We are delighted to announce that the ISMMS 2025 conference will be held in Seville, Spain, hosted by Susana González-Martínez of the University of Granada. The theme is New Metal Worlds: Building Bridges and Mending Broken Backs.
A formal call for papers will be released in the coming months. For now, we invite you to read about the exciting themes of the conference in detail.
Theme
Since its origins, we have witnessed profound changes and transformations in metal music. The sonority, the themes that concern it, the instrumentalization, and even the forms of artistic activism have been modified over time. The ISMMS 2025 Conference is proposed as an incentive space for the exchange of ideas, dialogue, and critical reflection on the borders, crossings, interstices, and relational spirals —inter and transdisciplinary, epistemological, methodological, pedagogical, social, cultural, and artistic— between the different agents and territories within metal studies. In this sense, this Conference focuses its interest on the frontiers, bridges, and transits that announce a crossing towards possible new metal worlds.
Justification
The city of Híspalis, Isbiliya, or Seville, in its different historical denominations -Roman, Arab, and Christian- is hosting the ISSMS’ 7Th Biennial International Conference in 2025. Seville, with its geopolitical enclave throughout the centuries, as well as the long tradition of cultural and religious crossbreeding, offers us an ideal historical-symbolic framework. Likewise, evoking a series of metaphors in tone to the convergence of worlds inspire and nourishes the thematic proposal, inviting a continuation around the critical reflection within the studies of music and metal cultures in the different territories of the North and South.
Metal studies have achieved a vertiginous development during the last decades. As a multidisciplinary field in expansion, its production encompasses a plethora of themes, approaches, methodologies, and exploratory possibilities that few other fields of knowledge offer. In recent years, metal studies have witnessed the opening of multiple perspectives of analysis with the observance of proposals from the Global South. The 2022 conference Heavy Metal in the Global South: Multiregional Perspectives held in Mexico was a milestone in this sense. This meeting revealed a paradigmatic shift in metal studies (Varas-Díaz, 2023) through a wide diversity of views, voices, and perspectives emanating from the Global South —as conceived by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2010)— and evidenced that all knowledge is situated (Haraway, 1995). Likewise, during the event, emphasis was placed on the relevance of creating and establishing bridges that allow the incorporation and circulation of other knowledge, which nourish the field of study based on North-South dialogue. ISMMS’ 2023 Conference, held in Canada, was proposed as a provocation to encourage self-reflection within the field of studies. An inward look over a six-decade journey to question ourselves about the external forces of extremity, abolition, and transformation that are still palpable in metal. A provocation triggers a contagion and contamination of self-consciousness through interaction. Two substantial elements, critical reflection of the outskirts and interactions inspire us to continue moving in the same direction in our 2025 proposal.
In this sense, to build some bridges that give continuity to the past ISMMS 2022 and 2023 meetings, the 2025 conference is proposed as a platform where different voices, perspectives, territories, epistemologies, methodologies, pedagogies, and disciplines take center stage to contribute to the creation of rhizomatic networks. Rhizomes (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980) are cognitive structures inspired by vegetal subway roots, in which the elements that compose them do not follow lines of hierarchical subordination. These epistemological models without a center inspire us insofar as they make possible a connective future of knowledges, dialogic spirals, and productive-affective networks, which we wish to see enhanced within metal and its studies. Likewise, the meeting aims to blur the physical and symbolic boundaries that separate us, outside and inside the academies, eliminating the mental monocultures (Shiva, 2008), promoters of a single way of thinking and, therefore, the same way of understanding metal, society, consumption, perception, expression, law, justice or the way of teaching and learning.
In this way, the emerging metaphors from the streets and waters of Seville will refer us to a changing relational cosmology throughout the centuries that will point out the border divisions and the bridges of hope—making it visible the backs that cross those bridges and the very taking of the word and the stage by the intruder, errant and “wrong” bodies that live in the borders. Likewise, ISMMS’ 2025 meeting aims to reflect on presences, privileges, and power relations, focusing on the means and channels to question and deconstruct them: technologies, tools, and creative processes that generate alliances, connectivity, affection, equitable productions, and restorative actions. Finally, it aims at the inquiry and generation of altered creative forms, new imaginaries, and possibilities through speculation and fabulation of new metal worlds that are already being configured in the artistic expressions of metal and that allow a livable existence for all beings from an ecology of knowledge and alternatives of hybridity, coexistence, and justice.
