Emília Barna, PhD, is Associate Professor and head of the Cultural Industries MA specialisation at the Department of Sociology and Communication, Budapest University of Technology and Economics. A sociologist and popular music scholar, her main research areas include the music industries and digitisation, popular music and gender, cultural labour, and popular music and politics. She has led the research project ‘Creative labour in the Hungarian music industry’ (NKFIH FK 128669, 2018–2022) and acted as country principal investigator in the project ‘Popular Music and the Rise of Populism in Europe’ (Volkswagen Stiftung 94 754, 2019–2022). With Tamás Tófalvy, she has co-edited the books Made in Hungary: Studies in Popular Music (2017, Routledge) and Popular Music, Technology, and the Changing Media Ecosystem: From Cassettes to Stream (2020, Palgrave), and published articles in the journals First Monday and Popular Music & Society. She is a member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and the Working Group for Public Sociology, ‘Helyzet’. She is editor of the Routledge Music and Politics book series.
Dan Bendrups is the Director of Research Education and Development, Graduate Research School, La Trobe University, Australia. He has written on various aspects of popular and folk music in Chile and is best known for his research regarding the role of popular music in sustaining Rapa Nui (Easter Islander) cultural heritage. His previous (2011) article in Popular Music described the experiences of Chilean diaspora musicians in Australia.
Gonzalo Carrasco holds a Master's degree in international relations from the University of Melbourne, and is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Social Inquiry at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University in Melbourne. His research interests lie at the intersection of culture, ideology and civic engagement, with a focus on Latin American protest art. Presently Gonzalo is exploring the Chilean Nueva Canción (‘New Song’) movement, an enduring Latin American artistic phenomenon ingrained in local and global political consciousness. This movement has prevailed as a reference for socio-political discourse, articulated through different channels of artistic creation and political involvement. Considering a more inclusive context, his research aims to broaden this area of investigation, identifying key variables shaping this movement's relative success, including New Song representations, narratives and contemporary renditions. These function as a valuable prism to make sense of the social context from which the genre emerges. Gonzalo has participated in a number of conferences and forums and conducted field research throughout several Chilean regions, investigating the intersection between cultural practices and political ideas.
André Doehring, PhD, is Professor for Jazz and Popular Music Studies and Director of the Institute for Jazz Research at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, Austria. He studied musicology and sociology and received his doctorate in musicology at the University of Giessen, Germany. His research and publications focus on socio-historical, cultural, political and media aspects of jazz and popular music as well as musical analysis. He co-edits the publication series Jazzforschung/Jazz Research and Beiträge zur Jazzforschung/Studies in Jazz Research. Recently, he has led the Austrian part of the project ‘Popular Music and the Rise of Populism in Europe’ (2019–2022, Volkswagen Foundation), an international team of researchers conducting research on the role of popular music in populist contexts in five European countries.
Mario Dunkel is Assistant Professor of Music Education at the Music Department of the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg, Germany. He holds a PhD in American studies from TU Dortmund University. His main research areas are music and politics, the history and practice of jazz, and transcultural music pedagogy. He is the author of The Stories of Jazz: Narrating a Musical Tradition (Hollitzer, 2021) and serves on the editorial boards of Jazz Research Journal and Jazz Education in Research and Practice. Since 2019, he has been the Principal Investigator of the European research project ‘Popular Music and the Rise of Populism in Europe’, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (www.musicandpopulism.eu).
Oded Erez is Lecturer in the Department of Musicology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research combines methodologies from ethnomusicology, historical musicology and cultural studies. Emphasising the interplay of aesthetics and politics in popular music and film music, his work often deals with Israel/Palestine and the East Mediterranean. His publications have appeared in the journals Popular Music, Ethnic and Racial Studies and Journal of Levantine Studies. He also contributed chapters to the recent Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Israel and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Jewish Music. He is currently completing a book manuscript exploring the intertwined histories of Mediterranean pop music and ethno-class politics in Israel.
Kai Ginkel, PhD, is post-doctoral researcher at the Anton Bruckner Private University Linz, Austria, for the project ‘Embodying Expression, Gender and Charisma – Breaking Boundaries’ (Austrian Science Funds, 2022–2026). Previous work includes a post-doctoral position at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria, for the project ‘Popular Music and the Rise of Populism in Europe’ (Volkswagen Foundation, 2019–2022), and a three-year fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies Vienna, Austria, in the postgraduate programme Sociology of Practices (2012–2015). He completed his dissertation on noise music at the Catholic University Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany (Noise – Klang zwischen Musik und Lärm. Zu einer Praxeologie des Auditiven, Transcript 2017). He studied sociology, psychology and political science at the Technical University Darmstadt, Germany. His main research interests are sound, popular music, practice theories, qualitative methodology and ethnography.
Ágnes Patakfalvi-Czirják, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Sociology and Communication of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. She completed a Cultural Studies PhD programme at the University of Pécs researching the Szekler minority group in Romania. Her main research areas are Hungarian nationalism, kin-state politics in CEE and everyday nationalism. She conducted fieldwork in Republic of Moldova for 6 months in 2015 and in the Szekler region of Romania for two years between 2014 and 2019. Between 2016 and 2019 she worked at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Minority Studies. Currently she is working as a researcher in the European project ‘Popular Music as a Medium in the Mainstreaming of Populist Ideologies in Europe’ (https://musicandpopulism.eu).
Raul Sanchez-Urribarri is a Senior Lecturer in Crime, Justice and Legal Studies at the Department of Social Inquiry, La Trobe University. His research focuses on constitutionalism, judicial politics and the rule of law in comparative perspective, with an emphasis on contexts of democratic deterioration (and Venezuela in particular). He also has a strong interest in the internationalisation of higher education, particularly on international mobility and intercultural teaching and learning. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of South Carolina, an LLM from Cambridge University and a Law Degree from Universidad Catolica (Caracas, Venezuela). His work has been published in The Journal of Politics, Law and Social Inquiry, the Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences, International Political Science Review and The Hague Journal on the Rule of Law, among other outlets. He is the Director of La Trobe's Philippines–Australia Forum, a co-editor at Thesis Eleven Journal (Sage) and is currently the Vice-President of the Consortium of Undergraduate Law and Justice Programs.
Melanie Schiller is Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Popular Music at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, and the author of Soundtracking Germany – Popular Music and National Identity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018 and 2020). Schiller is the chair and national representative of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music Benelux branch and (co-)editor of the Music and Politics series with Routledge. Her current research focuses on popular music and populism in Europe and Sweden in particular, in the international research project ‘Popular Music and the Rise of Populism in Europe’ (funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, 2019–2022). Her research interests include popular music, popular culture and politics, German popular music, national identity and nationalism, and transmedia storytelling, amongst others.
Lyndon C.S. Way is a Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media at the University of Liverpool. His area of research is analysing relations between (digital) popular culture, popular music and politics through the lens of multimodal critical discourse studies. He has published extensively in academic journals and in edited collections. He has (co-)edited a number of publications on music and digital popular culture as multimodal political discourse, written a monograph on Turkish music and politics (Bloomsbury 2018) and another entitled Analysing Politics and Protest in Digital Popular Culture (Sage 2021).
