Soundscapes of a Disapora: Investigating Identity Formation, Community Building, and Meaning Making in Panjabi Sikh Diasporic Youth

<a href="https://embed.stanford.edu/iframe/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpurl.stanford.edu%2Fjc646km8491" class="su-underline">Show Content</a>

Abstract/Contents

Abstract: This thesis explores the youth in the Panjabi Sikh diaspora and the ways in which they understand themselves, form community, and delineate their boundaries on the basis of language, performance, and history. The research particularly focuses on the practice of language along with the soundscapes of religious and cultural spaces, in order to interrogate Panjabi Sikh diasporic identity formulation through an auditory lens in an effort to see the ways that this new way of attending to identity can complicate the idea of what it means to be a young person within these communities. The thesis revolves around two key questions: (1) how do Panjabi Sikh youth in the diaspora come to define their identities and the community’s bounds, and (2) what are the key landscapes through the youth of the Panjabi Sikh community relate to histories and heritages in order to help define themselves? These questions of definition centrally circle one key theoretical question of how the excavation of auditory landscapes allows the ethnographer to better interrogate the formation of identity, the creation of community, and the making of meaning by youth in the Panjabi Sikh diaspora. The acoustic experience of being, both within noise and silence, can be a rich point of discovery and this text aims to take the reader closer that discovery accompanied by a journey through how Panjabi Sikh diasporic youth formulate identity and community.

Author	Kaur, Harleen
Thesis advisor	Thiranagama, Sharika

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/jc646km8491
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/jc646km8491

Use and reproduction: User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International license (CC BY-NC-ND).

Preferred citation: Kaur, H. (2022). Soundscapes of a Disapora: Investigating Identity Formation, Community Building, and Meaning Making in Panjabi Sikh Diasporic Youth. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/jc646km8491

Undergraduate Research Papers, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University.

Loading usage metrics...