The Routledge Handbook of Music and Migration

Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Music and Migration: Theories and Methodologies is a progressive, transdisciplinary paradigm-shifting core text for music and migration studies. Conceptualized as a comprehensive methodological and theoretical guide, it foregrounds the mobile potentials of music and presents key arguments about why musical expressions matter in the discussion of migration politics. 24 international specialists in music and migration set methodological and theoretical standards for transdisciplinary collaborations in the field of migration studies, discussing 41 keywords, such as mobility, community, research ethics, human rights, and critical whiteness in the context of music and migration. The authors then apply these terms to 16 chapters, which deal with ethnomusicological, musicological, sociological, anthropological, geographical, pedagogical, political, economic, and media-related methodologies and theories which reflect and contest current discourses of migration. In their interdisciplinary focus, these chapters advance interrelations between music and migration as enabling factors for socio-cultural studies. Furthermore, the authors tackle crucial questions of agency, equality, and equity as well as the responsibilities and expectations of writers and artists when researching migration phenomena as innate human experience. As a result, this handbook provides scholars and students alike with relevant and applicable methodological and theoretical tools in addition to an extensive literature and research review for further research.