Alexander Marsden, Ph.D. 2024
Advisor: Mark Katz
Dissertation Title: Rehearsing Community, Performing Empathy: The Value of Music in Refugee Advocacy Activism in the United Kingdom, 2015–2022
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Dissertation Abstract:
As in many other European countries, the refugee crisis has been a contentious political issue in the United Kingdom in the 21st century. Music has featured prominently among the tools employed by British civil society groups aiming to provide social support for refugees and asylum seekers and increase public empathy towards them. Examples of these ‘refugee music projects’ (RMPs), as I term them, include: a song-writing project for Syrian refugees in the northeast of England; an album recorded in the migrant camp in Calais, France in 2015–16; and various choirs run by refugee welfare charities. These projects vary in their methodologies, but they share an underlying conviction that music fosters understanding and encourages compassion.This dissertation focuses on diverse uses of music in UK-based refugee advocacy work from 2015 to 2022 to explore the imagined value of music as a tool of charitable and ethical action. I investigate how the actors involved in shaping and promoting musical refugee advocacy projects—including musicians, charity workers, activists, funders, and journalists—answer the question, ‘why music?’ I argue that the answers to this question, and the kinds of humanitarian action they inspire, are contingent, determined by particular histories and local cultural and political contexts. I explore determining factors of contemporary pro-refugee music projects, such as how they develop from earlier models of British musical humanitarianism; how their practices are shaped by the priorities of funders and the professional norms of UK community music work; and how these projects relate to broader debates around migration, austerity, and Brexit. This dissertation produces both an analysis of the relationship between music, migration, and charity in the British popular imagination, and a consideration of how these projects might be strengthened through a clearer understanding of the cultural conventions and infrastructures through which they operate.