Douglas Mattsson (Södertörn University, Stockholm)

Religious semiotic resources in black metal music and the evolvement of subcultures

Douglas Mattsson is a PhD student at the department of Religious Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm, Sweden. His academic background is in the study of religion, and his research has mostly focused on youth and subcultures in Muslim majority societies and especially Turkey. He is currently working on his dissertation which is an ethnographic study of the Turkish black metal music scene. His dissertation will be the first major scholarly work that focuses on a subculture that has been present in Turkey since the early 1990s. In the general framework of his dissertation, Mattsson is particularly interested in how religious semiotic resources are utilized within the scene to communicate thoughts and opinions regarding religion in Turkey. His most recent publication includes chapters in the anthologies The Politics of Culture in Contemporary Turkey (Pierre Hecker, Ivo Furman (eds.) Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and Living Metal: Metal Scenes around the World (Bryan Bardine, Jerome Stueart (eds.) Intellect, 2021).