Organiser Dr Elad Carmel writes:
This workshop, held on 19–20 May 2023, a week after Eurovision 2023 in Liverpool, was kindly supported by the Susan Manning Workshop Fund from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. It brought together a large group of researchers from a variety of disciplines, countries, and career stages to explore different aspects of one of the biggest and longest-lasting musical events in the world: the Eurovision Song Contest.
We set the tone (and the tune) for the first, in-person day with a special playlist made of our participants’ favourite Eurovision songs of all time, and we started off with our keynote lecture, Eurovision and LGBTQ+ Visibility in City Space by Dr Catherine Baker. Dr Baker’s pioneering scholarship on the Contest, especially in relation to LGBTQ+ studies, inspired and informed many of the presentations that followed.
Following the keynote, the first day saw three fascinating sessions which covered a number of crucial aspects of the politics of Eurovision. The first session discussed questions of camp and sexuality as well as the idea of the ‘Eurovision archive’, suggested by Oliver Lewis. The second session discussed different case studies of the relationship—and the increasing tensions—between queer and European politics, focusing on the participations and/or withdrawals of Turkey, Ukraine, Russia, and Hungary. In this and the following session, we saw an impressive range of methods and content analysis, including of social media and the press, to explore the reactions to and receptions of Eurovision, a key takeaway and a crucial direction for future research on the Contest. The last session included exciting talks on identity and pop, as with the case of Abba and Europop, described by Abigail Parker.
On the second, virtual day we heard another group of innovative and thought-provoking presentations on various underexplored aspects of Eurovision. These included, for example, Paul David Flood’s talk on ‘Soul-Pop and Afro-Swedishness in the Eurovision Song Contest’ and Karen Fricker and Peter Rehberg’s talk on ‘The Eurovision Song Contest in the Age of Microcelebrity’. See the full programme of the workshop here, and listen to a podcast summarising our workshop by two of our participants, Shiloh Cooper and Rosie Hodsdon, here.
As any Eurovision fan knows all too well, at the end of every May the Eurovision excitement calms down a little for a few months until the preparations for the next Contest kick off. Yet just before we said goodbye to Liverpool 2023, our workshop provided a friendly and professional space to reflect on some of the very latest development in Eurovision and helped to create a new network of researchers who will hopefully continue to meet in the years ahead. In the meantime, we are preparing to put together a special issue with selected papers from the workshop. Do keep an eye out and get in touch if you are interested in taking part in future events!