Papers by Ioannis Christidis
Internment Refugee Camps - Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, 2022
This article examines the role of music in the everyday lives of Syrian refugees in the hotspot c... more This article examines the role of music in the everyday lives of Syrian refugees in the hotspot camps of the EU. It demonstrates music’s capacity to evoke collective empathy, mobilise participation and foster acts of citizenship, shifting the imaginaries surrounding refugees from victimisation to agency and strength.
Christidis, Ioannis. 2022. “Singing and Dancing for Freedom of Movement - Enacting Citizenship and Resisting Forced Confinement in ‘Hotspot’ Refugee Camps in Thessaloniki, Greece 2016.” In Internment Refugee Camps Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Gabriele Anderl, Linda Erker, and Christoph Reinprecht, 1. Auflage, 177–91. Germany, Bielefeld: transcript. <https://www.transcript-verlag.de/chunk_detail_seite.php?doi=10.14361%2F9783839459270-013>
JOURNAL MUSIC & MINORITIES, 2021
Within the ever-expanding field of ethnomusicological research in contexts marked by sociopolitic... more Within the ever-expanding field of ethnomusicological research in contexts marked by sociopolitical, financial, and environmental crisis, a newly emerging area of study has been that of music in contexts of forced migration. This article explores the groundbreaking contribution of one of the pioneering figures in ethnomusicological research in that field: Adelaida Reyes. The article's goal is to encapsulate a framework that could be adopted and adapted by, and inspire new researchers on music and forced migration. After an introduction to the personal background of Adelaida Reyes, the article discusses three main positions that permeate her inaugural research in urban contexts, particularly that of New York. These are the interdisciplinary conceptualization of the socio-political context; the study of music of groups of people without essentialist preconceptions, and the adjustment of fieldwork methods to correspond to theoretical concerns and the empirical reality. The article then proceeds to link Reyes' core thoughts with the particular innovative theoretical and methodological concepts she applied in her multi-sited research with Vietnamese refugees in the U.S. and in refugee camps in the Philippines, as well as in her research with refugees from South Sudan in Uganda. Informed by anthropological refugee studies, her pioneering approach perceives forced migration as a unified experience and context, consisting of pre-departure features, departure-related, and finally, those related to resettlement. Musical meaning then becomes intensively transforming and dependent on a plethora of factors. On the one hand, as Reyes' ethnomusicological research in urban settings had pointed out, there was complexity, heterogeneity, and blurred boundaries, and on the other, emerging in particular experiences of forced migration, there was psychological distress; processes of institutional labeling; living in refugee camps; asymmetrical power relations between
mdw-WEBMAGAZIN, 2021
Contesting Border Regimes – Sounds and Images was the title of 2021’s international symposium Tra... more Contesting Border Regimes – Sounds and Images was the title of 2021’s international symposium Transkulturalität_mdw, which took place online on 7 and 8 May. In keeping with this event’s seven-year commitment, which has seen interdisciplinary scientific and artistic contributions around the notions of culture, cultural boundaries, and their theoretical and practical intersection in education and in the wider social and political realm, the focus this time was on recent refugee movements and the socio-political and cultural realities—and inequalities—that have emerged as result. Over 100 participants from all over the world—including both contributors and the audience—came together using digital meeting software, which has grown ever more integrated into everyday educational realities due to covid-19 restrictions and played a central role in rendering this type of event more international. The programme here included a variety of inputs such as keynote lectures, music, poetry, performances, film projections, panel discussions, and paper presentations. And with the aspiration of bringing diverse forms of artistic expression, fields of scholarship, and activism into dialog, it also extended invitations to personalities from within and outside the academic world.
mdw-WEBMAGAZIN, Feb 2021
On 11 November 2020, the Music and Minorities Research Center (MMRC) launched its first annual le... more On 11 November 2020, the Music and Minorities Research Center (MMRC) launched its first annual lecture, delivered in online form and hosted by Ursula Hemetek, director of the MMRC. Despite the special circumstances, this event managed to engage an interdisciplinary audience from all around the world and fulfil its main goal, which was to bring scholars from different disciplines together in constructive and lively discussions that reflect contemporary academic discourses and stances on crucial social issues.
The topic of this year was forced migration. Dawn Chatty, professor emerita of anthropology and forced migration at the University of Oxford, a former director of the Refugee Studies Centre and an active practitioner in the field, was invited to give the keynote address entitled Anthropological Reflections on Fortress Europe. Her presentation focused on the circumstances under which the modern humanitarian era arose and on how its initial objectives, linked with moral obligations and social responsibilities toward people seeking refuge, were gradually transformed by European governments into what is today referred to as a “fortress” mentality.
