isaResearch Summer School

isaResearch is the yearly international, interdisciplinary summer school of mdw and part of isa - International Summer Academy. It is a forum for negotiating the annual isa theme theoretically and discursively along current discourses and embedding it in the diverse contexts of Vienna's urban space. The isaResearch Summer School for Early Stage Researchers takes place at the same time as the artistic masterclasses and the festival on campus.

Across Moving Grounds

Music, Performing Arts, and the Politics of Mobility

22–25 July 2026 | mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna

Experiences of mobility, displacement, migration, and exile are not exceptional but constitutive of cultural and artistic histories. From touring performers and diasporic communities to digital circulation and forced displacement, music and performing arts have long been shaped by movement across borders. In recent decades, scholarly debates on these dynamics have introduced key concepts such as cosmopolitanism, translocality, and postmigration. When studying music, sound, and performing arts today, how might we reconsider the relationship between the global and the local? Which conceptual tools enable us to grasp contemporary mobilities without flattening their historical and political ambiguities?

In 2026, the isaResearch summer school in the framework of isa – International Summer Academy invites contributions that rethink the entanglements of the global and the local through postmigrant, decolonial, and intersectional perspectives and how they relate to music, sound, and the performing arts. We also welcome reflections on how worlding as a concept and artistic practice can can illuminate the creation of worlds beyond the binary logics of the local and the global.

 

As part of the isaResearch program, we cordially invite you to our public event:

TALKS & CONVERSATION

23 July 2026, 5 P.M. | Fanny Hensel Hall 

 

Music as a Means of Survival: Reflections on Musical Life in Besieged Sarajevo (1992–1995)

Amila Ramović (Academy of Music, University of Sarajevo)

During the siege of Sarajevo (1992–1995), in a city deprived of electricity, water, food, and safety, music became a remarkably vivid part of urban life. Despite constant shelling and sniper fire that claimed over 11,500 lives, including 1,500 children, citizens organized over 2,000 concerts, along with 170 exhibitions and 180 theatre productions (Čavlović, 2011). This phenomenon, often called “cultural resistance,” was not merely an act of defiance: artists and audiences gathered in basements and concert halls, risking their physical existence in order to assert their spirit, their humanity and dignity. Reflecting on Sarajevo’s musical life today can also serve as a provocation. At a time when the role of music and the arts in general are lost between the consumerist logic of neoliberal markets and the cultural neglect of fast digital communication, Sarajevo's experience reminds us that art is essential — not only in moments of survival, but as a fundamental aspect of living.

Amila Ramović is a musicologist and curator from Sarajevo. She is a professor at the University of Sarajevo’s Academy of Music (since 2015), its vice dean for international cooperation (since 2000) and head of doctoral studies (since 2021). Her research field expands from 20th and 21st century music aspects to study of music during the siege of Sarajevo 1992-1995. Her curatorial practice focuses on interdisciplinarity and intermediality in contemporary arts. 

 

Made in YUGOSLAVIennA: Balkan Music and Multiple Marginality

Jelena Gligorijević & Adriana Sabo

(MMRC, mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna)

As one of the largest migrant groups in Vienna, people from the former Yugoslavia have made a deep and lasting impact on the citys culturally diverse soundscape. Scholars have long been interested in how Balkan difference the regions unique blend of sounds, styles and identities shapes musical expression in Vienna and Austria at large. Yet one aspect remains largely unexplored: the role of Balkan popular music in the life stories and self-expression of ex-Yugoslav migrants who face additional marginalization based on gender or sexuality. This project shines a spotlight on two such groups within Viennas ex-Yugoslav scene, which project leads Jelena Gligorijević and Adriana Sabo will outline in their talk responding to the guest lecture. 

 

Moderated by Juri Giannini

(IMI, mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna)

 

The isa comprises masterclasses, workshops and lectures as well as isaOnStage with public concerts, the music education program isaCommunity and the interdisciplinary academic summer school isaResearch. The mdw campus provides an ideal setting that promotes exchange between disciplines as well as the interplay of artistic excellence, social responsibility, and intercultural community.

Organisation: Kathrin Heinrich, Therese Kaufmann, mdw Research Support

Academic Advisory Board:

Ass.-Prof.ⁱⁿ Dr.ⁱⁿ Anja Brunner, Institute for Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology (ivE)

Ass.-Prof. Scott L. Edwards, PhD, Institute for Musicology and Performance Studies (IMI)

Dr. ⁱⁿ Magdalena Fürnkranz, Senior Scientist, Theory and History of Popular Music, Department for Popular Music (iPOP)

Mag. Dr. Juri Giannini, Senior Scientist, Institute for Musicology and Performance Studies (IMI)

Ass.-Prof.ⁱⁿ Dr.ⁱⁿ Marie-Anne Kohl, Institute for Musicology and Performance Studies (IMI)

 

isaScience is now isaResearch!

For 10 years, isaScience was mdw's international conference for interdisciplinary research on music and performing arts. Scholars, artists, and activists from various disciplinary backgrounds and academic levels joined the discourse on the annual thematic focus isa, the international summer academy of mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria

isaScience History

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