Festival ’26 Open Call – Symposium Talks
Sonorities and IF welcome proposals for short talks (up to 20min) that engage with the theme of Improvising Futures.
Deadline for this open call is the 31st August 2025.
SARC is partner on the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) funded research project ‘Improvising Futures’ (2022-2027), which is led by the International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation. The project involves a large number of academic and non-academic partner organisations across the globe, including Moving on Music and Drake Music NI in Belfast. We are leveraging this international network to carry out practical initiatives, community interventions, and knowledge exchanges in order to imagine and implement new paradigms for confronting a broad range of social issues, and to conduct this research widely across disciplines and borders.
In the context of this open call for Sonorities 2026, the theme of Improvising Futures will focus on investigating the next generation of guiding research questions that will expand the global impact and reach of Critical Studies in Improvisation. This interdisciplinary field of academic scholarship and professional practice has its origins in music and the wider performing arts, and continues to expand to fields as diverse as law, architecture, psychology, anthropology, business management, healthcare and social policy (to name a few). Improvisation scholars aim to overcome the popularly held misconception that improvisation is simply ‘making it up as you go along’. Rather, improvisation is more productively understood as a skilled practice that transcends disciplinary boundaries and promotes new approaches to creative decision-making, critical dialogue, risk-taking, and collaboration across diverse domains and levels of expertise (e.g. how judicial discretion is applied on a case-by-case basis, or how architectural designs interplay with the agency of builders and inhabitants). A guiding aim is to rethink how best to cope with future events that cannot be predicted with a sufficient level of certainty, or for which a single correct response may not exist.
To apply, please complete the submission form and submit a proposal (in PDF format) containing:
- Title of proposed talk
- Name(s) and role(s) of presenter(s)
- Short description of talk, including duration
- Online links to relevant works (optional)
- Any specific technical requirements, including what you will provide yourself
Presenters selected through this open call without access to funding from an academic institution will receive a fee (£100 per local artist, £250 per artist traveling to Belfast to offset travel expenses). Up to three nights’ accommodation can be provided upon request. Sonorities can also provide a letter of support to assist with funding applications to cover additional costs.
This open call is supported by the SSHRC funded partnership grant Improvising Futures.