Tuesday, 26th March, 2:30pm-3:30pm

Humanity is in crisis. This research focuses on one of today’s most growing issues, the refugee crisis, and combines this reality with the power that music, as an artistic and pedagogical manifestation, can have in the process of integrating refugees into the context of the host country. We want to build strategies that allow displaced people to feel integrated through the demonstration of their culture and identity, relieving them of the bureaucratic processes that characterize applications for refugee status, based on the premise of music as an expression of integration and a promoter of cooperation (Guerra, 2015).

Since integration is a two-way process, the project aims to address the collaborative nature of music and its ability to provide spaces for dialogue between refugees and the host community. In the specific context of music teaching, this research aims to propose new perspectives for teachers in raising students’ awareness of musical multiculturalism and an increasingly global reality in the Portuguese and European space, with the aim of enriching their academic/school career with new interpretations, greater knowledge of the global musical panorama and the development of a more conscious citizenship of society – an invitation to discover in music a language of integration.

ANIM (Afghanistan National Institute of Music) is an excellent example for this case study, due to its history, mission and humanitarian work in music education in Afghanistan. By means of a qualitative approach through ethnographic observation of this orchestra’s rehearsals, we will refine and develop the concept of affordances postulated by DeNora (2000, 2002). This theoretical-analytical effort is crucial here to the extent that the music performed by these young people takes on a mediating role in relation to social actions and experiences, shaping new subjectivities and their externalisations. It is a technology of the self of (re)adaptation, resistance and identity re-emergence, as we have seen in other contexts (Guerra et al., 2021, 2016).

References

Guerra, P. (org.) (2015). More Than Loud. Os mundos dentro de cada som. Porto: Edições Afrontamento.

Guerra, P.; S., Sofia & Lima, J. C. (2021). Viagens feitas de sons. Contributos para uma (re)escrita de diásporas de mulheres imigrantes de leste em Portugal. NAVA, 6(1-2), 298-323, DOI https://doi.org/10.34019/2525-7757.2021.v6.33476.

DeNora, T. (2002). Music into action: performing gender on the Viennese concert stage, 1790–1810’.