Therefore, several metaphors make up the axes of fabulation, inspiration, and imagination in the ISMMS 2025 conference. I will describe them briefly below.
Guiding Axes of the Conference
Borders, bridges, and broken backs
Borders are physical and symbolic edges, cutting edges, unfathomable waters, and walls that separate us. The remains of Arab walls in the city of Seville, as well as the geographical situation of Andalusia – European periphery and the border between Africa and Europe, where every year hundreds of people die trying to cross its coasts towards a better future – refer us to the Borderlands experience described by Gloria Anzaldúa (2005). In this sense, we are interested not only in the situated experiences that inhabit the places between worlds, but also in the type of thinking that induces this vital experience: border thinking. From this metaphor, key questions and systemic and interpretative challenges emerge about the notions of frontier and the incorporation of subaltern knowledges (i.e., popular and embodied knowledges, historically oppressed groups) in music and metal studies. Likewise, Arab Seville refers us to hybridisms due to the history of miscegenation and multicultural coexistence in Al-Andalus. It makes us think of bridges of exchange and mutual enrichment but also of appropriations and epistemic violence (Spivak, 1988; Mohanty, 2008). Connective bridges, crossings, mixtures, encounters and misunderstandings, hybridisms, and bastardies are a terrain to deepen within the production of music and metal studies. In this sense, interpretative challenges emerge that revise notions that reify the positions of power among the actors and agents of the different metal scenes, cultures, and territories. In short, incorporating these perspectives of hybridity and otherness is an elementary step for cognitive justice within metal studies, reflected in the diversity of existing views within metal cultures.
Similarly, thinking about how borders have the function of preventing the becoming, movement, and flow of people —while imposing stigmas on errant bodies and generating a course of wandering bodies and broken backs— forces us to ask ourselves about the repercussions of global border relations for metal music and its agents. It prompts us to question the bodies displaced from their territories and the diasporic experience within metal music (i.e., migrants, economically and politically displaced, nomadic identities). Also, about the restorative practices and actions that activate the errant and “wrong” bodies, intruders, and broken backs, and the aesthetic ways of understanding resistance, activism, and social justice in metal music in different territories.
Fleet systems and summary relationships
In Christian Seville, we will find a decisive symbolic exemplification to think about power relations. Seville symbolizes the rupture, the accumulation, and the barbarism committed against the indigenous and Afro peoples. The city brings us a memory of expulsions and dispossessions of peoples such as the Jews and, of course, confronts us with the plundering and oppression of the Latin American peoples at the hands of the Spanish and European conquerors. The darker side of Sevilla’s story ignites a critical awareness of the summary relations between agents and territories in our field of study, reviewing issues such as racialization, gender, or coloniality in the systems of music production and the exchange of global metal knowledge. It also emphasizes the importance of valuing archival formats in recovering historiographic memory generated by artistic productions.
In the same way, Christian Seville, in its conquering feat, teaches us much about power relations with the creation of the so-called fleet system: the only authorized means of transport and exchange between America and Spain. The fleet systems offer us a metaphor as a symbol of an undesirable, impositive, and exploitative relational type. This metaphor is crucial to critically reflect on the relational systems in the metal scenes, industries, and academies. Similarly, and momentarily obviating the activities for which they were used, fleet systems can contribute something positive. They form a system of vessels connected towards achieving the same end, in which interactions and exchanges of information and resources occur. In this sense, they resemble the rhizomatic fabrics that we are interested in producing at the Conference. This analytical bet around the relation within metal cultures, which pays attention to the processes of creation and production, is of vital interest for the transformations of social justice to which we aspire. Ultimately, continuing to critically reflect on power dynamics, as well as on rhizomatic alternatives and relational spirals within metal, is a guide toward transformation.
