Winter School: IASPM Benelux Winterschool – Songs and Stories of Social Change (20-22.01.2027, Amsterdam)
Ravenstein Winterschool 2027: Songs and Stories of Social Change
Dates: 20-22 January 2027
Location: Amsterdam
Organizers: Aafje de Roest (University of Amsterdam), Melanie Schiller (Radboud University Nijmegen), Alberto Godioli (University of Groningen)
Credits: 6 ECs. More details on the assignments will be provided closer to the winter school. NB: Credits can only be awarded to humanities ReMA and PhD students from Dutch universities
Open to: PhD and ReMA students; OSL and IASPM Benelux members have first access
Registration VIA THIS LINK. (Still open)
Songs and popular music cultures do more than reflect social realities: they help shape them. Through melodies, rhythms, performance, and the stories they tell, songs can give voice to social change and resistance, articulate collective emotions, and imagine alternative futures. Across histories and geographies, songs have served as powerful vehicles for social change. From protest music and spoken word to hip-hop and musicals, they have long played a crucial role in mobilizing communities and sustaining movements.
This OSL winter school, organized in collaboration with IASPM Benelux, focuses on songs and popular music as narrative forms that articulate, sustain, and sometimes even ignite social movements and social change. By approaching songs through perspectives from literary studies, we ask what happens when we treat song lyrics, musical performances, and song cultures as narrative texts that can be analyzed with the tools of narratology, close reading, and literary interpretation. In doing so, the Winter School highlights how literary and narrative approaches can contribute to the study of songs and popular music.
How do protest songs give form to collective emotion? In what ways do narrative musical forms construct new political imaginaries? And how do songs that imagine the future sound out hope, urgency, or critique in moments of crisis? Throughout the winter school, we will explore these questions through a range of historical and contemporary case studies. Participants will engage with theoretical insights from literary studies, popular music studies, hip-hop studies, narratology, and related fields, alongside creative and interdisciplinary methodological approaches. In addition to examining songs as narrative texts, we will also discuss how songs can be embedded within other narrative media (such as literary texts), and how they can be a tool to reflect on storytelling itself.
This winter school is organized by the Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies (OSL) in collaboration with the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) Benelux branch and will take place in Amsterdam January 20-22, 2027. The winter school is open to everyone, with a special focus on ReMa students and PhD candidates from the humanities and social sciences. Credits can only be awarded to humanities ReMA and PhD students from Dutch universities. The number of participants is limited, and OSL and IASPM Benelux members have priority. Registration and participation are for free via the OSL website, and participants cover their own costs of travel and accommodation. Registration will open in September 2026; please subscribe to the OSL newsletter for more updates. For questions, please send an email to osl[at]rug[dot]nl.
Special guest: We are thrilled to announce that the winter school will include a session and Q&A with renowned songwriter Jens Lekman! Click here for an interview about his latest project Songs for Other People’s Weddings(accompanied by a novel of the same name, co-authored with David Levithan).