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Scholarship on prison music-making projects and programmes to date has largely overlooked the perspectives of prison music facilitators, who form an integral part of many prison music activities. The aim of the study, which was exploratory in nature, was to contribute to a better understanding overall of the relationship between music and imprisonment by focusing on the perspectives of prison music practitioners. Drawing from data collected in four Norwegian prisons through ethnographic research, data was analysed thematically with four key themes emerging: interpersonal communication and emotional connection; social responsibility; prison system and environment, and (in)difference and exclusion. The findings highlight the fact that the range of prison music activities offered in many Norwegian prisons affects music facilitators deeply in a number of ways, and support existing studies that find that prison music practices can contribute to creating a community of caring individuals both inside and outside prisons. Notably, the emergence of the (in)difference and exclusion theme demonstrates a more critical and nuanced view of prison music facilitators’ experiences as going beyond simplistic, romantic notions of music’s function in social transformation. Concerns raised for those who appear to be excluded or differentiated from musicmaking opportunities in prison – in particular foreign nationals and women – suggest that (even) in the Norwegian context, music in prisons remains a “reward” rather than a fundamental “right.” This study marks a step towards a richer and more critical understanding of prison musicking and aims to inform future research, practice, and the processes involved in the possibilities for offering music in prisons.
Musicae Scientiae
During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some American soldiers commonly listened to music in order to “motivate” themselves before action. Previous studies have shown that their most frequent choices to this effect pertained to two genres: “gangsta” rap and heavy metal. At another extreme of armed violence, Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik reported listening to a selection of tunes in the preparation of his 2011 massacre and possibly also during its perpetration. His musical choices sounded radically different from metal and rap. Yet, all of these styles of music had previously been associated with graphic violence throughout popular movies and video games. This paper asks how each type of music “worked” in motivating its listener for armed confrontation. The comparison requires going beyond the fact that mainstream media interact with common imaginaries of violence. The hypothesis here is that the differences between the terrorist’s and the soldier’s playlists reflect deeper contrasts in their engagements with the opponent. This case study of musical “motivation” leads to a broader discussion of the interplay between the agency of the listener, as opposed to the agency which he or she sometimes locates in the music itself.
Transposition
A proliferation of popular music genres flourished in post-independence Nigeria: highlife, jùjú, Afrobeat, and fújì. Originating within Yorùbá Muslim communities, the genres of fújì and Islamic are Islamised dance music genres characterised by their Arabic-influenced vocal style, Yorùbá praise poetry, driving percussion, and aesthetics of incorporation, flexibility, and cultural fusion. Based on analysis of interviews and performances in Ìloṛ in in the 2010s, this article argues that the genres of fújì and Islamic allegorise Nigerian unity—an ideology of tolerance, peaceful coexistence, and equity—while exposing the gap between the aspiration for unity and everyday inequities shaped by gender and morality.
Yearbook for Traditional Music
In light of the growing number of hate crimes, anti-Semitism and a rise in xenophobia in Germany over the past decade, many scholars and practitioners believe that remembrance culture in Germany is fading. Errinerungskultur, or how societies deal with their historic pasts, is particularly important in Germany because of its ongoing reckoning with the events of the Holocaust. One way of dealing with the societal aftermath of such conflict is the process of transitional justice, which seeks to correct the wrongdoings of the past and actively build better social, cultural and reconciliatory processes into post-conflict societies. These processes can encompass a number of projects including war crimes trials, victim reparations and memorialization efforts. This research examines how arts-based memorialization projects impact errinerungskultur in Germany. An exploratory case study was conducted, in which primary and secondary data were collected from four different German, arts-based memorialization projects. Using the Aesthetic Perspectives framework (2017), the projects were analyzed by their ability to meet three selected criteria for arts-based change. The most significant results showed that projects that strategically implemented stakeholder and participant-oriented processes in the development phase were more impactful than those that did not. These results suggest that while there are a plethora of memorialization projects seeking to reach goals of transitional justice, those which can be developed with transparent and open collaboration among diverse groups of stakeholders lead to more impactful outcomes.
