Navigating Professional Musical Identities While Forcibly Displaced: A Narrative Inquiry with Ukrainian Women

Exploring musical identity amongst those forcibly displaced engages with broader issues of nationhood, belonging and migration. People seeking international protection inhabit intersectional experiences of identity, holding the conflicting experience of negotiating the culture they have left and living within a new culture. This article examines the migratory stories of four female professional musicians, specifically from Ukraine, now living in Germany and Ireland. Through narrative interview data, insights are provided on the lives and musical career trajectories of these women, as well as key ‘turning points’ as they navigate new musical and cultural contexts. Their stories are revealed to be non-linear and complex. Thus, the article pieces together narrative fragments from four different Ukrainian women to inform understandings of how these musicians actively construct meaning from their musical experiences and utilise their professional musical identities as an alternative way of being to that of an asylum seeker. The women, through music, reject marginalisation and assimilation and instead forge new sounds, connections and ways to understand the self and ‘other’.