Research Topic:

‘Performing interculture – inequality and difference in contemporary music production in Berlin’

Supervisors:

Professor Mike Savage (Department of Sociology and International Inequalities Institute) and Dr David Madden (Department of Sociology)

Research Interests:

Cultural Sociology; Cultural Production; Migration Studies; Postcolonial Epistemologies; Urban Studies; Media Studies; Qualitative Methods

Thesis Abstract:

My research interests focus on the cultural industries, particularly on music production and performance, and their significance for urban inequalities, citizenship discourses and representational politics around ‘race’, ethnicity, class and gender. I would like to understand how social dynamics in the field of cultural production shape concepts of cultural value and legitimacy and how these discourses interlink with broader patterns of inequality and power. In my thesis, I explore contemporary forms of music production in Berlin and analyse whether it is associated with forms of urban multiculture or the reproduction of elite formations and racialised notions of difference. My thesis is based on an ethnographic study (including participant observation, interviewing and musicological analysis) of an on-going music project in the city and analyses how concepts of diversity, difference and inequality are constructed and reflected in both the project’s organisational set-up and aesthetic practices. 

Publications:

Holzberg, Billy and Kolbe, Kristina and Zaborowski, Rafal (2018) Figures of crisis: the delineation of (un)deserving refugees in the German media. Sociology.