How do music, people, and ideas move across geographic, political, and cultural boundaries? This was the central question at the 2026 edition of the isaResearch Summer School, entitled “Across Moving Grounds: Music, Performing Arts, and the Politics of Mobility”. This event saw an international group of 21 early stage researchers from a wide range of disciplines come together to shed light from the most varied perspectives on mobility as a core theme of musical and performative practices.

With its conferral of the 2026 Herta and Kurt Blaukopf-Award, the mdw has once again recognised excellent dissertation projects that stand out for their innovative methods, interdisciplinary approaches, and socio-political relevance. This award carries forward the legacy of Herta Singer-Blaukopf (1924–2005) and Kurt Blaukopf (1914–1999), two scholars persecuted under National Socialism whose work had a lasting impact on both musicology and music sociology, and simultaneously helps to position the mdw as an international centre of academic research.

It’s now official: the isaScience conference is history, having made way for the isaResearch Summer School as a new format for research within the framework of isa.

How do art and sound enter into dialogue with each other in the public realm? As part of KlangBildKlang, the three-day spring school “Sonic Dialogues: Intersections of Art and Sound in Public Spaces” offered a forum for early-stage researchers to explore precisely this question.

Ever since its establishment in 2021, mdwPress—our university’s own open-access academic publisher—has been working to make research at the mdw both more visible and openly accessible. An advisory board comprised of outstanding researchers and scholars from within and outside the mdw both guarantees academic independence and assures publication quality.

With an eye to communities and collectives ranging from social movements to artist groups and from ethnic communities all the way to “sonic ties” of the non-human sort, the 2023 isaScience conference zeroed in particularly on the interrelations between sound as such and power structures that exist in sound, music, and the performing arts at large.

isaScience 2023 is celebrating an anniversary: ten years of isaScience, organised by the mdw! This year’s conference on questions of togetherness and hence also looks inward at the isaScience community.

A violin suspended in mid-air next to an indoor swimming pool, another producing delicate sounds as if by itself: it was with such unusual impressions that HannaH Walter’s lecture-performance “becoming vyborg. becoming with technology” ushered in the second day of isaScience 2022, aptly fusing essential aspects of this interdisciplinary, hybrid humanities conference with the theme of “Un/Learning: Norms and Routines in Cultural Practices” in Reichenau an der Rax.