The BFE Student Prize 2023 is awarded to Ivan Mouraviev for his outstanding paper, “Bass, Space, Place: The Mediation of London Dubstep Culture in an Online Discord Community.”

This insightful and fascinating paper considers how a virtual music community can be understood as being organized around a “nostalgia genre” and how both online and offline spaces connected with that genre are reproduced in the virtual community. More broadly, the author aims to “stimulate discussion about how sonic cultures are preserved and remembered, and how the internet mediates musical genre and place” by addressing a community organized both virtually and in real life around dubstep, a form of electronic dance music (EDM) emergent in south London in the late 1990s. The argument is developed through a nuanced and mature synthesis of ethnography and theory, rooted in both current literature and fieldwork, both of which are integrated thoughtfully throughout the paper.