Community Orientated and Opportunity Learning (COOL) Music was a 12-month collaborative project between researchers at Glasgow Caledonian University and practitioners at the Edinburgh-based social enterprise Heavy Sound. The project began in October 2017 and involved 16 sessions of participatory music making with 32 ‘hard-to-reach’ young people (aged 12–17) aimed at increasing confidence and self-esteem and improving social skills. Using COOL Music as a case study, this article explores some of the challenges faced by community-based arts organisations tasked with delivering such interventions, contrasting COOL Music’s small-scale, targeted, community-based approach with prevailing top-down music interventions in Scotland. We argue that such programmes are particularly suitable in engaging those at the margins of society, reaching them on their own terms through music that resonates with their own lived experience. However, we acknowledge the short-term and transitory nature of such projects may prove problematic for some hard-to-reach groups who require more stability in their lives and may also lead to staff fatigue and burnout. We call for further research in these areas, and greater policy attention to be paid to the sustainability of such projects.
British Journal of Music Education
This article sets out a dialogue on the impact of music on people and society. The perspectives of three researchers, from different experiential and methodological backgrounds, are presented. The article explores: how we define concepts of impact; how we seek to measure the impact of engaging with music, providing examples from our own recent work; and tensions in attempting to capture or measure the ‘magic’ of music, including how to meet the needs of different audiences and how to develop new ways to capture impact. The authors reflect on the political climate in which music interventions operate, including the need to ask different questions at different times for different audiences, concluding that it is vital to measure both whether there is any impact, how this impact was achieved, and people’s experiences of engaging with music. We found consensus about the need to move evidence forwards through both the use of arts-based creative methods that focus on the music-making process itself as well as through collaborations that bring together varied perspectives, experiences, disciplines and research methods. We also argue that – as there is considerable evidence about the impact of music, on different people, in different ways and in different settings – researchers should now aim to take stock of the evidence base. Finally, we posit that there is merit in engaging with a reflective dialogue like the one presented here, as a tool to help challenge, disrupt and influence our own thinking.
International Journal of Community Music
In the drive to securitise migration, immigration detention has expanded rapidly across western democratic states. This article investigates the function and meaning that music workshops have for foreign nationals held in UK detention centres. Drawing on scholarship on affect and emotion, I consider how the workshops produce separate affective forms of time and space that stand apart from, but also shape the dominant structures and social discourses of the detention centre. For many participants, caught in a state of perpetual dislocation and the hierarchies of detention centre orderings, the workshops are a space to escape or make sense of place, investing space with an affectivity that provides a meaningfully felt counterpoint to the austerity of the detention every day. Nevertheless, as much as music is a resisting practice and a means of reinventing detention, it also functions as a technology of social control, perpetuating hegemonic orderings. Thus, a closer look at the performance space draws attention to the ways in which music merges with other biopolitical technologies in structuring and defining life in detention.
Ethnomusicology Forum
The article focuses on the role of music among RUF combatants fighting in the Sierra Leone civil war. It touches on some widely held notions of music and a general reluctance towards the idea that music can be instrumentalised for violent means. Furthermore, it will address in what way the research focus on music was conducive to qualitative interview sessions and direct interactions with former RUF members. Special focus lies on the songs that inspired rebel fighters and how these songs were used to prepare for and accompany violent attacks. The article concludes by exploring and comparing how perpetrators, victims and musicians assess the appropriation of music in the context of violence and how they feel about the songs today.
Transposition
The study assesses how Concerts Norway has interacted with the Norwegian Foreign Ministry and local musical actors in India to build infrastructure in the cultural field in India. Using ethnographic methods and document analysis, we found that CN successively shifted from rational, via entrepreneurial to relational brokerage, adapting the programme and the development communication to shifting MFA-policies as well as to the Indian partner ́s needs. We raise critical questions about arts development versus general views on development assistance and highlight a particular asymmetry between mainstream development models and the need to be strengthening the art sector, towards its sustainability.
Development in Practice
Conflicts are increasingly recognised as situated in local contexts with culturally specific elements playing important roles. At the same time, conflicts reflect and contribute to global dynamics. Seeking peace within this complexity requires curious, creative and critical approaches that can account for politics. But how can peacebuilders account for unique local settings while also recognising multiple and diverse perspectives within and between them? Reflecting on this question, Dancing through the dissonance explores the relationship between peacebuilding and dance in pluralist societies, examining the practice of dance-focused peacebuilding programmes in Colombia, the Philippines and the United States. Incorporating participant voices, critical political analysis and reflections on dance practice, the authors reveal the implications and nuances of arts-based peace initiatives. This book offers a unique insight into the application, practice and analysis of dance-focused peacebuilding programmes, building on a critical understanding of the politics of integrating dance into peacebuilding and the ways in which these programmes fit into global debates around peace and conflict. As the global community continues to seek inclusive pathways to peace that improve upon, supplement, or replace existing dominant approaches, this book provides a valuable in-depth analysis and recommendations for arts-based peacebuilding approaches.
