Conference Themes　　 1. Music and New Political Geographies in the Turkic-speaking World and Beyond　　 A conference held in Kazakhstan, a nation-state formed in 1991, provides a perfect opportunity to consider the role of music and dance in the formation, in our time, of new political and cultural geographies. Such new geographies may include new nation-states in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union; new alliances along transnational ethnic lines, as in the cases of the Turkic-speaking area of the world’s twenty eight countries, republics and districts, or the formation of the European Union; the challenge to national identity posed by globalization; and the rise of new subnational, regional sensibilities as a response to nationalism, transna-tionalism, and globalization. This topic is particularly relevant to the location of the meeting, but also inspires new submissions for other regions of the world affected by “new political geographies.” How have these new and emerging political and cultural alliances at the junction of a decision to merge or to choose independence used music to further their geopolitical goals and how have musicians and their audiences resisted new forms of economic and political domination and hegemony through music-making and dancing?　　 2. The Creators of Music and Dance　　 In a field of study that tends to focus on the music and dance of groups of people, what is the status of studies of individual creators of music, dance, artistic institutions, and scholarship? These creators may be musicians, singers, dancers, composers, choreographers, instrument-makers, social activists, government officials, or scholars. How do we understand the role of these individual creators in particular societies? How do we define creativity in terms of contributions to aesthetic forms? What cultural and social power do we attribute to individual creators? What cultural and social restraints do individual creators work under in particular communities?　　 3. Music, Dance, the Body, and Society　　 Music and dance performance in many societies are events that bring some people together while excluding other people. How do these processes of inclusion and exclusion work at the intersection of the body and society? How is the body politic formed by musicking and dancing bodies? How does society use music and dance performances to heal ailing bodies and reintegrate them into society? How do people use their able or (dis)abled bodies to counter social exclusion through music and dance performance? How is the gendered body interpreted and made in music and dance performance? How do minorities, immigrants, and displaced people use their musical and dancing bodies to deal with the power of the mainstream to define their social status?　　 4. Sound Environments: From Natural and Urban Spaces to Personal Listening　　 In the last decade there have been a number of calls for ethnomusicologists to broaden their studies from music to the more general area of sound. Questions are being asked about the relationship between the sounds of war and industrialization and the sound of music. Other questions concern the change of natural and musical sounds in environments altered by climate change. How is ethnomusicology responding to developments in the field of sound studies? How might ethnomusicological methods and perspectives contribute to sound studies? How do individuals and communities respond to their sound environments through personal listening choices, the building of new performance venues, the creation of new songs, performance styles, and genres, and the use of new electronic media and listening devices?　　 5. Visual Representation of Music Cultures　　 From Persian miniatures to YouTube and Vine, music and dance have nearly always and nearly everywhere been the subject of visual representation. Such representations have presented music historians with many problems under the rubric of musical iconography. What methodological and theoretical issues are still prominent in this long established area of study? On the other hand, how do new electronic visual media affect the transmission of musical and dance knowledge? How do they affect the social life of music and dance in particular societies? How are these new media altering our research methods? How can the visual images in these new media be adequately archived and preserved? How do these new media, and the opportunities they provide for self-expression, alter the balance of representation between researchers and research subjects? What is the relationship between representations of, and the flow of knowledge about, “traditional” and popular musics in these new media?　　 6. New Research　　 Proposals on new research on other relevant topics are also welcome.