cultural studies, and aesthetics. By addressing these areas, the session aims to highlight both the continuities with Chinese intellectual traditions and the creative innovations arising from the country鈥檚 rapidly changing cultural and academic environment. We are enthusiastically expecting dialogues between East and West on music and philosophy.
We invite papers that address, but are not limited to, the following themes:
鈥� Reinterpretations of Chinese classical philosophy in relation to music and sound.
鈥� Engagement with Western philosophical thought in Chinese music scholarship.
鈥� Comparative studies of aesthetics, ethics, and ontology of music in Chinese and international contexts.
鈥� Contemporary Chinese contributions to global debates in philosophy of music.
鈥� Reflections on the institutional and disciplinary conditions of music鈥損hilosophy research in present-day China.
Submission guidelines: Abstracts must be submitted in English (maximum length as required by MPSG 26 guidelines). Contributions from scholars based in China and abroad are equally welcome.
Themed Session 3: 鈥�Liminal Musicking: Dreams, Imagination, Thought鈥�
Session convenors: Dr Christine Dysers and Malte Kobel (liminalmusicking@gmail.com)
What is 鈥榤usical thought鈥�? Can music be considered a form of thinking? How to think in, with or through music?
In times of planetary crises, traditional modes of thinking and being in the world increasingly fall short. Music, by definition engaged with sociality, has the agency to access, highlight and challenge existing socio-political formations, and might therefore imagine alternative ways of being in the world.
Marking the start of a larger, collaborative research project, we hypothesise musicking as a mode of thought in its own right; one that differs from and raises challenges to a normative phonologocentrism of (Western) traditional rationality and its disembodied understanding of thinking. In that respect, we speculate that musicking is a liminal and transient practice that shares certain affinities with (lucid) dreaming and the imaginary.
This themed session aims to foster cross-disciplinary conversation on liminal musicking and its surrounding topics. We invite proposals for short provocations of up to ten minutes in the broadly defined fields of music studies and philosophy, and welcome speculative, theoretical, and practical perspectives from across genres, cultures, histories and traditions on topics including, but not necessarily limited to:
鈥� Musical epistemologies: music as thought, musicking as thought-in-action, sonic thinking, more-than-human musical sensibilities, feminist and decolonial perspectives and methodologies
鈥� Imaginary musics: imagined, fictional, and surrealist musics, music and mental imagery, music and memory
鈥� Music in/and dreams: irrational, illogical, unreal, incoherent, or associative musics, strange and warped temporalities, disorientation, dream logics
鈥� Multi-modal reasoning and affect: non-sonic musical sensibilities (touch, smell, taste, etc.), feeling-thinking, d/Deaf perspectives
Further details of the conference, including the Call for Papers for Free Sessions on any area of music and philosophy (deadline: 31st October), can be found on the MPSG website: