Music, Migration and Mobility Conference

Approaches centring mobility/mobilities also allow for focus on the ways that mobilities are unequally accessed, positioned, relational, and perhaps unjust (Sheller 2018), and, as a result, potentially slowed, stopped, stuck, or impeded. Researchers are, thus, as likely to talk of immobilities in order to reflect the uneven experiences and power relations that shape mobility, as they are to speak of meaningful movements. One example is Berish’s work (2012) on the experience of Black jazz musicians in the United States across infrastructures of automobility and race. Another example would be the effect of recent changes in access to mobility for British musicians after Brexit.

There is, indeed, no single prevailing framework for approaching mobilities, but rather a multitude of ‘mobile methodologies’ (Merriman 2014; Büscher, Freudendal-Pedersen, Kesselring, Kristensen 2020) which can be used to apprehend mobilities and immobilities in connection with traditional and innovative research methods. Further, in centring the mobilities and immobilities of, say, migrants, one can cast new light on concepts like exile, helping us to think critically about inherited models that ultimately privilege stasis in describing discrete and delineated movement ‘from there’ ‘to here.’

The conference will offer an opportunity to discuss the methodological, conceptual, and practical challenges that arise from such an approach, and to enter into a dialogue about its usefulness.

As a world-leading advocate for the future of music, the Royal College of Music is committed to being an agent of positive and meaningful cultural change, embracing the ideals of an open, innovative and just society.

This conference aims to build on the work of the AHRC-funded Music, Migration, and Mobility project, undertaken in partnership with Royal Holloway University of London and The University of Salzburg. Since it began in 2019, the project has aimed to investigate the diverse and uneven mobilities of migrant musicians who fled Nazism and fascist regimes for Britain in the years leading up to the Second World War. The project aims to determine how foregrounding mobility can help us to better understand the legacies and impact upon culture of migratory musicians and other mobile artists and cultural figures.

In the context of migration, the new mobilities paradigm helps us to challenge the notion of (transnational) mobility as an abnormal human experience, which in turn allows us to re-evaluate the lives and legacies of migratory peoples.