No Nations: Punks Without Borders

A Community-Building Conference hosted by PSN US and PSN Canada

November 13 – Online (8am-3pm, PST UTC-8, LA time)

Register here: https://ubc.zoom.us/meeting/register/fN0SnroFRSSVPrWxpCgWXw

The conference will begin at 8am PST Los Angeles (UTC-08).

If the registration link above tells you the conference starts at 9am in Vancouver, please note that BC has changed its time zones is now an hour ahead of Los Angeles.

To convert timezones, enter your city here at “Pick Date and Locations” by the green checkmark:

https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meetingtime.html?iso=20261113&p1=137

Conference Schedule

8:00-9:20

Monica Storss, “Punk in Space: Lunarpunk Futures”

Michele Varini, “No Future, No Borders, No Posers? Commercialization and the Policing of Punk Authenticity Across National Scenes”

Bob Jakubovic, “‘Warm in Your Coat’: Genre as Border in Romeo Void’s ‘Never Say Never’”

9:30-10:50

Katie Brown, “Folk Punk or Trova Punk? Punk Ideologies and Self-Identifying with Subgenres in a Costa Rican Punk Scene”

Justin Madu, “In My Head: Punk, Performativity, and ADHD”

Brando Ratti, “We Come from Provinceland. Punk culture and movement in the Italian province of the early 2000s: between oral tradition and digital transition.”

11:00-12:30        Stories from the Underground: Discussion of Research Plans Roundtable

Davy R. Howard, “Punk Game Studies/Ludic Punk Studies”

Kelly Day, “More Than Music: Community Care, Oral History, and the Unwritten Pedagogies of DIY Punk”

Annette Leibing, “Shared apocalypses: what can be learned from juxtaposing punks and Jehovah’s Witnesses”

Sara Vitorino Fernandez, “THIS IS FARO, NOT LISBON: Rethinking Borders, Community, and Transnational Hardcore from Southern Portugal”

1:10-2:30

Jon Sewell, “Underground and Punk Archives in the American South”

Tyler Sonnichsen, “‘The chemical men said “stay mellow”’: The Dead Milkmen, Martians and Environmental Justice”

Evan Martin-Casler, “Cracks in the Wall: Sonoran Subculturing in the U.S./Mexico Borderlands”

In the spirit of enabling access, this single-day Punk Scholars Network conference will be held online. It is aimed especially at emerging scholars across the Americas, including Latin America, Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States. The conference will be conducted in English.

Stories from the Underground

In addition to panel presentations of prepared papers, we will also have conversational roundtables where presenters need not produce a polished presentation but can instead share emerging projects and invite feedback on research plans. Such conversations need not address the conference theme but are certainly welcome to do so.

Punks without Borders

What are the borders of punk? How does punk cross borders, whether they are literal or conceptual? How does punk think about the nation and the globe especially at a time of environmental collapse? Where do the borders of punk begin and end? What does gatekeeping do and how are such impulses symptomatic of larger social practices or an effect of sedimented historical practices. How have literal borders shaped DIY practices? What are the politics of the border throughout the global history of punk? How does punk experience the borders between the material and the digital? What does it mean to police or not police a border?

Additionally, papers might address:

• Geography, community, and sound
• Nationalism, anti-nationalism
• DIY practices
• Migration
• Temporal borders and before-and-after moments
• Indigeneity, decolonization, settler colonialism
• Space and sound
• Death-dealing and border patrol
• Earthlings and anthropocentrism
• Punk frontiers, borderlands, and emerging futures
• The border as a graphic device in punk visual culture, design, graphic novels
• Pedagogical practices that redraw the borders of punk culture
• Ethnography, storytelling, and archival research

The theme is meant to be open-ended to allow for a capacious conversation about the topic and to showcase a wide range of research exploring punk. We welcome papers involving a range of methodological approaches, from ethnographies to research creation and from digital humanities to archival close reading along with everything else in between.

As ever, the PSN invites proposals from undergraduate and graduate students, independent scholars, artists, university researchers, and members of the punk community outside of academia.

For this event, we particular encourage new and emerging scholars to apply and self-identify as such.

Submission Details

1. Proposals should be 200-350 words.

2. Please also include a presentation title, affiliation information (if any), career stage, pronouns, and a brief professional bio (50-100 words).

3. Please self-select either a prepared paper presentation (15-18 minutes) or a discussion of research plans (8-10 minutes).