Transposition
From 2000 on, the emergence of activist choirs has greatly influenced practices of political activism in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. In this article, I analyze how activists, singers, and listeners repurpose antifascist music legacy in order to experiment with new forms of political engagement. I propose the concept of radical amateurism, a political community that fuels the politicization of a field of leisure, which enables people to form new audiosocial alliances at local, regional, and global scales. Locating my theoretical framework within the field of affective politics of sound, I show that political potentiality, when related to music and sound, is inscribed in the complex relationship between imagined and real, exception and everydayness, emerging and routinized, and impossible and possible. In conclusion, I scrutinize contingencies of affective politics and discuss the ways affective encounters enable a new framework for practicing political engagement in a moment of apathy and neoliberal exhaustion.
Ethnomusicology
Numerous studies have borne out the effects of cultural and music education on individuals’ well-being, considering music as a mainly systematic practice or skill or as established educational supply. However, few studies assess the impact of music programmes designed to achieve specific goals, where music is considered as a tool for social change. As a case study, we take the Medellin Music School Network (Colombia), whose education programme for music initiation has been running for 23 years. Our aim is to evaluate the economic and social impact generated by participating in this programme. We use a quasi-experimental propensity score matching technique as the evaluation method. Results show that the programme significantly reduces the probability of participants’ becoming involved in conflict, added to which they perceive a better quality of life. Students achieve better academic performance and intensify cultural consumption and participation in artistic activities. Institutional efficacy is reflected through beneficiaries expressing a positive and significant willingness to pay in order to maintain the programme. The work also aims to evidence the usefulness of the methodology for evaluating the impact of cultural policies, particularly in developing areas.
Journal of Cultural Economics
Music is an important presence in our world, thought to be universal in human societies. The ubiquity of music has led some to postulate that it might have an important evolutionary purpose. One theory about the purpose of music is that it helps facilitate the social aspects of our existence. If this is the case, music has the potential to be a powerful tool for change. Indeed, some research has suggested that music can increase positive intergroup interactions. Thus far, the research has shown that music may produce change in intergroup attitudes when accompanied by other intergroup interactions, such as cohabitation. It has also shown promise in relation to music preference and witnessed musical interaction. However, evidence for increased positive intergroup attitudes following actual (instead of imagined, vicarious, or witnessed) musical interaction in a controlled environment is still lacking. The purpose of this study was to test this idea. One hundred eighty-two undergraduate psychology students were recruited to complete musical tasks in collaboration, a non-musical task in collaboration, or a musical task alone (isolation). I hypothesized that (1) relative to intergroup non-musical collaboration, intergroup musical collaboration will lead to an increase in positive intergroup attitudes; and (2) musical isolation will lead to minimal or no increase in positive intergroup attitudes. The results of this study did not support these hypotheses.
In “Engaging the ‘Other’: Contemporary Music as Perspective-Shifting in Post-conflict Northern Uganda,” Opiyo explores the relationship between music and peacebuilding in developing constructive relationships in Northern Uganda, the site of over two decades of conflict between the Ugandan government and various rebel groups, particularly the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). By focusing on three popular and poignant conflict-era songs, this essay suggests that there is significant potential for transformative peacebuilding when music strategically engages with groups labelled by society as the “other.” Building on a discussion of the songs themselves, Opiyo makes a case for recognizing the value of music for nurturing perspective-shifting within groups and between groups polarized by protracted conflict.
Peacebuilding and the Arts
Cultural exchange and internationalization—the process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimension into the functions and delivery of higher education—have increased markedly in significance within higher education in the last few years. In the broadest sense, this agenda is about preparing students for living in and contributing to an increasingly connected global society. At a time when the political and social trend seems to be toward exclusionism, exposing students to a vibrant blend of ideas, opinions, and experiences within the stimulating, yet safe, space of university resonates all the more strongly. However, historically it has been difficult to encourage students to participate fully, particularly with regard to student mobility and studying abroad. Socioeconomic and cultural factors play an important role here. This case study investigates the design and rollout of an innovative online international exchange program carried out between Abertay University in Dundee, Scotland, and DePaul University in Chicago, IL. As part of their core mission, both institutions are committed to widening participation, and both have a high proportion of first-generation students from the lowest socioeconomic groups. Consequently, the student mobility rate at both universities is low, which limits opportunities for students to situate their learning within a global context. Recent developments in digital communications and platform sharing technologies have allowed universities to explore online collaboration and virtual exchange, but this raises new challenges. In particular, how do you embed a sense of genuine cultural exchange and collaboration between students who are geographically remote, very possibly in different time zones, and—crucially—still enmeshed in their local culture? This paper outlines an innovative and practical response to that problem, using a collaborative project in which students must serve as both directors and clients in the production of creative sound works to facilitate a profound and meaningful cultural exchange. The paper outlines the design and implementation of this online student exchange program; discusses the challenges, benefits, and drawbacks to the approach; and concludes by generalizing from this particular case to discuss how discipline-specific skills can be used as a mechanism to build cohesive and outward-looking cohorts of students, even when they are not colocated on campus.
