Faculty of Arts and Humanities of University of Porto Casa da Música 13 to 16 july 2015

Now in its second year, Keep it Simple, Make it Fast (KISMIF) is probably one of the largest conferences of underground music/culture of its kind. Convened by Andy Bennett and Paula Guerra the conference, accompanied by the pre-emptive Summer School, was a week-long event with core themes revolving around the many global underground scenes and drawing upon an impressive international range of established subcultural scholars and postgraduate researchers. As members of the conference scientific committee, and as founders of the Punk Scholars Network, we were invited to deliver keynotes at the preceding Summer School, to chair panels and to convene on a number of Summer School sessions, offering ad hoc summative commentaries to those in the panel. The Summer School offered 'an opportunity for all students (bachelor, masters, doctorate, post-doctorate) to attend specialist master classes and discuss their research work in seminars'. Its inclusion, therefore, was based upon a clear pedagogical model whereby students could discuss, disseminate and contemplate their own research. More than that, it was also important in empowering students to gain control of the academic arena, often a space solely for the 'academic'. Here, postgraduate students presented papers that ranged from political activism to urban communities, from aesthetics to mediation , and from identities to authenticity. As an academic environment, the Summer School beat many a conference: papers were presented in an often-informal basis, with students helping and signposting each other towards unknown areas of research.

Dear colleagues, We are delighted to meet you all at the third KISMIF International Conference ‘Keep It Simple, Make It Fast!’ (KISMIF) International Conference, here at Porto, this year dedicated to the theme ‘DIY Cultures, Spaces and Places’. This initiative follows the great success of the two first KISMIF Conference editions (held in 2014 and 2015), seeking to voice the will of the many researchers who have sought to promote an annual scientific meeting for the discussion of underground music scenes and do-it-yourself culture at the highest level . The KISMIF Conference 2016 is once again focused on underground music, directing its attention this time towards the analysis of DIY cultures’ relationship to space and places. Thus, we challenge students, junior and senior teachers/researchers, as well as artists and activists, to come to the KISMIF International Conference and present works which explore the potential of the theoretical and analytical development of the intersection of music scenes, DIY culture and space under a multidimensional and multifaceted vision. We hope with this to enrich the underground scenes and DIY cultures analysis by producing innovative social theory on various spheres and levels, as well as focusing on the role of DIY culture in late modernity. Indeed, the role of music and DIY cultures is once more an important question – taking place in a world of piecemealed yet ever-present change. The space, spaces, places, borders, zones of DIY music scenes are critical variables in approaching contemporary cultures, their sounds, their practices (artistic, cultural, economic and social), their actors and their contexts. From a postcolonial and glocalized perspective, it is important to consider the changes in artistic and musical practices with an underground and/or oppositional nature in order to draw symbolic boundaries between their operating modalities and those of advanced capitalism. Territorialization and deterritorialization are indelible marks of the artistic and musical scenes in the present; they are related to immediate cosmopolitanisms, to conflicting diasporas, new power relations, gender and ethnicity. As in previous KISMIF Conferences, it is our intention to welcome reflexive contributions which consider the plurality that DIY cultural practices demonstrate in various cultural, artistic and creative fields and to move beyond music in considering artistic fields like film and video, graffiti and street art, the theatre and the performing arts, literature and poetry, radio, programming and editing, graphic design, illustration, cartoon and comics, as well as others.

The KISMIF Conference 2015 will be preceded by a two-day Summer School entitled Gettin’ Underground Together! The Summer School Gettin’ Underground Together! will offer an opportunity for undergraduate and graduate students, including those staying on for the conference, to attend specialist master classes and discuss their research work in seminars led by top academics in the field. It is also the possibility of deepening both theoretical and methodological questions in both proximity and dialogue with some of the main world references of the urban musical scenes. This Summer School is the result of a series of developed works in the last decade within the framework of social sciences, namely Sociology of Culture, Sociology of Arts, Sociology of Youth, Urban Sociology, Sociology of Music, Cultural Economics, Urban Studies and Urban Planning. Hence, it is important to understand the importance, functioning, process, the agents, characteristics, genres and subgenres of the current urban music scenes. The music scenes invite us to map the territory of the city in new ways while, at the same time, defining types of activities whose relationship with the territory is not easily expressed. There exists a contradiction between the growing visibility of the urban music scenes and its persistent illegitimacy as a sociological object of investigation (and also in social sciences, in a broader sense). Such a contradiction is a research challenge to pursuit. This will lead to an insightful debate about its mains aspects and structuring guidelines. http://www.punk.pt/kismif-summer-school-2/