Explain How The Cultural Turn Has Affected The Study Of Migration

How the Cultural Turn has allowed music to be transformed into oral histories: music about migration and the borderland between the USA and Mexico from the album Border Song

Introduction

This essay will explain how the cultural turn has affected the study of migration through the advent of music. The cultural turn was a movement in the 1980s and 90s that changed how geography is studied (Eyerman, 2004). This has allowed for a much broader range of topics to be researched through a geographical lens, such as identity, race, gender, sexuality, and intersectionality, that take a more human-focused approach rather than just a physical one (Jacobs and Spillman, 2005). This opening up to cultural geography has allowed for a much broader approach

It went from looking at the physical aspects of the world such as the environment, landscapes, topography and climate to also including the human, cultural, and political aspects of an environment. It changed the understanding of how humans inhabit and shape the spaces around them. Not just how our lives are shaped by the environments we live in but the whole story of how they affect us and in turn how we affect them. This opened geography to become a much broader field of study allowing for race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, nationality, and intersectionality to become focal points in research (Jacobs and Spillman, 2005). ___ the growing awareness of how much our culture shapes geographic phenomena (Blunt, 2007). This fundamentally changed the study of geography, allowing for not just quantitative studies but qualitative ones as well. Additionally, the changes to geographic research have allowed us to better understand our surroundings allowing for other areas such as city planning to benefit from the advancement. Overall, the cultural turn led to a change in how we regard geography, as something that is not only physical but cultural as well which have allowed us to better understand how we interact with our environments (Eyerman,

After looking at the lyrics in just three songs from the Border Songs album you can see how much they discuss. They tell the oral histories that would otherwise be forgotten and ignored in the eyes of the powerful. They allow those that are struggling a voice through their artistry. Throughout the songs discussed above, there were themes of placelessness, identity, transnationalism, diaspora, nationalism, globalism, citizenship, and borders. By listening to these songs, we can better understand the struggle that migrants have to go through and the individual choices they have to make (Craigie, 2014). It shows that often there are forces at play that make migrating the only option for an individual. Overall, the music allows us to see more clearly what migrants must go through and gives them a voice in their own