Marko Kölbl, a senior researcher at the Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology at the mdw, presented his response from an ethnomusicological point of view, drawing particularly from his research on the musical expressions of the Afghan community in Vienna.
In the following interview, Dawn Chatty speaks about her personal motivation to engage in social anthropology and about the role of anthropological research in understanding the relationship between policies, moral economies, and refugees’ lived experiences as well as in providing knowledge for further implementations in activities that can affect refugees’ realities for the better.
MMRC website, 2021
Hurriya in Arabic and Azadi in Persian are the words for freedom. The trilingual slogan “Hurriya,... more Hurriya in Arabic and Azadi in Persian are the words for freedom. The trilingual slogan “Hurriya, Azadi, Freedom now!” was chanted in protests, in singing and dancing, in the summer of 2016, in Thessaloniki, a city in northern Greece, by people mainly coming from war-torn Syria, protesting for the re-opening of European borders and against their forced settlement in refugee camps. Throughout the previous months, the refugee movement through Turkey towards Europe was at its peak, encompassing mass border-crossings, traveling by any possible – risky – means, setting up of makeshift camping zones along the "Balkan route," from Greece to the Austrian borders. These conditions led many countries to loosen their border controls and let people pass. However, this did not last more than six months. With the EU-Turkey Refugee Deal of March 2016 the European border regime was reinstated even more strictly. Greece until then had constituted a transit country. With the closure of the borders, about 15,000 refugees, mainly coming from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, were blocked at the Greek – (North) Macedonian borders, near the Greek village of Idomeni. After two months of protests and border-crossing attempts, all these people, were finally forcibly moved by the Greek authorities into twelve wretched refugee camps, in old warehouses, abandoned factories and military facilities, on the outskirts of Thessaloniki, at a distance of 70km from the border.
Very soon, protests erupted in the center of the city as well as in the refugee camps. What was so unique was that in all these protest-events music seemed to play an integral role. There was no protest without music, and even in the abject conditions in refugee camps, there were people involved in various musical performances. The main – but not the sole – protagonists in these musical expressions were young men of Syrian-Arab origin, who mostly danced to Syrian popular/folk dance music, known as dabke, and sang songs about the Syrian uprising of 2011 and their own ongoing experiences as refugees.
In this podcast, Ioannis Christidis, researcher of the ethnomusicological project “Music in the experience of forced migration from Syria to the European borderland,” presents and contextualizes field-recordings of singing and dancing performances documented by him in Thessaloniki 2016, as well as relevant audio samples traced on the internet. He then attempts to interpret them through the experiential perspectives of their own protagonists and by making use of theories and concepts deriving from ethnomusicology, anthropology and political sciences.
Stimme, 2020
An interview with Marie-Thérèse Kiriaky, about the humanitarian and musical activities of the Ara... more An interview with Marie-Thérèse Kiriaky, about the humanitarian and musical activities of the Arab-Austrian Women's Association (Vienna, Austria). On-line English version of the following:
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). „Interview mit Marie-Thérèse Kiriaky, Koordinatorin der Arab- Austrian Women’s Organization: 'Musik hat die Gabe, Menschen zu verbinden!' In: Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 23-25.
Stimme, 2020
Ioannis Christidis befragt Marie-Thérèse Kiriaky, über die humanitären und musikalischen Aktivitä... more Ioannis Christidis befragt Marie-Thérèse Kiriaky, über die humanitären und musikalischen Aktivitäten der Arabisch-Österreichischen Frauen Organisation (Wien, Österreich).
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). „Interview mit Marie-Thérèse Kiriaky, Koordinatorin der Arab- Austrian Women’s Organization: 'Musik hat die Gabe, Menschen zu verbinden!'.“ In: Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 23-25.
Stimme, 2020
Ein Artikel von Ioannis Christidis in der Sonderausgabe der Zeitschrift Stimme: Klang-heimaten, M... more Ein Artikel von Ioannis Christidis in der Sonderausgabe der Zeitschrift Stimme: Klang-heimaten, Musik und Minderheiten.
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). " 'Wir, die Fremden!' Musik im Kontext von Flucht – Ismails Geschichte.“ In: Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 11-13.
Stimme, 2020
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). "Wir, die Fremden!" Musik im Kontext von Flucht – Ismails Geschichte... more Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). "Wir, die Fremden!" Musik im Kontext von Flucht – Ismails Geschichte.“ In: Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 11-13.
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). „Interview mit Marie-Thérèse Kiriaky, Koordinatorin der Arab- Austrian Women’s Organization: 'Musik hat die Gabe, Menschen zu verbinden!'.“ In: Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 23-25.
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). CD – Rezension: "The Songs We Still Remember." Von: Basma Jabr & Orwa Saleh. In:Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 29.
website of MMRC, 2020
What are the transforming functions, meanings, and socio-political implications of the musical pe... more What are the transforming functions, meanings, and socio-political implications of the musical performances of Syrian refugees and exiles throughout their journey and resettlement in Europe? -
"Music in the experience of forced migration from Syria to the European Borderland" is a research project that aims to answer that question and to further inspire music-centered interventions in the form of projects of applied ethnomusicology.
visit:
https://www.musicandminorities.org/research/projects/music-in-the-experience-of-forced-migration/
Events by Ioannis Christidis
The 46 th ICTM World Conference Presentation Guidelines Presentation Formats and Rules This confe... more The 46 th ICTM World Conference Presentation Guidelines Presentation Formats and Rules This conference consists of regular papers organized as prearranged panels, prearranged roundtables, as well as panels consisting of individual papers addressing similar themes. In addition to regular papers, this year conference attendees will encounter a new mode of delivering research-the paper-performance. Paper-performances have been integrated into panels, again based on shared themes. Another innovation of the 46 th World Conference is a Film Festival. On Day II and Day III, 16 documentaries will be screened-each more than once-in three dedicated rooms. You can find the schedule in the Film Festival brochure. During the last three days of the conference, you will have an opportunity to discuss each film with the filmmakers in regular conference sessions (look for Film Discussions). Panels and roundtables are typically either 90 minutes or 120 minutes long. In a panel, each paper is allotted 20 minutes for its presentation, followed by 10 minutes for questions and discussion. The roundtable format, on the other hand, is more flexible. Panellists address the main issue or topic of the roundtable for 8-10 minutes, and the remainder of the time is open for an informal discussion between roundtable members and a more extended question-and-answer session with the audience. Programme of the 46th ICTM World Conference Each session in the programme has, in addition to its title, a unique identifier consisting of three components: a Roman numeral, a capital letter, and an Arabic numeral.
The international symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Music and Minorities will be held from the... more The international symposium of the ICTM Study Group on Music and Minorities will be held from the 25th to the 29th of October in Uppsala, Sweden.
The presentations can be followed live here on:
www.isof.se/mmlive
Concept and Organisation
Evelyn Annuß (Department of Cultural Management and Gender Studies)
Ur... more Concept and Organisation
Evelyn Annuß (Department of Cultural Management and Gender Studies)
Ursula Hemetek (Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology, Music and Minorities Research Center)
Therese Kaufmann (Research Support)
Gerda Müller (Vice Rectorate for Organizational Development, Gender & Diversity)
Hande Sağlam (Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology)
Organisation & PR
Julia Fent (Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology, Music and Minorities Research
Center)
Book of Abstracts
Content: Evelyn Annuß, Julia Fent, Ursula Hemetek, Therese Kaufmann, Gerda Müller, Hande Sağlam
Cover Design: Sebastian Hierner (Communications and Marketing)
Layout: Julia Fent
Technical Management
Pit Kaufmann (Audio-Video-Centre)
Information
www.mdw.ac.at/ive/symposium-2021
Video:
https://mediathek.mdw.ac.at/contestingborderregimes
Annual Conference of the Austrian Association for Exile Research (öge) in cooperation with the De... more Annual Conference of the Austrian Association for Exile Research (öge) in cooperation with the Department for Contemporary History (University of Vienna) and the research network “Migration, Citizenship and Belonging” (Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Vienna)
2-4 December 2020, Vienna
online
The conference aims to facilitate an extensive engagement with the organized, state-led, and forced placement of refugees in both the past and present. The emphasis will be on a comparative perspective – synchronic as well as diachronic. One of the key aims of the conference is to make visible the parallels and differences between the practices and types of internment in different countries – while considering the specific historical contexts. Another important focus will be the nexus of relationships and agencies which constitute the camps in question as transitory spaces. The contributions consist of analyses of local phenomena or case studies as well as comparative engagements from an international or historical perspective.
Committee:
Gabriele Anderl (öge), Linda Erker (Department of Contemporary History/University of Vienna), Kerstin von Lingen (Department of Contemporary History/University of Vienna), Christoph Reinprecht (öge & Department of Sociology/University of Vienna), Nora Walch (öge)
Drafts by Ioannis Christidis
Paper Abstracts by Ioannis Christidis
Programme Brochure of the Conference "Music, Migration, Belonging/s in 21st-Century Europe", 2023
The paper was presented at the conference "Music, Migration, Belonging/s in 21st-Century Europe,"... more The paper was presented at the conference "Music, Migration, Belonging/s in 21st-Century Europe," which was organized on 24-25 November 2023, at the University of Music and Performing Arts, within the research project "Women Musicians from Syria: Performance, Networks, Belonging/s after Migration."
