GSSC Seminar Series
13 August 2024
From Capital to Concerts: Forced Migrants and Value Creation in Germany’s World Music Scene
Rose Campion (University of Cologne)
Abstract
This ethnography investigates how forced migrants navigate careers in the German world music industry. I argue that these insights reveal certain values underpinning Germany’s migration regime. Specifically, I look at labour market integration, diversity discourses, and policies of interculturalism. In this paper I examine how these musicians accumulate and translate capital into career opportunities in the context of displacement.
While professional musicians may represent a small percentage of Germany’s overall migrant population, they nevertheless constitute an interesting social prism through which to study value. Music operates in a pericapitalist realm where different forms of value production can be translated into commodities and gifts. Thus ethnographic work on creative industries can reveal insights about the interaction between economic and social worth, or value and values. How forced migrants build knowledge of these processes and try to use them to their own advantage is the subject of this presentation.
Bio
Rose Campion is interim Junior Professor of Music and Migration at the Institute for European Ethnomusicology at the University of Cologne. She is completing her dissertation at the University of Oxford in the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS). Previously she was a Humboldt Foundation German Chancellor Fellow and recipient of research funding from DAAD and the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung.