Jake Harwood turned his lifelong hobby as a musician into a scholarly question: Could the sharing of music help ease interpersonal relations between people from different backgrounds, such as Americans and Arabs?
To explore the issue, and building on his years of research on intergroup communication, Harwood began collaborating two to three years ago with his graduate students and other researchers on a number of studies, finding that music is not merely a universal language. It appears to produce a humanizing effect for members of groups experiencing social and political opposition.
"Music would not have developed in our civilizations if it did not do very important things to us," said Harwood, a professor in the University of Arizona Department of Communication. "Music allows us to communicate common humanity to each other. It models the value of diversity in ways you don't readily see in other parts of our lives."
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