Book of Abstracts (2023 ICTM World Conference in Ghana), 2023
Paper Abstract by Ioannis Christidis "Remembrance, inter-community solidarity and active citizens... more Paper Abstract by Ioannis Christidis "Remembrance, inter-community solidarity and active citizenship – Syrian politically charged music in Europe" within the session "VA08 THE SOCIAL POWER OF MUSIC IN PROTEST, SOLIDARITY, AND REBELLION"
Music across Borders | 21st Quinquennial Congress of the International Musicological Society (IMS2022) August 22–26, 2022 Athens, Greece | Abstract Book, 2022
p. 104
Roundtable Organizer/Chair
Ioannis CHRISTIDIS (University of Music and Performing Arts Vi... more p. 104
Roundtable Organizer/Chair
Ioannis CHRISTIDIS (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna)
Roundtable Participants
Ioannis CHRISTIDIS (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) Melissa J. SCOTT (University of California, Berkeley)
Graihagh CORDWELL (University of Oxford)
Title:
Music Infrastructures across Borders: Digital Media, Mobile Technologies, and Music among Syrians in Greece and Jordan
Considering the increasing refugee movements of the last decade, ethnomusicologists have started to examine the changing musical, cultural, and social environments in many cities and countries of destination. Various themes and interests have emerged, most prominently the relationship between musical practices and experiences of trauma, both individual and collective; displacement and relations to place; and political mobilization against restrictive border policies. Syrian refugees are one of the largest and most widely dispersed groups of migrants and have subsequently attracted ethnomusicological in- quiry in a variety of settings and socio-political contexts, from Lebanon and Jordan, to Greece, Austria, and Germany, and to the USA and Canada. In this widening field of study, music making in Syrian migration is often framed in terms of the moral, political, and methodological consequences of power imbalances and misrepresentations. Indeed, such inequities are made explicit within contexts of displacement, where both policy and social attitudes limit the extent to which migrants have control over their lives. This panel considers, however, the potentially empowering role of mobile phones, Wi-Fi, so- cial media, and other media technologies for Syrian refugees throughout their journeys and experiences of resettlement. We focus in particular on migrant music making and listening practices, and the possibilities such technologies offer to create public and pri- vate spaces for musical performances, independent of spatial and political boundaries.
Ioannis Christidis, on the basis of fieldwork in Thessaloniki (2016), will examine ways in which certain technologies that empower migration practices are used to am- plify, circulate, and experience music in response to restricted mobility, deprivation of rights, and dehumanizing living conditions in refugee camps. Melissa J. Scott will revisit the relationship between urban soundscapes and emplacement by focusing on the use of broadcasting and streaming technologies, such as radio and YouTube, among Syrian musicians in Jordan. Graihagh Cordwell will explore the place of media technologies and internet in Za'atari Refugee Camp in Jordan, including how Syrian musicians approach the challenges faced by the lack of access to certain technologies in their music making.
Book of Abstracts | 46th World Conference of the International Council for Traditional Music. Lisbon, Portugal. , 2022
p.51
Christidis, Ioannis
(University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Music and Minorities ... more p.51
Christidis, Ioannis
(University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Music and Minorities Research Center)
As of the 1990s, a new style of Syrian dabke music emerged, diverging from its past nationalist-folk attitude. It constitutes a developing musical idiom that combines singing, lively beats, and the playing of folk instruments in an electro-digital way. This new pop-folk dabke is connected to the working and rural classes of Syria, mainly performed by popular musicians in weddings and other festivals, and danced in circle or line. It is also common – with regional diversification and names – in areas with a strong presence of Kurdish and Assyrian minorities. This new dabke, however, especially in urban contexts, such as Damascus and Aleppo, also bears social, ethnic, and class stigma, often cited among Syrians as the “music of the streets,” “music for simple entertainment,” “the music of the mini-bus drivers of Damascus,” “not music at all.” In the past 15-20 years, because of the growing popularity of the Syrian wedding-singer Omar Souleyman, Syrian dabke started to attract the attention of audiences of alternative, world, or electronic music, in Europe and North America. At the same time, dabke traveled together with the Syrians who fled the war in their country and arrived as refugees in various Western countries. In Greece, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, numerous dabke performances by Syrian migrants are today staged in public venues or private dance clubs, and very often within dance workshops. This paper particularly focuses on the presence of Syrian dabke in Vienna, Austria. Through field research, it seeks to find out where it is possible to attend dabke performances, and how Syrian dabke as a genre is positioned in the broader musical scenes of Vienna, taking into account its entrenched – negative – connotations but also its renewed momentum on a European level.