International Journal on Innovations in Online Education
This article documents relationships, strategies, and activities involved in developing and carrying out collaborative community-engaged research for reconciliation, based on Indigenous methodologies and research-creation. It documents an example of Indigenous/non-Indigenous collaboration in Unama’ki (also known as Cape Breton, Canada), providing data towards the refinement of models of research designed to foster reconciliation, and contributing to a literature on Indigenous/ non-Indigenous collaborations in ethnomusicology and related fields. While revealing some challenges in the process with respect to addressing local needs, it also describes transformations that can be achieved through effective collaboration, including ways in which universities can be involved.
Yearbook for Traditional Music
Jean-Marc Rouillan is one of the founding members of Action directe (1977–1987). In this interview, he talks about the connection between his musical practices and his political activism since the May 1968 events in France, the role of music and sound in the armed struggle of Action directe, and the place he attributes to music in the history of political struggles.
Transposition
Going Underground situates the demand for “free music” as part of a broader contestation of the terms of cultural consumption in the radical milieu of the long 1960s. At stake in the mobilizations recounted in the reflections of Action Directe-member Jean-Marc Rouillan was not just access to popular music, but the validity of the subversive meanings ascribed to cultural production under capitalism. Struggling with the system’s ability to co-opt challenges to its hegemony by putting them up for sale, activists insisted that it was they, and not promoters or other financially-interested middle men, who had the right to determine the conditions under which liberatory cultural expression such as rock‘n’roll would be consumed. The insistence that music be “free” embodied a characteristic demand of the radical moment around 1968: that culture actually matter.
Transposition
A growing body of evidence points to a wide range of benefits arising from participation in group singing. Group singing requires participants to engage with each other in a simultaneous musical dialogue in a pluralistic and emergent context, creating a coherent cultural expression through the reflexive negotiation of (musical) meaning manifest in the collective power of the human voice. As such, group singing might be taken—both literally and figuratively—as a potent form of ‘healthy public’, creating an ‘ideal’ community, which participants can subsequently mobilise as a positive resource for everyday life. The experiences of a group of singers ( n = 78) who had participated in an outdoor singing project were collected and analysed using a three-layer research design consisting of: distributed data generation and interpretation, considered against comparative data from other singing groups (n= 88); a focus group workshop (n = 11); an unstructured interview (n = 2). The study confirmed an expected perception of the social bonding effect of group singing, highlighting affordances for interpersonal attunement and attachment alongside a powerful individual sense of feeling ‘uplifted’. This study presents a novel perspective on group singing, highlighting the importance of participant experience as a means of understanding music as a holistic and complex adaptive system. It validates findings about group singing from previous studies—in particular the stability of the social bonding effect as a less variant characteristic in the face of environmental and other situational influences, alongside its capacity for mental health recovery. It establishes a subjective sociocultural and musical understanding of group singing, by expanding on these findings to centralise the importance of individual experience, and the consciousness of that experience as descriptive and reflective self-awareness. The ways in which participants describe and discuss their experiences of group singing and its benefits points to a complex interdependence between a number of musical, neurobiological and psychosocial mechanisms, which might be independently and objectively analysed. An emerging theory is that at least some of the potency of group singing is as a resource where people can rehearse and perform ‘healthy’ relationships, further emphasising its potential as a resource for healthy publics.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
This short commentary reflects on Luis Velasco-Pufleau’s interview with Jean-Marc Rouillan. Picking up on the connections made between musical practice and political struggle, it locates Rouillan’s life and thoughts in relation to punk and the subversive charge more general to rock‘n’roll. By so doing, questions of freedom, action and commodification are considered, relating how cultural revolution may feed into political insurrection.
