Conference Agenda

Beads from a friendship bracelet scatter across asphalt, catching stadium light before disappearing into the dark. A snowglobe breaks in transit, glitter drifting loose, a tiny storm of permanence and loss. This presentation examines the environmental and ecological dimensions of contemporary Taylor Swift fandom through the emergence of “EcoSwifties”—fans who integrate environmental ethics into their participation in Swiftie culture. Framing fandom as both an ecological and cultural phenomenon, I argue that large-scale pop fandoms generate material, infrastructural, and affective environmental impacts through touring, merchandise production, digital platforms, and fan mobility. Rather than positioning environmental critique as external to fandom, I foreground how ecological concern arises from within fan communities as a form of ethical self-reflexivity. Drawing on mixed-method qualitative research, combining digital ethnography, online discourse analysis, and content analysis of public fan spaces, I examine how EcoSwifties negotiate the moral tension between affective attachment to a beloved artist and unease with the environmental costs of fandom practices. Particular attention is given to merchandise culture—such as vinyl variants, limited-edition drops, and defective goods—as a key site where environmental anxiety, consumer guilt, and ethical experimentation converge. Through anonymized ethnographic vignettes, I show how fans articulate responsibility not through abstention, but through reuse, repair, upcycling, peer education, and forms of “low-impact” participation. Ultimately, the presentation contributes to scholarship on fandom, popular music, and the environmental humanities by demonstrating how fans operate as ecological actors, mediating pleasure, care, and planetary responsibility within highly mediated pop cultures.

This paper examines how romantic couples on TikTok use music to create affective, intimate, and marketable representations of heterosexual love, and how these sonic strategies participate in postfeminist constructions of gender, desire, and intimacy. Focusing on three highly visible TikTok couples—Levi Coralynn and William Conrad, Nara and Lucky Smith, and Pookie and Jett Puckett—the study analyzes 18 videos through multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) to examine how music interacts with visual and textual elements to shape romantic self-branding. Drawing on postfeminist media theory (Gill; Banet-Weiser) and the concept of romantic opportunism (Bandinelli), the paper argues that music plays a central ideological role in compressing complex relationships into affectively compelling and commercial narratives of romantic love. Across the cases, the paper presents three key findings: (1) music functions as an affective romantic brand that stabilizes couples’ online identities; (2) it supports gendered performances of desire in which women are positioned as primary objects of love; and (3) it blurs boundaries between intimate moments and commercial content. By mobilizing familiar songs, audio trends and memes, and music genres, these couples present romance as both attainable and aspirational, even within sponsored content, aligning intimate life with neoliberal and postfeminist logics of self-branding. The paper contributes to ethnomusicological debates on music, affect, and mediation by demonstrating how sound operates as a form of power and affective labor, naturalizing the commodification of intimacy and framing romantic love as something to be felt, admired, and purchased, reinforcing postfeminist notions of love.

This paper examines artificial intelligence (AI) as a form of infrastructural power that reshapes creativity, sustainability, and labor within contemporary music scenes. Moving beyond approaches that frame AI primarily as a neutral tool for composition and production, the study focuses on AI-mediated platforms, data-driven production environments, and recommendation systems, asking how these infrastructures reorganize the social, material, and symbolic conditions through which music is created, circulated, and valued in everyday musical life. Methodologically, the research combines scene-based analysis with qualitative interpretive perspectives grounded in cultural economy and critical platform studies (Straw 1991; Bennett and Peterson 2004; Hesmondhalgh 2019), tracing how creative agency, authorship, and musical labor are negotiated across human musicians, algorithmic systems, and platform infrastructures. Musical practices shaped within the Turkish context are approached not as a bounded case but as analytical intensifiers that render visible heightened forms of algorithmic visibility, platform dependency, and precarious labor within globally uneven music economies. The paper argues that AI reorganizes collective, affective, and experiential dimensions of musical work while redistributing value and recognition, thereby functioning as a regulatory infrastructure that contributes to the reproduction yet also the potential transformation of inequalities across global music worlds (Zuboff 2019; Couldry and Mejias 2019). By foregrounding lived musical experience alongside technological structures, the study contributes to ethnomusicological debates on creativity, labor, sustainability, and power in contemporary music.

Contemporary Gombhira Gaan, a satirical song theatre tradition associated with Chapai Nawabganj and performed through the dialogic pairing of nana–nati (grandfather–grandson), has long operated as a vernacular public sphere where moral commentary is staged through humor, parody, and topicality. Das (2021) argues that Gambhira’s protest poetics convert everyday injustice into performable critique, and I extend his insight to the political economy of music-making under contemporary cultural capitalism. Farjana (2022) shows how Gombhira’s humorous address binds entertainment to ethical counsel, and I ask what happens when that counsel targets the institutions that broker musical value in Bangladesh. Drawing on performance ethnography in festival contexts, lyric and discourse analysis, and digital ethnography of video clips, this paper traces how Gombhira ensembles narrate and mock Bangladesh’s music industries and their Dhaka infrastructures. Performers render the work of intermediaries, including commissioning politics, gatekeeping in broadcast and live circuits, platform-driven visibility, and the problem of piracy and unpaid royalties, as UNESCO Dhaka documents in its sector mapping. Rather than treating folk and industry as separate domains, I show how contemporary Gombhira collapses them. The stage becomes a site where supply-chain logics are debated, rural mobility to metropolitan markets is evaluated, and revenue opacity is named as a failure. The paper contributes to debates on mediation and cultural policy by proposing Gombhira as a form of industry critique that travels across stages and smartphones while remaining anchored in satire’s ethical grammar of shame, laughter, and counsel.