Uploads
Papers by Ioannis Christidis
Christidis, Ioannis. 2022. “Singing and Dancing for Freedom of Movement - Enacting Citizenship and Resisting Forced Confinement in ‘Hotspot’ Refugee Camps in Thessaloniki, Greece 2016.” In Internment Refugee Camps Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Gabriele Anderl, Linda Erker, and Christoph Reinprecht, 1. Auflage, 177–91. Germany, Bielefeld: transcript. <https://www.transcript-verlag.de/chunk_detail_seite.php?doi=10.14361%2F9783839459270-013>
The topic of this year was forced migration. Dawn Chatty, professor emerita of anthropology and forced migration at the University of Oxford, a former director of the Refugee Studies Centre and an active practitioner in the field, was invited to give the keynote address entitled Anthropological Reflections on Fortress Europe. Her presentation focused on the circumstances under which the modern humanitarian era arose and on how its initial objectives, linked with moral obligations and social responsibilities toward people seeking refuge, were gradually transformed by European governments into what is today referred to as a “fortress” mentality.
Marko Kölbl, a senior researcher at the Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology at the mdw, presented his response from an ethnomusicological point of view, drawing particularly from his research on the musical expressions of the Afghan community in Vienna.
In the following interview, Dawn Chatty speaks about her personal motivation to engage in social anthropology and about the role of anthropological research in understanding the relationship between policies, moral economies, and refugees’ lived experiences as well as in providing knowledge for further implementations in activities that can affect refugees’ realities for the better.
Very soon, protests erupted in the center of the city as well as in the refugee camps. What was so unique was that in all these protest-events music seemed to play an integral role. There was no protest without music, and even in the abject conditions in refugee camps, there were people involved in various musical performances. The main – but not the sole – protagonists in these musical expressions were young men of Syrian-Arab origin, who mostly danced to Syrian popular/folk dance music, known as dabke, and sang songs about the Syrian uprising of 2011 and their own ongoing experiences as refugees.
In this podcast, Ioannis Christidis, researcher of the ethnomusicological project “Music in the experience of forced migration from Syria to the European borderland,” presents and contextualizes field-recordings of singing and dancing performances documented by him in Thessaloniki 2016, as well as relevant audio samples traced on the internet. He then attempts to interpret them through the experiential perspectives of their own protagonists and by making use of theories and concepts deriving from ethnomusicology, anthropology and political sciences.
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). „Interview mit Marie-Thérèse Kiriaky, Koordinatorin der Arab- Austrian Women’s Organization: 'Musik hat die Gabe, Menschen zu verbinden!' In: Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 23-25.
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). „Interview mit Marie-Thérèse Kiriaky, Koordinatorin der Arab- Austrian Women’s Organization: 'Musik hat die Gabe, Menschen zu verbinden!'.“ In: Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 23-25.
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). " 'Wir, die Fremden!' Musik im Kontext von Flucht – Ismails Geschichte.“ In: Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 11-13.
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). „Interview mit Marie-Thérèse Kiriaky, Koordinatorin der Arab- Austrian Women’s Organization: 'Musik hat die Gabe, Menschen zu verbinden!'.“ In: Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 23-25.
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). CD – Rezension: "The Songs We Still Remember." Von: Basma Jabr & Orwa Saleh. In:Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 29.
https://www.mdw.ac.at/magazin/index.php/2020/11/25/bye-bye-fluechtlingslager/?lang=en#easy-footnote-1-5465
"Music in the experience of forced migration from Syria to the European Borderland" is a research project that aims to answer that question and to further inspire music-centered interventions in the form of projects of applied ethnomusicology.
visit:
https://www.musicandminorities.org/research/projects/music-in-the-experience-of-forced-migration/
Events by Ioannis Christidis
The presentations can be followed live here on:
www.isof.se/mmlive
Evelyn Annuß (Department of Cultural Management and Gender Studies)
Ursula Hemetek (Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology, Music and Minorities Research Center)
Therese Kaufmann (Research Support)
Gerda Müller (Vice Rectorate for Organizational Development, Gender & Diversity)
Hande Sağlam (Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology)
Organisation & PR
Julia Fent (Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology, Music and Minorities Research
Center)
Book of Abstracts
Content: Evelyn Annuß, Julia Fent, Ursula Hemetek, Therese Kaufmann, Gerda Müller, Hande Sağlam
Cover Design: Sebastian Hierner (Communications and Marketing)
Layout: Julia Fent
Technical Management
Pit Kaufmann (Audio-Video-Centre)
Information
www.mdw.ac.at/ive/symposium-2021
Video:
https://mediathek.mdw.ac.at/contestingborderregimes
2-4 December 2020, Vienna
online
The conference aims to facilitate an extensive engagement with the organized, state-led, and forced placement of refugees in both the past and present. The emphasis will be on a comparative perspective – synchronic as well as diachronic. One of the key aims of the conference is to make visible the parallels and differences between the practices and types of internment in different countries – while considering the specific historical contexts. Another important focus will be the nexus of relationships and agencies which constitute the camps in question as transitory spaces. The contributions consist of analyses of local phenomena or case studies as well as comparative engagements from an international or historical perspective.
