Embodied Research Through Music Composition and Evocative Life-Writing: Disrupting Diaspora examines how attendance to the lived experience of diaspora can impact our scholarly understanding of the term.
Drawing on the entanglements between her life and practice as a music composer, British Iranian author Soosan Lolavar weaves together a uniquely embodied approach, enriched by both her personal narrative and music. Lolavar scrutinises the way that the metaphor of diaspora has left indelible marks on her life and work, exploring these through the narrative presented in this book and an accompanying website with extensive clips of her music. This process allows her to construct new theoretical conceptions of diaspora which bring nuance and detail to a concept used widely across the humanities and social sciences. Through these means, Lolavar presents a map for transdisciplinary work which triangulates artistic practice, theory and evocative life-writing in lively and reflexive ways. Her work contributes to a growing field of embodied scholarly work and makes a powerful case for the potential of music to connect us to our shared experience of embodied ways of knowing.
This unique book is primarily written for an academic audience with interests in embodied research methods, diaspora studies, practice-as-research and music composition. It will also be suitable for those working across the disciplines of music, sociology, communications, creative writing and human geography.