13, 14 & 15 January 2027
CALL FOR APPLICATIONS
Supported by a Van Oostrom grant, MOCReN will host its second Winter Workshop at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, on Wednesday 13, Thursday 14, and Friday 15 January 2027. This is not a traditional conference with paper sessions. As with the inaugural Winter Workshop at the University of Bristol in 2024, the event will provide an opportunity for care-led and playful sessions to discuss research methods, develop work together, and network, this time with the theme of music and (post-)truth in the age of GenAI ‘slopaganda’.
We will continue building collective and critical approaches to online music cultures (Freitas et al. 2025) and listen to a societal operating system ‘in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals’ (Derakhshan 2016). User- and AI-generated music is now playing an increasingly powerful role in far-right propaganda online. Within a Dutch context, this is evidenced by an AI-generated gabber remix of “Wij zeggen nee, nee, nee, tegen een AZC” topping the Spotify charts (Down 2025). In the UK, slopaganda has arisen through the case of ‘Amelia’, a musical ‘AI girlfriend’ created using Grok and Suno that sings anti-immigration songs and ridicules a government-funded videogame intended to educate young people about the dangers of political radicalization. There are numerous other examples besides these which could be explored across the three days of the workshop. As Purohit (2023, xiv) stresses with reference to ‘Hindutva Pop’ (H-Pop) in India, internet-mediated music is ‘no longer meant to merely entertain but also indoctrinate’.
The workshop is prompted by, and will address, questions including:
- How should we investigate and theorise various political uses of music online during the post-truth era?
- What methodological and epistemological ground truths do we rely on when researching online music cultures?
- How do ideas of media literacy, suspicion, and aesthetic value inform our engagements with audiovisual genAI slopaganda?
- Why has music become involved in the grey area between fandom and conspiracism?
- How do post-truth and populist discourses collide in online music cultures?
We welcome applications for participation using this online form. Applications and proposals will be reviewed by the MOCReN steering committee to identify and suggest potential study groups who will work together during the event. Please note that this event is not intended as a space to complete or solicit feedback on existing work-in-progress. Rather, the winter workshop is an opportunity to make and solidify connections with colleagues, and to begin a new collaborative research project based on mutual interests. Participants will be asked to engage actively in these collaborations, starting with a facilitated discussion about expectations, capacity, division of labour, and inclusive working practices.
Some sessions on research methods will be programmed in the event schedule, but we also welcome volunteers to suggest and lead ‘How To…’ segments. If you have experience of undertaking research using new and exciting approaches which may be unfamiliar to others, please do indicate this as part of your application in the online form.
This Winter Workshop is free of charge to attend, although attendees are responsible for arranging and covering their travel and accommodation in Utrecht. Using the Van Oostrom funds, two widening participation bursaries have been created for early career researchers without financial support to cover four nights of accomodation in Utrecht (see details in the online form). The event is partly catered thanks to support from the Van Oostrom grant, facilitating opportunities for socialising, community building, and borrel! The event takes a deliberately playful approach to research, with a code of conduct that emphasises inclusion and seeks to redress traditional academic power imbalances. Utrecht is a beautiful and well-connected university city with relatively few tourists, especially in the winter. All workshop sessions will take place in the binnenstad (old inner city), mostly in university rooms close to coffee machines.
The deadline for all participation applications is Friday 21st August 2026. Subsequent correspondence regarding decisions, travel info, and accommodation recommendations will be sent out by Friday 11th September 2026. The final information including a schedule will be distributed in November 2026, and an online pre-workshop meeting will be held via videocall on Friday 11th December 2026.
References
Derakhshan, H. (2016). Social Media is Killing Discourse Because It’s Too Much Like TV: We need more text and fewer videos and memes in the age of Trump. MIT Technology Review [29th November 2016]. https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/11/29/155271/social-media-is-killing-discourse-because-its-too-much-like-tv/.
Down, A. (2025). AI slop tops Billboard and Spotify charts as synthetic music spreads: Hits include country songs and a Dutch anti-refugee anthem, both entirely made without human composition. The Guardian [UK] [13th November 2025]. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/13/ai-music-spotify-billboard-charts.
Freitas, J., Gamble, S., Perevedentseva, M., Spencer, E. K., & Williams, J. (2025). A Collective Vision for Researching Popular Music and Online Cultures: Introduction to JPMS special issue “Popular Music and Online Cultures”. Journal of Popular Music Studies, 37(4), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2025.37.4.1.
Purohit, K. (2023). H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars. HarperCollins.