Committee:
Gabriele Anderl (öge), Linda Erker (Department of Contemporary History/University of Vienna), Kerstin von Lingen (Department of Contemporary History/University of Vienna), Christoph Reinprecht (öge & Department of Sociology/University of Vienna), Nora Walch (öge)
Drafts by Ioannis Christidis
Paper Abstracts by Ioannis Christidis
Roundtable Organizer/Chair
Ioannis CHRISTIDIS (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna)
Roundtable Participants
Ioannis CHRISTIDIS (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) Melissa J. SCOTT (University of California, Berkeley)
Graihagh CORDWELL (University of Oxford)
Title:
Music Infrastructures across Borders: Digital Media, Mobile Technologies, and Music among Syrians in Greece and Jordan
Considering the increasing refugee movements of the last decade, ethnomusicologists have started to examine the changing musical, cultural, and social environments in many cities and countries of destination. Various themes and interests have emerged, most prominently the relationship between musical practices and experiences of trauma, both individual and collective; displacement and relations to place; and political mobilization against restrictive border policies. Syrian refugees are one of the largest and most widely dispersed groups of migrants and have subsequently attracted ethnomusicological in- quiry in a variety of settings and socio-political contexts, from Lebanon and Jordan, to Greece, Austria, and Germany, and to the USA and Canada. In this widening field of study, music making in Syrian migration is often framed in terms of the moral, political, and methodological consequences of power imbalances and misrepresentations. Indeed, such inequities are made explicit within contexts of displacement, where both policy and social attitudes limit the extent to which migrants have control over their lives. This panel considers, however, the potentially empowering role of mobile phones, Wi-Fi, so- cial media, and other media technologies for Syrian refugees throughout their journeys and experiences of resettlement. We focus in particular on migrant music making and listening practices, and the possibilities such technologies offer to create public and pri- vate spaces for musical performances, independent of spatial and political boundaries.
Ioannis Christidis, on the basis of fieldwork in Thessaloniki (2016), will examine ways in which certain technologies that empower migration practices are used to am- plify, circulate, and experience music in response to restricted mobility, deprivation of rights, and dehumanizing living conditions in refugee camps. Melissa J. Scott will revisit the relationship between urban soundscapes and emplacement by focusing on the use of broadcasting and streaming technologies, such as radio and YouTube, among Syrian musicians in Jordan. Graihagh Cordwell will explore the place of media technologies and internet in Za'atari Refugee Camp in Jordan, including how Syrian musicians approach the challenges faced by the lack of access to certain technologies in their music making.
Christidis, Ioannis
(University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Music and Minorities Research Center)
As of the 1990s, a new style of Syrian dabke music emerged, diverging from its past nationalist-folk attitude. It constitutes a developing musical idiom that combines singing, lively beats, and the playing of folk instruments in an electro-digital way. This new pop-folk dabke is connected to the working and rural classes of Syria, mainly performed by popular musicians in weddings and other festivals, and danced in circle or line. It is also common – with regional diversification and names – in areas with a strong presence of Kurdish and Assyrian minorities. This new dabke, however, especially in urban contexts, such as Damascus and Aleppo, also bears social, ethnic, and class stigma, often cited among Syrians as the “music of the streets,” “music for simple entertainment,” “the music of the mini-bus drivers of Damascus,” “not music at all.” In the past 15-20 years, because of the growing popularity of the Syrian wedding-singer Omar Souleyman, Syrian dabke started to attract the attention of audiences of alternative, world, or electronic music, in Europe and North America. At the same time, dabke traveled together with the Syrians who fled the war in their country and arrived as refugees in various Western countries. In Greece, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, numerous dabke performances by Syrian migrants are today staged in public venues or private dance clubs, and very often within dance workshops. This paper particularly focuses on the presence of Syrian dabke in Vienna, Austria. Through field research, it seeks to find out where it is possible to attend dabke performances, and how Syrian dabke as a genre is positioned in the broader musical scenes of Vienna, taking into account its entrenched – negative – connotations but also its renewed momentum on a European level.
