Keynote speakers

Melanie Schiller

Melanie Schiller is a Professor of Contemporary Media Cultures at Radbound University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She serves as chair of the Benelux branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) and is editor of the Music and Politics book series with Routledge. Schiller is the author of Soundtracking Germany: Popular Music and National Identity (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018; paperback 2020) and co-editor of the volume Popular Music and the Rise of Populism in Europe (Routledge, 2024), which emerged from her work in the international research consortium of the same name (2019–2022), funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Her current research—funded by the Dutch Research Council (2025–2030)—focuses on protest music and polarization in climate related social movements.

The Politics of Heroic Averageness: Populism and Music in Sweden
Once considered an outlier in Europe, Sweden has become a central site for the normalization of radical right populism. At the heart of this shift is the rise of the Sweden Democrats (SD), whose success lies not only in political strategy but in a broader cultural project. Focusing on the aesthetic and rhetorical strategy of what I conceptualize as “heroic averageness”, this lecture examines how the SD use popular music—notably through party leader Jimmie Åkesson’s band Bedårande Barn and collaborations with artists like Peter Jezewski—to portray themselves as relatable “ordinary Swedes,” while simultaneously reconstituting the very meaning of Swedish normality in exclusionary, nativist terms. Songs such as Jezewski’s My Land and events like the SD’s Summer Festival serve as powerful tools for blurring the boundaries between mainstream culture and radical ideology. In doing so, the SD both mainstream the radical and radicalize the mainstream, turning popular music into a key arena not only for political messaging but for the construction of cultural hegemony. As chief ideologist Mattias Karlsson has stated, “culture influences politics more than the other way around,” positioning cultural production—particularly music—as central to the SD’s broader project of winning the so-called “culture war” and shaping national identity in line with their ideological agenda. Drawing on theories of populism and cultural studies, this lecture examines how the Sweden Democrats’ engagement with popular music reflects a broader contestation over the symbolic frame-works and affective attachments through which collective belonging, social norms, and dominant narratives about Swedish identity are articulated and negotiated.

David Hebert

David Hebert: Music Diplomacy Amid Populism and Protectionism
David G. Hebert is a Professor with Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen. He is also an Honorary Professor with the Education University of Hong Kong and Affiliated Professor with University of the Faroe Islands and Kyambogo University (Uganda). He is a member of the Executive committee and Board of the International Society for Music Education, Chair-elect of the Historical Ethnomusicology section of SEM, and has grant-funded projects in Uganda and China. With a special interest in Indigenous peoples, he previously worked as Head of Music for a Maori college and is now part of a major research project on Sami music. He is also author or editor of 11 books, with articles in over 30 different journals. Recently, he especially writes about music and AI, decolonization, cultural diplomacy and sustainability.

Music Diplomacy Amid Populism and Protectionism

If one were to summarize the main political tendencies impacting the world today, far-right populism (with the rise of authoritarian leaders) combined with protectionism (featuring preoccupation with borders, migration and tariffs) would seem to be among the most prominent. There is also a noticeable shift from multilateralism toward transactionalism, which appears to be eroding the post-WWII world order through the ascent of BRICS and related alliances. How does music interact with these tendencies, and what hope might music provide in efforts to nudge humanity toward a more just and sustainable world in these uncertain times?  Music can play a highly effective role in cultural diplomacy that aims to bridge between ideological divides exacerbated by social media siloization. One relevant case comes from Samarkand, a great city on the historic Silk Road: The Sharq Taronalari Festival, which is one of the world's largest international folk music events, funded by UNESCO and the government of Uzbekistan. I participated in this spectacular festival on three different years, ex-periencing remarkable performances of traditional music from all inhabited continents. There are also entire institutions devoted to music diplomacy, a prominent example of which is the Barenboim-Said Academy, a con-servatoire in Berlin founded with the purpose of inspiring cooperation between Arabs and Jews through classical music. In the field of Chinese music, a notable case was Copenhagen’s Music Confucius Institute, which I researched by interviewing expert pedagogues who had taught traditional Chinese musical instruments to European students. In the opposite direction, the Intensive World Music Concerts—developed across recent years among Chinese traditional instrument majors in the “Cross-Cultural Music Diplomacy” course at Beijing Language and Culture University—is another example, through which Chinese students learned to perform songs from Europe, Africa, Middle East and the Americas.

Finally, music diplomacy can also take the form of research and development initiatives. For example, the Sapmi Singing Map is a Norwegian Research Council-funded project that features close collaboration with Sami joikers to develop educational resources so their music, which had long been margin-alized, can be sensitively taught to all students in Nordic schools. For each of these cases, anecdotes will be shared from direct personal experience, and each example will be considered in relation to state-of-the-art theories that provide a deepened understanding of music diplomacy. However, today perhaps the greatest threat to all these inspiring forms of heritage is AI’s unregulated colonization of human arts, so promising ways of responding to AI must also be briefly discussed. Taken as a whole, these examples show how the power of music diplomacy can foster forms of empathy and reconciliation that emphasize our shared humanity and thereby counteract the threat of deepening political divides.