Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Drawing on a multi-sited ethnography of 39 Iranian migrant musicians across five UK cities (2022–2024), this article investigates how unconscious dynamics, fractured subjectivities, and cultural dissonances are negotiated through musical creativity. Shifting focus from prescriptive policy to lived realities, the study bridges ethnomusicology, migration studies, and a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework to challenge linear paradigms of social integration. By examining divergent adaptive strategies, the research illustrates that sonic creativity is a social act that operates as a primary apparatus for self-organisation – be it expression, preservation or integration. The core contribution lies in a materialist-psychoanalytic synthesis, demonstrating that integration is neither a top-down policy outcome nor a purely internal psychological process. Rather, it is an achieved effect forged at the intersection of psychological lack and material mediation. The findings reveal that the structurally split subject is inextricably linked to the external socio-political architectures – venues, spatial acoustics, and gatekeepers – that both constrain and afford its articulation. Ultimately, this article argues that musical expression acts as a fraught site where encounters with memory, displacement, and otherness resist closure, reframing diasporic integration not as a measurable endpoint, but as a continuously deferred, materially grounded process.
Source: Journal of Intercultural Studies
Author: Amin Hashemi
Institution: University of Aberdeen
Language: English
Topic: Music History and Culture
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: hybrid
Funder: Leverhulme Trust
OpenAlex ID: W7221039491