Transposition
Participatory music engagement has the capacity to support well-being. Yet, there is little research that has scrutinized the processes through which music has an effect. In this meta-ethnography [PROSPERO CRD42019130164], we conducted a systematic search of 19 electronic databases and a critical appraisal to identify 46 qualitative studies reporting on participants’ subjective views of how participatory music engagement supports their mental well-being. Synthesis of first-order and second-order interpretations using thematic coding resulted in four third-order pathways that account for how participatory music engagement supports mental well-being: managing and expressing emotions, facilitating self-development, providing respite, and facilitating connections. Our interpretation suggests that people benefit from participatory music engagement by engaging with specific and multiple processes that meet their individual needs and circumstances. These findings inform research directions within the field of music and well-being, as well as guiding the development and delivery of future music interventions.
Qualitative Health Research
Over the last six years I have worked in music and inclusion as a researcher, practitioner and coordinator. This work has been embedded in a variety of settings: in community music, disability arts, youth work, education, professional arts and academia. I have been involved in the social act of connecting people across differences in disabilities and health statuses, generations, social backgrounds and ethnicities. In each case, an ethos of inclusivity was adopted and every single person’s participation was desired. Some of these activities have been labelled ‘inclusive’ and some not, some have been more successful at bridging across differences between participants and others less so. In each case, musical activity has been used as a resource around which people are brought together, to share in time, space and the act of musicking.
Music and Arts in Action
This is a book about peacebuilding. Given that we will be considering throughout the possibility, processes and practices of peacebuilding, it is perhaps most appropriate to begin at the end, that is, with some consideration of the end of the peacebuilder’s labours. How is peace to be understood?
Peacebuilding and the Arts
Music and Arts in Action
Listening can become a tool for exploration of, engagement with and sensorial knowledge of the world. Music can be a device for projecting, framing and preparing for confrontation with the enemy. How can the study of sound and music help us to understand collective violence and war? How can the study of war and collective violence help us to understand the importance of musical practices and listening for human beings? This special issue of Transposition explores these questions through an analysis of the links between sound, music and violence.
Transposition
In December 2016, the Gambia appeared on the brink of violent conflict when Yahya Jammeh, the country’s dictator of 22 years, refused to concede defeat in the presidential election. This article investigates the way griot performers responded to the Gambia’s political crisis, using the platform of the popular kora mbalax style as a medium for political engagement and conflict resolution. It shows that performers’ responses to the Gambia’s political crisis drew on longstanding practices of conflict mediation while also demonstrating creativity and flexibility in engaging with social media and more direct forms of political critique.
Ethnomusicology Forum
This article addresses the possibility that Western classical music might be used as a source of hope for a post-conflict future by considering a literary depiction of music and conflict resolution. As a case study, Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo is identified as a “musico-literary novel,” and established within the framework of Stephen Benson’s “literary music” and Hazel Smith’s methodological development of musicoliterary studies through extended interdisciplinarity. The novel features three Sarajevan citizens who hear a cellist play in the rubble-strewn streets, and their music-listening experiences motivate them to work toward a post-conflict future. To consider the potential insights and blind spots surrounding ideas about music’s potential power in this narrative, the soundscape of the novel is identified to establish the significance of sound, music, and active listening in the text; parallels are highlighted between the ending of The Cellist of Sarajevo and Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars, revealing music as an active moral force; and similarities between Galloway’s novel and Craig Robertson’s “Music and conflict transformation in Bosnia” are illustrated, demonstrating how interdisciplinary analysis of a musico-literary novel can offer a valid contribution to discussions surrounding the use of music to exit violence.
Violence: An International Journal
International Journal of Community Music
Transposition
Music Downtown Eastside explores how human rights are at play in the popular music practices of homeless and street-involved people who feel that music is one of the rare things that cannot be taken away of them. It draws on two decades of ethnographic research in one of Canada’s poorest urban neighborhoods, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Klisala Harrison takes the reader into popular music jams and therapy sessions offered to the poorest of the poor in churches, community centers and health organizations. There she analyzes the capabilities music-making develops, and how human rights are respected, promoted, threatened, or violated in those musical moments. When doing so, she also offers new and detailed insights on the relationships between music and poverty, a type of social deprivation that diminishes people’s human capabilities and rights. The book contributes to the human rights literature by examining critically how human rights can be strengthened in cultural practices. Harrison’s study demonstrates that capabilities and human rights are interrelated. Developing capabilities can be a way to strengthen human rights.
