Conference Report: “The Future of Pop: Big Questions Facing Popular Music Studies in the 21st Century,” AMS Pre-Conference Symposium
Co-authors: Brian F. Wright, Amy Coddington
Journal of Popular Music Studies
Vol. 32, no. 3: pp. 27–39 (2020)
Abstract
The study of popular music is, well, popular. It crosses over easily between academic and non-academic audiences, it addresses objects and practices many students are already passionate about, and it is frequently seen within music departments (and other departments in which it takes place) as a driver of enrollments. Popular music scholars also frequently help shape public discourse. Yet while much of the work we do intersects with work by musicians, fans, journalists, filmmakers, podcasters, and others, our existing scholarly systems still do not value engaging with these constituencies. Popular music studies is also an inherently interdisciplinary field and thus as a whole comprises hugely diverse methodological and theoretical orientations, not to mention varied disciplinary and professional expectations. In addition to these specific issues, popular music studies faces the same widespread challenges as academia itself. Higher education’s growing reliance on contingent labor has far-ranging effects on the quality of instruction, mentorship, leadership, and research that popular music scholars can achieve. Graduate programs do not sufficiently prepare students for professional careers outside of academia, and the difficult labor market disproportionately affects underprivileged people. As a result, the academy is less diverse than our students, the greater public, and, for many scholars, our objects of study.
In this article, we report on the two-day event, “The Future of Pop: Big Questions Facing Popular Music Studies in the 21st Century,” at Northeastern University in October 2019. The event was sponsored by the Popular Music Study Group of the American Musicological Society (AMS-PMSG), Northeastern University, and Amherst College as a pre-conference symposium tied to the AMS’s annual meeting in Boston. The concentrated space and time of the symposium enabled and encouraged friendly discussions, collegial interrogations, and some collaborative thinking among participants about how to address the challenges we all face in our work—challenges necessarily complicated by our diverse identities, disciplines, research interests, and relationships to the academy. The Future of Pop was intended as a gathering space for those in attendance to take our field seriously, to critique and celebrate where we are and where we have come from, and to generate conversations about moving forward, both collectively as a field and as individual scholars and pedagogues.