Christidis, Ioannis. 2022. “Singing and Dancing for Freedom of Movement - Enacting Citizenship and Resisting Forced Confinement in ‘Hotspot’ Refugee Camps in Thessaloniki, Greece 2016.” In Internment Refugee Camps Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Gabriele Anderl, Linda Erker, and Christoph Reinprecht, 1. Auflage, 177–91. Germany, Bielefeld: transcript. <https://www.transcript-verlag.de/chunk_detail_seite.php?doi=10.14361%2F9783839459270-013>
The topic of this year was forced migration. Dawn Chatty, professor emerita of anthropology and forced migration at the University of Oxford, a former director of the Refugee Studies Centre and an active practitioner in the field, was invited to give the keynote address entitled Anthropological Reflections on Fortress Europe. Her presentation focused on the circumstances under which the modern humanitarian era arose and on how its initial objectives, linked with moral obligations and social responsibilities toward people seeking refuge, were gradually transformed by European governments into what is today referred to as a “fortress” mentality.
Marko Kölbl, a senior researcher at the Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology at the mdw, presented his response from an ethnomusicological point of view, drawing particularly from his research on the musical expressions of the Afghan community in Vienna.
In the following interview, Dawn Chatty speaks about her personal motivation to engage in social anthropology and about the role of anthropological research in understanding the relationship between policies, moral economies, and refugees’ lived experiences as well as in providing knowledge for further implementations in activities that can affect refugees’ realities for the better.
Very soon, protests erupted in the center of the city as well as in the refugee camps. What was so unique was that in all these protest-events music seemed to play an integral role. There was no protest without music, and even in the abject conditions in refugee camps, there were people involved in various musical performances. The main – but not the sole – protagonists in these musical expressions were young men of Syrian-Arab origin, who mostly danced to Syrian popular/folk dance music, known as dabke, and sang songs about the Syrian uprising of 2011 and their own ongoing experiences as refugees.
In this podcast, Ioannis Christidis, researcher of the ethnomusicological project “Music in the experience of forced migration from Syria to the European borderland,” presents and contextualizes field-recordings of singing and dancing performances documented by him in Thessaloniki 2016, as well as relevant audio samples traced on the internet. He then attempts to interpret them through the experiential perspectives of their own protagonists and by making use of theories and concepts deriving from ethnomusicology, anthropology and political sciences.
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). „Interview mit Marie-Thérèse Kiriaky, Koordinatorin der Arab- Austrian Women’s Organization: 'Musik hat die Gabe, Menschen zu verbinden!' In: Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 23-25.
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). „Interview mit Marie-Thérèse Kiriaky, Koordinatorin der Arab- Austrian Women’s Organization: 'Musik hat die Gabe, Menschen zu verbinden!'.“ In: Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 23-25.
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). " 'Wir, die Fremden!' Musik im Kontext von Flucht – Ismails Geschichte.“ In: Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 11-13.
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). „Interview mit Marie-Thérèse Kiriaky, Koordinatorin der Arab- Austrian Women’s Organization: 'Musik hat die Gabe, Menschen zu verbinden!'.“ In: Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 23-25.
Christidis, Ioannis. (2020). CD – Rezension: "The Songs We Still Remember." Von: Basma Jabr & Orwa Saleh. In:Stimme - Klangheimaten: Musik und Minderheiten, H.117: 29.
https://www.mdw.ac.at/magazin/index.php/2020/11/25/bye-bye-fluechtlingslager/?lang=en#easy-footnote-1-5465
"Music in the experience of forced migration from Syria to the European Borderland" is a research project that aims to answer that question and to further inspire music-centered interventions in the form of projects of applied ethnomusicology.
visit:
https://www.musicandminorities.org/research/projects/music-in-the-experience-of-forced-migration/
The presentations can be followed live here on:
www.isof.se/mmlive
Evelyn Annuß (Department of Cultural Management and Gender Studies)
Ursula Hemetek (Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology, Music and Minorities Research Center)
Therese Kaufmann (Research Support)
Gerda Müller (Vice Rectorate for Organizational Development, Gender & Diversity)
Hande Sağlam (Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology)
Organisation & PR
Julia Fent (Department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology, Music and Minorities Research
Center)
Book of Abstracts
Content: Evelyn Annuß, Julia Fent, Ursula Hemetek, Therese Kaufmann, Gerda Müller, Hande Sağlam
Cover Design: Sebastian Hierner (Communications and Marketing)
Layout: Julia Fent
Technical Management
Pit Kaufmann (Audio-Video-Centre)
Information
www.mdw.ac.at/ive/symposium-2021
Video:
https://mediathek.mdw.ac.at/contestingborderregimes
2-4 December 2020, Vienna
online
The conference aims to facilitate an extensive engagement with the organized, state-led, and forced placement of refugees in both the past and present. The emphasis will be on a comparative perspective – synchronic as well as diachronic. One of the key aims of the conference is to make visible the parallels and differences between the practices and types of internment in different countries – while considering the specific historical contexts. Another important focus will be the nexus of relationships and agencies which constitute the camps in question as transitory spaces. The contributions consist of analyses of local phenomena or case studies as well as comparative engagements from an international or historical perspective.
