This music student wrote her dissertation on the Eurovision Song Contest

Just when you thought you’d heard it all

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Thinking of a topic for your dissertation is a daunting prospect to say the least. You might have heard people write about war, politics or feminism, maybe something more adventurous like celebrity culture or TV programmes.

But how do you stand out from the crowd? Judith Scholes, a third year music student at the University of Manchester, has certainly achieved this, writing her dissertation on the pop culture sensation which has annually rocked our world for decades – Eurovision.

The dissertation’s full title is ”Where’s your heart? Humanity rise: The Eurovision Song Contest as a Platform for Empowerment of Minority Identities’, and focuses on how minorites find empowerment on the Eurovision stage. Judith describes the competition as ‘a global platform, where you get three minutes, that are live, broadcast to the world where you can say anything you want’.

Judith said some of her discussion includes ‘the 2016 competition, when the winner was a Crimean Tatar, who sang about the oppression that they faced from Russia in 1944 when Crimea was annexed, a transgender woman (Dana International) who previously won and became an icon of Eurovision, and also Marija Serifovic who won with her performance of her lesbian identity’.

Marija Serofovic

The aim of the dissertation was to explore what makes minorities win the competition, and how great it is for them. We hope her efforts score her more marks than the UK’s Eurovision fails.