Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:57:59am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Sounding Resistance in Global Music Session Chair: Mikkel Vad | |
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Deviant Propaganda: Festivity and Femininity in Anti-ISIS Propaganda Music Yale University, In June 2014, the militant extremist organization the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) invaded Iraq from the Syrian border, quickly seizing extensive territories and initiating a three-year conflict alongside a global campaign to defeat it. Based on its extremist interpretation of Islam, the militant group's presence was marked by the implementation of extreme violence, ethno-religious cleansing, and sexual slavery that created an atmosphere of dread and terror across the country. ISIS propagated and put into action its rigid ideology, including the strict control over women’s corporeal presence and the erasure of music. Under these circumstances, the Iraqi government called on citizens to participate in the war against ISIS while also seeking to protect them from the spread of ISIS ideologies, rendering propaganda music a vital means of mobilization and persuasion. While military propaganda music in the Arab world typically features slow tempos, deep masculine timbres, and large vocal ensembles, in this paper, I will draw attention to the creative and unprecedented characteristics of anti-ISIS propaganda music, including its dance-inducing rhythms, vivid acoustic design, and representation of female body and voice. Building on my conversations with civilians about their wartime experience of this music, I will then address how the aforementioned musical characteristics acted as a direct counter to ISIS terror. I argue that this deviant propaganda should be viewed beyond a mere dissemination strategy, and instead, as a symmetrical schismogenesis (Bateson 1935), wherein anti-ISIS responses transgress accepted Iraqi norms of wartime music in order to work in opposition to ISIS’s extreme misogyny and suppression. Focusing on the meaning created by these aesthetic elements, I will demonstrate how these propaganda music tracks encapsulate the idea of the nation’s immortality and endurance, what I call “musical lastingness”. Finally, in tandem with the recent scholarship on the terror-responsive effects of music (Crandy 2017; Young 2019; Thomson 2023), I will situate the idea of musical lastingness within Terror Management Theory (Greenberg et al. 1986) to expand on the understanding of musicking as an existential practice. | |