Music-Making as a Tool of Cross-cultural Adaptation
Author: Emre C Alptekin, emre.alptekin@uwr.edu.pl
Department: Doctoral College of Sociology
University: University of Wroclaw, Poland
Supervisor: Elzbieta Opilowska
Year of completion: In progress
Language of dissertation: English
Keywords:
Sociocultural Adaptation
, Migration
, Musicking
, Music and Culture
Areas of Research:
Arts
, Migration
, Communication, Knowledge and Culture
Abstract
With the intensifying flow of academically motivated people between countries, the significance of research on cross-cultural adaptation increases. Although the problems and difficulties caused by cultural differences have been researched frequently, this research focused on a common practice among different cultures: musicking in an intercultural context. The current research project explores how collective musicking shapes migrants' cross-cultural experiences in Poland. For this purpose, the relevance between migrants' cross-cultural adaptation and collective musicking as a social activity in Poland is examined. The concept of sociocultural adaptation will be intensively focused on by relating the concept with musicking to find the roles of musicking on migrants' adaptation process. The required data will be gathered through in-depth interviews with migrants from various countries and observations from musical circles who gathered to make music as a collective activity during their transnational accommodation. The collected data will be analyzed by the inductive coding approach to explore the commonalities in the migrants' experiences. The findings of the small-scale pilot study lead that collective musicking shapes music-maker migrants' cross-cultural experiences by not merely helping them gain a specific social network but also contributing to their financial income and their mood states and finally, privileged behavior by the host country members towards these students.
