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 Ramovic (Academy of Music, University of Sarajevo)

 

Made in YUGOSLAVIennA: Balkan Music and Multiple Marginality

Jelena Gligorijević & Adriana Sabo

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

 

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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