Committee:
Gabriele Anderl (öge), Linda Erker (Department of Contemporary History/University of Vienna), Kerstin von Lingen (Department of Contemporary History/University of Vienna), Christoph Reinprecht (öge & Department of Sociology/University of Vienna), Nora Walch (öge)
Roundtable Organizer/Chair
Ioannis CHRISTIDIS (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna)
Roundtable Participants
Ioannis CHRISTIDIS (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna) Melissa J. SCOTT (University of California, Berkeley)
Graihagh CORDWELL (University of Oxford)
Title:
Music Infrastructures across Borders: Digital Media, Mobile Technologies, and Music among Syrians in Greece and Jordan
Considering the increasing refugee movements of the last decade, ethnomusicologists have started to examine the changing musical, cultural, and social environments in many cities and countries of destination. Various themes and interests have emerged, most prominently the relationship between musical practices and experiences of trauma, both individual and collective; displacement and relations to place; and political mobilization against restrictive border policies. Syrian refugees are one of the largest and most widely dispersed groups of migrants and have subsequently attracted ethnomusicological in- quiry in a variety of settings and socio-political contexts, from Lebanon and Jordan, to Greece, Austria, and Germany, and to the USA and Canada. In this widening field of study, music making in Syrian migration is often framed in terms of the moral, political, and methodological consequences of power imbalances and misrepresentations. Indeed, such inequities are made explicit within contexts of displacement, where both policy and social attitudes limit the extent to which migrants have control over their lives. This panel considers, however, the potentially empowering role of mobile phones, Wi-Fi, so- cial media, and other media technologies for Syrian refugees throughout their journeys and experiences of resettlement. We focus in particular on migrant music making and listening practices, and the possibilities such technologies offer to create public and pri- vate spaces for musical performances, independent of spatial and political boundaries.
Ioannis Christidis, on the basis of fieldwork in Thessaloniki (2016), will examine ways in which certain technologies that empower migration practices are used to am- plify, circulate, and experience music in response to restricted mobility, deprivation of rights, and dehumanizing living conditions in refugee camps. Melissa J. Scott will revisit the relationship between urban soundscapes and emplacement by focusing on the use of broadcasting and streaming technologies, such as radio and YouTube, among Syrian musicians in Jordan. Graihagh Cordwell will explore the place of media technologies and internet in Za'atari Refugee Camp in Jordan, including how Syrian musicians approach the challenges faced by the lack of access to certain technologies in their music making.
Christidis, Ioannis
(University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Music and Minorities Research Center)
As of the 1990s, a new style of Syrian dabke music emerged, diverging from its past nationalist-folk attitude. It constitutes a developing musical idiom that combines singing, lively beats, and the playing of folk instruments in an electro-digital way. This new pop-folk dabke is connected to the working and rural classes of Syria, mainly performed by popular musicians in weddings and other festivals, and danced in circle or line. It is also common – with regional diversification and names – in areas with a strong presence of Kurdish and Assyrian minorities. This new dabke, however, especially in urban contexts, such as Damascus and Aleppo, also bears social, ethnic, and class stigma, often cited among Syrians as the “music of the streets,” “music for simple entertainment,” “the music of the mini-bus drivers of Damascus,” “not music at all.” In the past 15-20 years, because of the growing popularity of the Syrian wedding-singer Omar Souleyman, Syrian dabke started to attract the attention of audiences of alternative, world, or electronic music, in Europe and North America. At the same time, dabke traveled together with the Syrians who fled the war in their country and arrived as refugees in various Western countries. In Greece, Belgium, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands, numerous dabke performances by Syrian migrants are today staged in public venues or private dance clubs, and very often within dance workshops. This paper particularly focuses on the presence of Syrian dabke in Vienna, Austria. Through field research, it seeks to find out where it is possible to attend dabke performances, and how Syrian dabke as a genre is positioned in the broader musical scenes of Vienna, taking into account its entrenched – negative – connotations but also its renewed momentum on a European level.