On 7 July 2026, Marcus Bösch was a guest speaker at the seminar ‘What do you Meme? Humour, Sounds and Contexts in Internet Culture’. Together with the students and other interested attendees, he discussed political meme culture, far-right codes on TikTok and the question of how a pop song like ‘L’amour toujours’ can become a tool of digital propaganda.

The 23rd Popkritik event at the “Sputnik” in Paderborn focused on football as a pop-cultural phenomenon: from Argentine fan chants and Colombian identity, through AI-generated football music, to Shakira and the commercialisation of the World Cup.

Amid sweltering temperatures, the President of the North Rhine-Westphalia State Parliament and the ‘Popboard NRW’ network hosted a ‘Parliamentary Pop Evening’ at the State Parliament in Düsseldorf on 18 June. Numerous politicians, musicians, officials, journalists and even a group of academics attended an entertaining and highly productive event.

“Tuning the Noisegate: Politics of Filtering, Selecting and Amplifying in Popular Music” – this was the theme of the seventh biennial conference of the German-speaking branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM D-A-CH), which took place from 28 to 30 May 2026. This year’s host was the Institute of Music at Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. A small delegation from the Paderborn Pop Team, comprising…

On 2 June 2026, the Contemporary History Research Unit and the C:POP Research Centre hosted a lecture by Dr Martin Göllnitz entitled ‘(I can’t get no) securization’. Security dynamics of pop in the 1950s and 1960s. The focus was on the question of how pop music in the former Federal Republic of Germany was perceived not only as entertainment, pleasure or youth culture, but also as a potential threat to notions of social order.