Music Saved Them, They Say: Social Impacts of Music-Making and Learning in Kinshasa (DR Congo) explores the role music-making has played in community projects run for young people in the poverty-stricken and often violent surroundings of Kinshasa, the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The musicians described here – former gang members and so-called "witch children" living on the streets – believe music was vital in (re)constructing their lives. Based on fieldwork carried out over the course of three-and-a-half years of research, the study synthesizes interviews, focus group sessions, and participant observation to contextualize this complicated cultural and social environment. Inspired by those who have been "saved by music", Music Saved Them, They Say seeks to understand how structured musical practice and education can influence the lives of young people in such difficult living conditions, in Kinshasa and beyond.
Peacebuilding and the Arts
Yorùbá culture has music as a fundamental motivator in communal development projects, war, attendance to dispute, conventional gathering, exigent meeting, and peace maintenance and so on. Presently, attention is gradually shifting focus from the obtainable mediation and impartation of traditional music towards popular urban culture. This calls for a reevaluation in order to preserve and make the best of the embedded impact of traditional musical contents. Hence, the study sets out to identify the possible potency of Yorùbá traditional songs as a means of peace advancement and to ascertain the status of its usage for peace social stability in contemporary dispensation. Anchored on functionalism and communicative theories, the research used Yorùbá traditional song repertory, and bibliographic modes of enquiry to achieve its set goals. The result shows that Yorùbá traditional music for peace advancement is in three dimensions, namely peace conservative songs, peace recovery songs and peace conceptual songs. There are also traditional songs for ritual peace advocacy. The paper concludes that traditional repertory is convincingly potent in the maintenance of peace culture in the Yorùbá context. It facilitates communication, though it is currently being underutilized.
Port Harcourt Journal Of History & Diplomatic Studies
This article explores a religious community in Algeria where, with the ignition and structure of ritual music, a wide spectrum of trance processes are explicitly cultivated so that pain and suffering can be engaged, moved, and expressed through trance dancing. The way that trance is described in d ̄ıw ̄ an indicates that it is understood as emerging primarily from the realms of feelings, particularly the dialectical role of painful feelings. Furthermore, varieties of trance are named and indexed either by the sorts of affects they involve or as types of actions that trance feels like. Thus, rather than trance being something of the “mind” here, it is an affective experience, ordered by how it feels. This article takes a close-up, sensory ethnographic approach to flesh out the rich, detailed taxonomy of feeling intensities that are used to describe how trance feels, examining what tranced suffering does both socially and personally. [affect, body, suffering, Sufism, trance]
Ethos
After the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the post-genocide government spearheaded the creation of genocide commemorations. Over the past two decades, political elites and survivors’ organizations have gone to great lengths to institutionalize the memorialization, including creating laws to protect the memory of the genocide from denialism. Ordinary Rwandans have responded to the annual commemorations using creative means of support for and disagreement with the government’s interpretation of their shared violent past. Music has been used as citizen-driven tool to both spread and criticize genocide memorialization nationally and beyond. While scholars have explored the politicization of state-organized mechanisms such as memorials, citizen-driven creative means remain largely unexplored. Addressing this gap in Rwandan memory scholarship, I examine how Kizito Mihigo, a famous post-genocide musician, used his individual memory of surviving the genocide against the Tutsi through music to contribute and respond to the annual commemorations of the genocide. I argue that Mihigo’s story and commemoration songs were politicized from the start but were intensified when he used his music to go beyond promoting genocide commemorations to questioning the events and when he pleaded guilty to terrorism charges.