Ports and crossings to new worlds
Other metaphors that Seville inspires in us are ports and crossings; the city has historically been one of the most important river ports in Europe. The metaphor of ports ignites our imagination with journeys and transits to new territories, planes and possibilities, perspectives, goals, and challenges. Ports are starting points for journeys and transits toward new hopes and renewed imaginaries. Crossroads, intersections, and sea currents encourage and activate us toward changes. They push us into mutual affectation with strangers along the way and promote entrepreneurship and innovation, exploration, and experimentation for the creation of new worlds. In this sense, we focus on identifying, recreating, and imagining possibilities within our field of study that live in the interstices, capable of implementing new ways of doing research, other methodologies, capable of manifesting themselves as critical-creative productions that give room for new stories, narratives, and imagined worlds.
We want to promote lively reflection through fabulations, speculations, and innovations in imaginaries within global metal cultures. We trust that metal studies and music will enhance the production of counter-hegemonic types of being and living in the world through sophisticated academic and artistic contributions that inaugurate new metal worlds from a renewed, critical, and sensitive existential ethic-aesthetic, offering the opportunity to imagine a livable life for all.
All in all, the different metaphors inspired by Seville direct our proposal to the interest in those places of intersection and generally absent voices, where creativity and the most overflowing imagination, methodological challenges, engaged (Borda, 1989) and activated (Belausteguigoitia, 2022) academia, and the innovations that push metal studies in their process of growth sprout. Thus, the Conference aims to encourage critical reflection as the axis and rudder of a series of thematic lines leading to the production of strategic studies within the field: a) hybridisms (borders and bridges), b) alterities (broken backs), c) spirals and rhizomes (fleet systems and non-summary relations), and d) new metal worlds (ports and crossings).
Thematic lines and presentation formats
a) Hybridisms: Borders and bridges
- Transexplorations of knowledge, epistemologies, disciplines, languages, pedagogies, and/or methodological processes within metal studies, territories, and metal cultures.
- Musicality and metal movements in a transhumant and nomadic historical key.
- Global border system, coloniality, and its repercussions on metal cultures, economies, industries, imaginaries, and territories.
- Mestizations, hybridisms, and bastardies in the metallic cultural and artistic manifestations.
- Subaltern knowledge and border thinking; manifestations and incorporations within the metal.
- Metallic diaspora; practices and manifestations.
- Resistance, activism, social justice, and restorative actions with a situated perspective in metal music and culture.
- Bridges between and for an activated academy, an artistic activism, and a reflexive art.
b) Alterities: Broken backs
- Errant travelers: Becomings, transformations, and transpositions in creative expressions within metal and its agents.
- “Wrong” bodies: Agents and problematics of gender, race, disability, sexuality, age, class, nationality, religion, ethnicity, etc., within metal.
- Intruders: Representations, influences, and permeabilities between foreign agents and metal studies, music, and cultures.
- “Wet” backs: Border and diasporic agents in metal.
c) Spirals and rhizomes: Fleet systems and non-summary relations
- Relational confabulations between metal studies and music agents.
- Practices of responsibility and commitment from the academy with its local scenes.
- Extrapolations and interventions from metal studies to communities and/or other areas of knowledge.
- Methodological, procedural, technological, and/or artistic innovations for research in metal studies.
- Creative processes and dialogic spirals within metal cultures.
- Memories and politics of care in metal music.
- Affections; perspectives of analysis from the affective and sensorial turn.
d) New Metal Worlds: Ports and crossings
(These are contributions in and from music and metal studies that inaugurate, among other possible ones, some of the fictions, narratives, or proposals listed below)
- Fantasy speculations between-worlds
- Relational ecologies and holistic cosmologies
- Post-pandemic (metallic) worlds and sounds
- Cyberspatial transits
- Cyborg and post-human fabulations
- Emergency re-existences
- Shuttles of immemorials
- Radical tendernesses
- Symbiont and aliens’ acuerpamientos (protect-support-huddles)
- Altered cartographies
Presentation Formats
Presentations will be accepted in both traditional academic work and arts-based research formats (i.e., video essay, film, music, performance, art-graphic, collage, comic, illustration, and photography).