Thematic Issue: Music Education Among Refugee and Migrant Youths: Sharing, Belonging, Including

Alix Didier Sarrouy is a researcher at the Instituto de Etnomusicologia – Centro de Estudos em Música e Dança (INET-md, NOVA FCSH), where he coordinates the Thematic Line on Power, Politics, and Activism. In 2020, he was awarded a highly competitive individual research grant from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) for a six-year project titled ‘IncArt – Migrants and Refugees in Europe: Arts as Tools for Sociocultural Inclusion’. He served as Principal Investigator for the exploratory project ‘YouSound – Music Education as an Inclusive Tool for Underage Refugees in Europe’ (2022–2023), also funded by FCT, and is a team member of the project ‘PERICREATIVITY – Peripheral Creativities: Youth, Art, and Public Policies in Segregated Territories’. In 2022, Alix Didier Sarrouy published two books: Atores da educação musical: etnografia nos programas socioculturais El Sistema, Neojiba, Orquestra Geração (Edições Húmus-CICS.NOVA) and, as co-editor and co-author, A arte de construir cidadania: juventude, práticas criativas e ativismo (Tinta da China).

Chrysi Kyratsou is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher Fellow at the Research Ireland-funded project MUSPACE, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. She previously held an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Researcher Fellowship at UCD School of Music. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Queen’s University Belfast (research project funded by a Northern Bridge DTP-AHRC Studentship and a British Forum for Ethnomusicology Fieldwork Grant 2019), and degrees in Musicology and Music Education, and Ethnomusicology. Her research interests comprise musicking, encounters, (im)mobilities, (non)belonging. Chrysi’s fieldwork research into refugees’ sheltering in reception centres explores how refugees’ aesthetic agencies are informed by the shifting backgrounds in which they live, and how they shape their socialities. She is the Editor of the Special Issue: Navigating hurdles and reconfiguring (im)mobilities in times of corona (Critique of Anthropology 44:4), Editor of the Round Table Voice and Agency (Royal Musical Associational Research Chronicle 56), and author of several articles available OA.

The development of this TI took place during an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Researcher Fellowship, when she was based at UCD School of Music. Preliminary work for this Introduction took place a Research Visit at the Instituto de Etnomusicologia – Centro de Estudos em Música e Dança (INET-md, NOVA FCSH), as part of her IRC Fellowship.