Memory Studies
This article-based doctoral thesis contributes to the multifaceted debate concerning the role of music in “development.” By development, I refer to the international aid sector and the deliberate actions of states and/or development agencies to promote equity between various localities and between social groups or classes in the Global South, previously referred to as developing or third world countries. Development studies is an academic field of its own, but it is interdisciplinary in nature, due to heterogenous understandings of what it means and what it takes to create such equity. Applying an academic lens that bridges development studies with musicological thought as well as peace studies and postcolonial theory, my work addresses questions about “arts development” versus general views on development assistance in a bid to unpack a particular asymmetry between mainstream development models and the need to strengthen—and therefore empower—the arts sector in the interests of its sustainability. There are, in fact, perpetual tensions between “two opposing professional paradigms: the largely intuitive, practice-led world of the arts and the increasingly evidence-based, bureaucratically driven approaches of international development” (Dunphy 2013: 3). This study examines how these tensions were negotiated by Concerts Norway (Rikskonsertene), a governmental music organization and key cultural partner of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, between 2000 and 2018. In this period, Norway branded itself as a pioneer and principal international funder of cultural expression as a tool for development, based on a distinct twin-track policy seeking to value the social utility of art as well as the art itself. My thesis offers an academic exploration of the ways in which three musical development projects were initiated and conducted by Concerts Norway together with local partners in Palestine, India, and Sri Lanka. The origins and development goals of these three projects differed, in the sense that they were each based on distinct geographical contexts and needs. Yet, many of the key program features were the same. This study shows how Concerts Norway and its local partners contributed to strengthening cultural infrastructure in these countries, especially in the concert, festival, and educational fields. Their collaborations furthermore facilitated the transfer of artistic and technical skills, as well as the documentation and preservation of intangible heritage. They were also deemed to be successes by external development evaluators. Yet, a close look at the operational mechanisms of these projects reveals that their framing as “development” initiatives narrowed the scope of their potential agency. The current development system, despite its good intentions, is imbued with outdated binary conceptions and inherited colonial hierarchies, in addition to a result-based management approach that does not work particularly well for the arts. I therefore argue here that the mainstreaming of these musical activities as development limited rather than enhanced their potential furtherance of equity. A central theoretical contribution of this research is a “post-development framework for music and social change”—that is, a proposal suggesting how a rethinking and restructuring of such projects might contribute to a more humane and fairer global (art) world. The framework pays particular attention to local assessments and processes of change. It urges stakeholders and artists to continuously—and reflexively—analyze their own positions, identities, attitudes, and power relations within the project’s structure, as well as its musical repertoire, teaching methods, and performance arenas. It also opens up for a wider assessment of development “results” than what is currently undertaken.
This dissertation explores the relationship between music, ethnicity, and violence in Gambella, a region in western Ethiopia that borders South Sudan. Ethnic identity in Ethiopia and South Sudan has become increasingly politicized in recent decades and is cited as a cause of protests and conflicts in both countries. The multi-ethnic region of Gambella particularly struggles with ethnic tensions and cycles of violence, especially between the two majority ethnic groups in the region, the Anywaa and Nuer. The present study focuses on these two ethnic groups, exploring how local music-making and interpretive frameworks of listening reflect, shape, and produce Anywaa and Nuer ethnicity in the context of the Ethio-South Sudanese border. As scholars now recognize, ethnicity is not a self-evident category but is socially constructed, produced in encounters with perceived Others. Ethnic differences also tend to arise under circumstances of inequality, as ethnicity is a mode of identification by which marginalized social groups can organize themselves and vie for recognition, political representation, and access to resources. Gambella is one of the most underdeveloped and neglected regions of Ethiopia, and its populations are the targets of cultural denigration in Ethiopia’s national imaginary. The marginalization of peoples has played a role in the rise of politicized ethnicity in Gambella. Cycles of state-sponsored and ethnically-based violence on both sides of the border further sharpen ethnic divisions, a heightened need to defend the ethnic Self against threatening Others. Communities on the Ethio-South Sudanese border utilize music to define a cultural identity and history, cultivate a shared ethnic consciousness, and delimit ethnic boundaries. In Ethiopia, traditional musical styles are frequently linked with ethno-cultural identities, and song lyrics overtly or covertly appeal to ethnic identification and affiliation. In Gambella and South Sudan, music-making is also inspired by experiences of ethnicized violence, as singers compose songs that recount instances of ethnic massacres, encourage ethnic cohesion based on shared experiences of trauma, and, in some cases, overtly threaten others and valorize warfare. In the face of cycles of violence, state neglect, and the pressures of globalization, ethnicity for Anywaa and Nuer has existential stakes. Music protects the ethnic Self by generating ethnic solidarity; artists furthermore garner their musical abilities to attempt to make their ethnic groups visible to governments and other constituencies that can potentially offer security and ensure their livelihood. Song is a particularly privileged medium in Gambella region: singers pointedly use their songs to teach and advise their ethnic communities, and people often listen to songs specifically for their lyrical messages. At the same time, the ambiguity of musical aesthetics opens up space for multiple interpretations and recontextualizations based on each individual’s personal history and concerns. Ethnic groups are not monoliths, and this dissertation includes many variations in musical interpretation, exploring the multi-layered and sometimes unpredictable meanings and significances of these songs and highlighting the complex and contradictory processes of making ethnicity.
