CfP: IASPM-bfE Biennial Conference – Bypassing and Rerouting: Appropriations, Displacement and Hacking in Popular Music (01.-02.07.2026, Gustave Eiffel University, France) Deadline: 07.04.2026
Call for Papers
Bypassing and Rerouting: Appropriations, Displacement and Hacking in Popular Music.
July 1 & 2, 2026
Gustave Eiffel University Organization CCAMAN-LISAA, CEMTI, RASM-CHCSC & IASPM-BfE
[FULL CfP PDF]
Announcement on the IASPM-bfE Website
Studying popular cultures necessarily leads to taking into account the logics and practices of bypassing and diversion. From the nineteenth century, some workers engaged in what was known as travail en perruque – work carried out fraudulently for one’s own benefit, using the employer’s tools or time – while the so-called “sublime” workers (Poulot, 1980) resorted to various ruses to deceive their employers. The practice of diversion first emerged in painting (notably with Duchamp’s readymade), before developing in photography and cinema. Theorized by the Situationists (1958) and later by Guy Debord (1967), diversion came to refer to oppositional artistic practices involving the re-presentation of existing cultural and media productions. These practices have taken root within a fringe of cultural and musical activities, transforming its stakes, forms, and aesthetics, and contributing to what Pujas calls “the art of diversion” (2017). This new approach calls for a consideration of logics of deviation and “hacking” in relation to the global strategies of the “mainstream” (Bacot and Canonne, 2019). With the rise of mass media over the course of the twentieth century, consumption patterns within working-class milieus were understood as forms of circumvention, resistance (Hoggart, 1970; de Certeau, 1980), or as the actualization of a new shared culture (Dumazedier; Morin, 1963). The presence of cultures of avoidance, of subcultures (Hebdige, 1979), countercultures (Whiteley, 2012, 2013), and underground cultures is particularly visible in the musical world. Avoidance also consists in producing independently, through DIY practices, and in consuming or even sharing music according to alternative logics, notably via illegal streaming platforms or collaborative downloading networks (Born and Durham, 2022). These “reroutings,” as theorist Steve Goodman defines them, are part of a long history of popular culture and ultimately represent a true culture of circumvention in their own right. Sampling, remixing, and mashups became parts of a “culture jamming” described by Mark Dery (1993). In its original intent, circumvention follows a logic of avoidance, conceived in order to take advantage of limitations—and sometimes flaws—within a system or device, with the aim of creating new objects, practices, and uses (Nova & Ribac, 2019). In this sense, while bypassing and diversion do not stem from the same approach, nor from a linear or unified process, they nonetheless describe a shared trajectory of twisting use, models, or frameworks, conceived not in terms of finality but as a dynamic, evolving, and referential process. The heterogeneity of both the practices and methods considered here – which delve into vast disciplinary fields and open up equally important areas of action (whether compositional, instrumental, identity-based, social, ecological, or even political) – nonetheless constitutes creative matrices, at the very least disruptive ones, that transform our approach from creation through to reception.
This international conference – the first biennial event of the European Francophone branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-BfE) – aims to explore practices, uses, discourses, as well as media and technologies at work in contemporary popular music, through the lens of bypassing and diversion, and all other forms suggesting notions of movement, displacement, or even replacement. The intention to interrogate these mechanisms is thus driven by a dual line of inquiry addressing both the causes and the effects of these practices of bypassing and diversion at work in the history of popular music. These may be examined through a set of non-exhaustive thematic axes:
Musical intertextuality axis: sampling, covers and patterns
Technology, organology, production and distribution axis
Performances, audiences and reception axis
Guidelines for Submission
Proposals for papers of no more than 350 words, accompanied by a short biobibliographical note must be submitted at iaspmbfe[at]outlook[dot]fr
Deadline for submission: April 7th, 2026
Notification of acceptance: end of April, 2026
Dates and location: July 1 and 2, 2026 at Gustave Eiffel University