Integration and the Making of Subjectivity of Migrants via Musical Creativity
I examine how music might facilitate or hinder social integration in contexts of migration of Iranian musicians in the UK. I employ ethnographic and interdisciplinary approaches on case studies of individual musicians framed by debates in post-colonialism, ethnomusicology, and psychoanalysis. Re-examining ‘integration’, I challenge presumptions around the discrimination of the host community or the tenacious cultural identity of migrants. Working through the intertwined relationship between the individual and the social, I focus on creativity as the manifestation of the musician’s subjectivity, and music as a performative medium that connects these musicians with the various cultural contexts in which they operate.
Dr Amin Hashemi is an interdisciplinary researcher in ethnomusicology, post-structuralist psychoanalysis and discourse analysis from Iran. He focuses on the links between musical creativity and subjectivity, the regimes of truth, and the transformations of the paradigms. As a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, here at the Music Department, he examines the constitution of subjectivity and dynamics of socio-cultural integration of Iranian migrant musicians in the UK. In his previous one-year postdoctoral research at ISCS (Tehran), he investigated the abandoned notion of social space of the university as the site for the creative processes of the practice of rock music by the Iranian youth in the making of their subjectivity. His PhD Thesis at SOAS, as conducted between 2014 and 2019, was on antagonism in popular music of post-revolution Iran, focused on the events and cases between 2013 and 2018, especially in regard to the politics of culture and everyday musical practices.