Across Moving Grounds

Music, Performing Arts, and the Politics of Mobility

22–25 July 2026 | mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

Apply now

Experiences of mobility, displacement, migration, and exile are not exceptional but constitutive of cultural and artistic histories. From touring performers and diasporic communities to digital circulation and forced displacement, music and performing arts have long been shaped by movement across borders. In recent decades, scholarly debates on these dynamics have introduced key concepts such as cosmopolitanism, translocality, and postmigration. When studying music, sound, and performing arts today, how might we reconsider the relationship between the global and the local? Which conceptual tools enable us to grasp contemporary mobilities without flattening their historical and political ambiguities?

In 2026, the isaResearch summer school in the framework of isa – International Summer Academy invites contributions that rethink the entanglements of the global and the local though postmigrant, decolonial, and intersectional perspectives and how they relate to music, sound, and the performing arts. We also welcome reflections on how worlding as a concept and artistic practice can can illuminate the creation of worlds beyond the binary logics of the local and the global.

Taking place in parallel to the isa masterclasses and workshops at the mdw campus in Vienna – a city both historically diasporic and currently postmigrant – the four-day workshop is open to Ph.D. students and other early-stage researchers in the humanities and artistic research, specifically those immersed in the study of music, sound, dance, and film. Participants will be able to present and discuss their research in an interdisciplinary framework. Experts in respective fields at the mdw and beyond will engage in conversations and act as respondents. The programme will also include a lecture by an international expert and site-visits in the cultural landscape of Vienna. The summer school thus sets out to provide participants with an intimate interdisciplinary experience that fosters new networks and perspectives.

Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Postmigration as concept, method, and critique
• Translocality and digital networks of cultural production
• Exile, diaspora, and historical continuities of displacement
• Climate crisis: ecological displacement and artistic responses
• Cosmopolitanism revisited: class, race, and cultural capital
• Decolonial perspectives on global music history and canon formation
• Worlding and musical world-making: epistemologies and aesthetics
• Translation as method
• Sound, film, performance, and the politics of positioning
• Methodological innovations: How can traveling concepts and critical term analysis offer new analytical tools? (How) can travel, mobility, and movement themselves become (integrated into) methodological premises?

We invite applications from Ph.D. students and other early-stage researchers from disciplines including (but not limited to) Musicology, Dance and Performance Studies, Artistic Research, Queer Theory, Cultural Studies, Music Theory, Indigenous Studies, Music Sociology, Critical Race Studies, Ethnomusicology, Popular Music Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Art History, and Film and Media Studies. Presentation proposals must be connected to the topic of the participant’s thesis or current research project.

Attendance at the summer school is free of charge, with lunch and refreshments provided on-site by the mdw. Limited funding to help with travel and accommodation expenses is available. The exact amount of funding will be decided according to the requirements of the participant. Application is possible after the acceptance of your proposal with a short description of your situation and academic affiliation (or lack thereof). We are happy to organize childcare for researchers travelling with children of any age and kindly ask to be informed of any such needs as soon as possible after acceptance.

Applications including a title, a presentation abstract, keywords, a statement of motivation, and a short bio must be uploaded via our website. The deadline for applying is 30 April 2026.

Decisions on the acceptance of proposals will be announced by the end of May.

The isa comprises masterclasses, workshops and lectures as well as isaOnStage with public concerts, the music education program isaCommunity and the interdisciplinary academic summer school isaResearch. The mdw campus provides an ideal setting that promotes exchange between disciplines as well as the interplay of artistic excellence, social responsibility, and intercultural community.

Organisation: Kathrin Heinrich, Therese Kaufmann, mdw Research Support

Academic Advisory Board:

Ass.-Prof.ⁱⁿ Dr.ⁱⁿ Anja Brunner, Institute for Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology (ivE)

Ass.-Prof. Scott L. Edwards, PhD, Institute for Musicology and Performance Studies (IMI)

Dr. ⁱⁿ Magdalena Fürnkranz, Senior Scientist, Theory and History of Popular Music, Department for Popular Music (iPOP)

Mag. Dr. Juri Giannini, Senior Scientist, Institute for Musicology and Performance Studies (IMI)

Ass.-Prof.ⁱⁿ Dr.ⁱⁿ Marie-Anne Kohl, Institute for Musicology and Performance Studies (IMI)

isaResearch is mdw’s international summer school for interdisciplinary research on music and performing arts. We invite early-stage researchers, scholars, artists, and activists from various disciplinary backgrounds and academic levels to join the discourse on isa’s annual thematic focus.

Established under the former name isaScience, this forum for researchers has been part of isa, the international summer academy of mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria since 2013.

isaResearch 2026 will take place from 22 to 25 July 2026 on campus of mdw at Anton-von-Webern-Platz 1 in Vienna

Limited funding to partially support travel and accommodation expenses will again be available for students and scholars in academic precarity upon acceptance of the proposal. The exact amount of funding will be decided on a case-by-case basis according to requirements of the participant. To apply please email isaresearch@mdw.ac.at after your proposal has been accepted with a short description of your situation and academic affiliation (or lack thereof).

The isaResearch team is happy to organise childcare for researchers travelling with children of any age. Please let us know beforehand to make sure all needs can be met.

For further information please contact isaresearch@mdw.ac.at

Organisers of isaResearch:

Organisation:
Kathrin Heinrich, Research Support of the mdw

Therese Kaufmann, Head of the Research Support of the mdw

Contact:
isaresearch@mdw.ac.at

SHORT:

If you are participating in a meeting via Zoom, you will be visible with your registered name and, in case of having enabled the camera, your picture. If you are participating in the discussion actively with a comment, under use of the microphone function, you are going to be heard and seen by all participants live. The lecture only shall be recorded, not however the discussions thereafter, which will only be available in the live stream. Video and audio recordings of the lecture will be produced for purposes of documentation and information of mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw).

The recording becomes part of the entire meeting records and is going to be permanently accessible to the general public in the media section of mdw (mdwMediathek). Other possible uses include e.g. publication of a transcript or of a video documentation of the meeting series. Please consult our detailed data protection information (https://www.mdw.ac.at/datenschutz/datenschutzinformation-der-mdw/).

If you do not want to be part of the recording, please use a pseudonym for participation in the Zoom lecture and do not enable camera or microphone functions while using Zoom. Those are deactivated by default by mdw in its capacity as host. An active participation in the discussion is only possible after activation of those functionalities.

I have read the data protection information.