This book uses the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC), as an analytical entry point to understand and illuminate post-War Europe and the drive to create an identity that can legitimise the European project in its broadest sense. The ESC presents an idealised vision of Europe, and this has long existed in a strained relationship with reality. While the trajectory of post-war European integration is a high-profile topic, we believe that the ESC offers a unique and innovative way to think about the role of culture in the history of post-War European integration and tensions between the ideal and reality of European unity. Through the series of case studies that make up the chapters in this book, analysis brings these interlinked tensions to light, exploring the roles of culture and identity, alongside and a productive conversation with the political and economic projects of post-war European integration.

Drawing from the wealth of academic literature about the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) written over the last two decades, this book consolidates and recognizes the ESC's relevance in academia by analysing its contribution to different fields of study. The book brings together leading ESC scholars from across disciplines and from across the globe to reflect on the intersection between their academic fields of study and the ESC by answering the question: what has the ESC contributed to academia? The book also draws from fields rarely associated with the ESC, such as Law, Business and Research Methodologies, to demonstrate the contest's broad utility in research, pedagogy and in practice. Given its interdisciplinary approach, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students working in cultural, media, and music studies, as well as those interested in the intersections between these areas and politics, law, education, pedagogy, and history.

Guerrilla Music: Musicking as Resistance, Defiance, and Subversion explores human initiations and responses to music as a process and product intrinsically part of our culture, history, place, time and ecological musical worlds. The contributors challenge scholarly approaches wherein music is detached from the social relationships in which it is produced, transmitted, used and judged. ‘Guerrilla’ is a trope long applied to socio-political machinations, human conflict and confrontation. Guerrilla Music provocatively explores research involving music practices, stories, communities and musickers worldwide that resist, defy and subvert by silence and non-compliance, reluctant subordination, subversive depowering, resistive counterpoint, or destructive, violent dismantling. Contexts spanning the subcultural local, glocal and universal highlight the potency, passions, actions and life worlds of music, musicians and those that become engulfed in musical maelstroms that incite change. Guerrilla Music both invigorates and advances scholarly debates about social power, colonisation and difference by exploring the social semiotics of music making and communities, identifying powerful new ways of understanding human communication, and what musicking means in the twenty-first century.

This book investigates Australia’s relationship with the Eurovision Song Contest over time and place, from its first screening on SBS in 1983 to Australia's inaugural national selection in 2019. Beginning with an overview of Australia’s Eurovision history, the contributions explore the contest’s role in Australian political participation and international relations; its significance for Australia’s diverse communities, including migrants and the LGBTQIA+ community; racialised and gendered representations of Australianness; changing ideas of liveness in watching the event; and a reflection on teaching Australia’s first undergraduate course dedicated to the Eurovision Song Contest. The collection brings together a group of scholar-fans from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives — including history, politics, cultural studies, performance studies, and musicology — to explore Australia’s transition from observer to participant in the first thirty-six years of its love affair with the Eurovision Song Contest.

This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles publishing online in advance of print publication. At this time, we cannot add information about unpublished articles in this handbook, however the table of contents will continue to grow as additional articles pass through the review process and are added to the site. Please note that the online publication date for this handbook is the date that the first article in the title was published online.

The Eurovision Song Contest is famous for its camp spectacles and political intrigues, but what about its actual music? With more than 1,500 songs in over 50 languages and a wide range of musical styles since it began in 1956, Eurovision features the most musically and linguistically diverse song repertoire in history. Listening closely to its classic fan favorites but also to songs that scored low because they were too different or too far ahead of their time, this book delves into the musical tastes and cultural values the contest engages through its international reach and popular appeal. Chapters discuss the iconic fanfare that introduces the broadcast, the supposed formulas for composing successful contest entries, how composers balance aspects of sameness and difference in their songs, and the tension between national genres of European popular music and musical trends beyond the nation’s borders, especially the American influences on a show that is supposed to celebrate an idealized pan-European identity. The book also explores how audiences interact with the contest through musicking experiences that bring people together to celebrate its sounds and spectacles. What can seem like a silly song-and-dance show offers valuable insights into the bonds between popular music and cosmopolitan values for its many followers around the world. From dance parties to flashmobs, parodies to plagiarisms, and orchestras to artificial intelligence, Another Song for Europe will be of particular interest to Eurovision fans, critics, and scholars of popular music, popular culture, ethnomusicology, and European studies.

Over recent decades, LGBTQ people have successfully fought for civil and reproductive rights across Western states, including the right to marry, have children and serve openly as public servants and in the armed forces. Internationally, states have started to use their stance on homonormativity to position themselves as progressive. This book provides new insights into the role played by race, sexuality, and gender by analysing contemporary constructions of Swedishness through LGBTQ rights by using three specific case studies: • a “pride parade” organised by the Swedish populist right; • Swedish Armed Forces’ marketing material; • a social media account by and for racialised LGBTQ people.

The Routledge Handbook of Popular Music and Politics of the Balkans is a comprehensive overview of major topics, established debates and new directions in the study of popular music and politics in this region. The vibrant growth of this subject area since the 1990s has been intertwined with the region’s political and socio-economic transformations, including the collapse of state socialism in much of the region, the break-up of Yugoslavia, the advent of neoliberal capitalism, the rise of Romani activism, the complex politics of ‘Europeanization’ before and after the global financial crisis, and the region’s relationship to the European Union border regime. The handbook illustrates the wide range of disciplines and methods that contribute to this field’s interdisciplinary dialogue and highlights emerging approaches such as the study of Black diasporas in the region, popular music’s links with LGBTQ+ communities, and the impact of digital technologies on musical cultures. This volume will benefit specialist researchers, tutors creating or refreshing courses on popular music in the region, and students interested in these topics, especially those who are at the point of developing their own independent research projects.

This book examines the enactment of gendered in/equalities across diverse Cultural forms, turning to the insights produced through the specific modes of onto-epistemological enquiry of embodied performance. It builds on work from the GRACE (Gender and Cultures of Equality in Europe) project and offers both theoretical and methodological analyses of an array of activities and artworks. The performative manifestations discussed include theatre, installations, social movements, mega-events, documentaries, and literary texts from multiple geopolitical locales. Engaging with the key concepts of re-enactment and relationality, the contributions explore the ways in which in/equalities are relationally re-produced in and through individual and collective bodies. This multi- and trans-disciplinary collection of essays creates fruitful dialogues within and beyond Performance Studies, sitting at the crossroads of ethnography, event studies, social movements, visual studies, critical discourse analysis, and contemporary approaches to textualities emerging from post-colonial and feminist studies.

This provocative book makes the case for the complete removal of national symbolism in the Olympic Games. Focusing on the case of national flags at the Olympic Games, it explores the history of national symbols at the Olympics and asks what this issue can tell us about the politicisation of sport in the twenty-first century. Drawing on multi-disciplinary research from history, political science and sociology, and exploring the link between historical processes and the experiences of individuals, the book attempts to deconstruct the global sport system and its traditions. It argues that the history of flags is essentially the history of nationalism itself, impacted by power interests, and by exploring the lesser-known Olympic histories of athletes such as American boxer Oscar De La Hoya or those from the Faroe Islands, the book explores the complex links between national symbolism and international sport. It concludes with a controversial set of proposals for breaking those links, including a new tradition that would symbolically ‘lock up’ national flags as part of the opening ceremony of Olympic Games. Thought-provoking and concise, this book is fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the politics, sociology, history or governance of sport, or in nationalism, international organisations or the history of protest.