CfP: 49th ICTMD World Conference (14.-20.01.2027, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile) Deadline: 05.02.2026
49th ICTMD World Conference
14–20 January 2027
Santiago, Chile
You are cordially invited to attend the 49th ICTMD World Conference, which will be held on 14-20 January 2027 at Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile. The ICTMD World Conference provides the leading international venue for the presentation of new research on traditions of music and dance. Many new initiatives emerge at World Conferences and, perhaps even more crucially, discussion at these meetings helps us shape our ongoing work. A successful World Conference is a truly stimulating place to be, and a wonderful place to meet and share ideas, music, and dance, with colleagues from all over the world.
Conference Themes
The conference themes for the 49th ICTMD World Conference have been developed in both English and Spanish, in recognition of the large number of Spanish-speaking members across Latin America, and in consideration of participants from the host country and the broader region. The conference aims to adopt bilingual approaches wherever possible to foster greater inclusivity and accessibility.
1) Latin America and the Caribbean in the Region and Beyond
Latin America and the Caribbean encompass diverse musical and dance traditions shaped by complex histories of colonization, resistance, migration, and cultural exchange. From Afro-Caribbean music and Indigenous ritual dances to mestizo genres, contemporary urban forms, and diasporic reimaginings, music and dance in this region serve as powerful tools for identity, memory, political expression, and social transformation. This theme invites scholars, artists, and practitioners to explore Latin American and Caribbean music and dance both within the region and in transnational and diasporic contexts, including ones that may often be overlooked, such as Asian music in Latin America and Latin American music in Asia. It encourages reflections on how these expressive forms are practiced, studied, preserved, adapted, and contested across local, national, and global landscapes. How do regional aesthetics and social meanings shift as genres move across borders? What roles do migration, tourism, digital media, and global markets play in shaping these traditions? How are institutions—academic, governmental, religious, or grassroots—engaged in their transmission and transformation?
2) Digital Media
As digital technologies continue to rapidly transform the cultural landscape, music and dance practices across the world are undergoing profound shifts. From AI generated compositions and choreographies to online dance challenges, virtual reality performances, and digital archives of intangible heritage, the integration of digital media into the expressive arts is reshaping how music and dance are created, experienced, transmitted, and theorized. This theme invites critical engagement with the intersections of music, dance, and digital media, foregrounding the implications these technologies hold for ethnomusicology, ethnochoreology, and related disciplines. How do digital platforms affect traditional forms of musical expression as social and artistic practices? How can traditional forms of authority and cultural rights be managed with rapid and widescale digital sharing? What ethical and epistemological questions arise when AI becomes a co-creator or interpreter of music and movement? How are digital tools enabling new forms of embodiment, improvisation, and community? How are digital platforms improving and impacting music distribution, promotion, and consumption? Conversely, how might they contribute to cultural homogenization, surveillance, sustainability concerns, or the commodification of expressive forms? How are the recent processes of political control, platforms concentration and decay affecting existing digital scenes and cultures?
3) Power, Conflict, and Planetary Health
This theme explores how sound and movement respond to and shape the interconnected challenges of political struggle, environmental crisis, and community resilience. From protest songs and national anthems to climate activism, post-disaster recovery, or critiques of sonic weapons and the legislation of bodies, music and dance practices act as powerful tools for expressing resistance, negotiating power, and rebuilding both societies and ecosystems. We invite contributions that examine these modes as sites of contestation, cultural memory, and ecological engagement highlighting how it reflects and influences the complex dynamics between social, cultural, and environmental systems. Topics may include music in conflict and reconciliation, sonic responses to ecological degradation, and the role of performance in (re)organising communities and imagining more just, sustainable futures. This theme also encourages innovative presentation formats and interactive sessions. It approaches music and dance as community, social and cultural practices as sites of contestation, and as sources for (re)imagining, (re)conceptualising, and (re)organising society.
4) Spiritual and Religious Performativities
The spiritual and the spirit world are often believed to exist independently of religion, society, and belief systems that typically claim authority and generate various orthodoxies. Spirituality as personal belief and religion as institutionalized organization can be either complementary or adversarial (e.g., internal reformation or external evangelization). Notably, performances associated with rituality, spirituality, and religiosity can be distinguished from their performativity in the original Butlerian sense—for example, the non-ecclesiastical Missa Solemnis, subscription concerts of Bharata Natyam, or Papantla's Palo Volador as a UNESCO-designated tradition. This theme opens itself to considerations (and reconsiderations) of gender, colonial complicities and resistances, shifts between restricted, private and public forms, secularization, tourism, cultural conservation, ecologies, and subject positionality—including that of the researcher.
5) Queering the Field
Queer approaches, queer topics, and not least queer researchers have gained momentum in contemporary ethnomusicological discourse. Ethnomusicological gender studies currently focus widely on sexuality, with queer theory forming a central theoretical impulse. Recent publications discuss the position of queerness within our field, including critical reflections on how "queering" has gained academic currency and may also lose its initial disruptive qualities as it becomes an apolitical buzzword in the humanities. Nonetheless—or perhaps especially now—it is vital to provide spaces for critically interrogating music and dance practices through a queer lens, encompassing both normative and queer expressive forms, as well as the positionalities of queer researchers. The theme also invites discussions of Indigenous non-binary genderings and reconceptualizations of local gender constructs informed by global/glocal(ized) LGBTQ+ categories.
6) Alternate Histories
The proposed theme seeks to highlight previously unwritten or erased intellectual histories within music and dance studies, especially as Western methodologies and theories continue to dominate global music-dance scholarship. This theme offers scholars the opportunity to present on topics such as alternative research methodologies (including collaborative or applied approaches); increased diversity in researcher positionalities; varied approaches to fieldwork notation; the histories of local, self-taught, or otherwise marginalized scholars and practitioners (e.g., women, queer, Indigenous); overlooked theoretical insights; and histories of knowledge production and dissemination that extend beyond written texts. It builds on recent pedagogical movements toward global music history, historical turns in Latin American ethno/musicology, and the emergence of traditional music studies in Chile as a distinct ethnomusicological subdiscipline.
7) New Research
In addition to the themes above, we welcome papers on new areas of research not addressed within the conference themes.
Timeline / Línea de tiempo
First notice: April 2025
Second notice (themes): July 2025
First call for proposals: October 2025
Second call for proposals: November 2025
Deadline for submission of proposals: 31 December 2025
Notification of acceptances: 31 March 2026
Submissions
Submit your proposal to the 2027 ICTMD World Conference now using the following website: easychair.org/cfp/ictmd2027