A sense of belonging within social groups is determined in part by observed commonalities, but this can be self-assigned, assigned by others, unintentionally developed over generations or imposed by social hierarchies. Conflicts sometimes arise around the borders of these categories. Peacebuilding efforts sometimes find success through softening these borders to the point where conflicting social groups recognise their commonalities while respecting their differences. These social constructs are complicated by the understanding that everyone possesses simultaneous identities that can be foregrounded or backgrounded depending on life experiences, social and cultural influences and time. Due to these influences, new identities emerge throughout time and old ones may fade. In short, the concept of identity is a social construct that helps individuals and groups make sense of their world and where they feel they belong. Likewise, music is a social and cultural activity; many scholars, especially in the social sciences, claim that a sense of identity from the producer and the receiver of the music is required in order to interpret the phenomena. The experience of the phenomena, especially repeated experiences, can form, shape or alter these senses of identities. As such, it follows that music and peacebuilding can connect in and through the concept of identity.
Music and Arts in Action
In this article, I bring together research from ethnomusicology, ecology, neuroscience, ‘4E’ cognition theory and evolutionary musicology in support of the idea that musicking, human musicking in particular, can best be understood as an emergent ecological behaviour. ‘Ecological’ here is used to mean an active process of engaging with and connecting ourselves to our various environmental domains – social, physical and metaphysical – and although I will focus on musicking, these concepts may apply to other artistic behaviours as well.
idea journal
Transposition
Zimbabwe is in the grips of a socio-political crisis which is rooted in the question of the legitimacy of the ruling ZANU-PF party following several disputed national elections. In the face of this growing challenge to its reign, the country’s ruling elite has used the military to entrench itself in power. This has resulted in the breakdown of the rule of law, and allegations of abductions and torture of dissenting voices have become a common chorus. Endemic corruption has crippled the economy with the masses struggling to make ends meet. It is in this context that this article discusses the nuances of political satire, advocacy for peace and development expressed in songs from the popular Tuku music genre. I selected six songs by Oliver Mtukudzi and did a textual analysis of the lyrics to show how they are laced with implicit political protest undertones. An analysis of the themes of the selected songs reveals the underlying dissent, and advocacy for peace that characterizes Tuku music. I also interviewed music fans to solicit their opinions on the perceived political innuendos in these songs. Tuku music captures and subtly portrays these cultural experiences, at times leaving people arguing about the intended meanings. I argue that the selected songs by Oliver Mtukudzi express the experiences and challenges faced by people in a country that has been politically polarized and economically unstable.
Mankind Quarterly
Transposition
This essay explores the late engagement of music research with the long-standing yet overlooked association between music, violence and terror. In mapping this new field, it seeks to understand this latency as a disciplinary trauma. It examines music’s integral role in new technologies of terror emerging during the Cold War, the cultural biases that have turned it into an elusive means of torture, and the effects stemming from the overshadowing of its damaging potential. Focusing on the notion of witnessing, it highlights the need for more nuanced soundscapes of detention that explore the entanglement of negative and positive uses of music as they are imposed from above and reclaimed from below.
Transposition
This essay interrogates methodological, analytical and representational issues that continue to challenge scholars addressing bellicose violence: Is it ethical to write about terror, pain and despair from afar? Can sensationalism ever be justified in analyses of bellicose violence? What kind of silences might we allow for? These questions are explored in relation to necropolitical Mexico, drawing from empirical research with musicians commissioned to write narco rap, producers and consumers of rap del barrio, and hip hop artists protesting the disappearances, homicides, systematic violence and impunity enjoyed by criminal organisations and state institutions alike.
Transposition
Pau Casals (1876-1973) is well known as a cellist, but his facet as a composer is not widely known, especially the fact that he composed piano music. Taking into consideration that Casals was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, a case can be made for a reassessment of Casals’ place not only in the history of the twentieth century music but also in the struggle against totalitarianism – specifically with regard to the Spanish Civil War but also the Cold War following the new political dispensation after the Second World War. Casals saw his activities both as a composer and as a performer as a means of lobbying for world peace. My methodology will include a qualitative analysis of the biographical and cultural context; an examination of unpublished archival material and live performances of Casals’ music to present my findings and to test the experience of his music in performance. As a concert pianist, and moreover, one who shares Casals’ culture, I have a strong and appropriate interest in bringing my experience of his music into the public domain. It is through the eyes of performance-led research and autoethnography that one can fully grasp what Casals’ compositions are about; through the interpreting of Casals’ music, one becomes an ‘agent of culture’ and, consequently, one creates a dialogue between the culture at the time of Casals’ life and the culture that surrounds a performance of Casals’ works now. Casals’ music is still valid today insofar as it attempts to touch the core of our humanity.
That the global community is experiencing great upheaval and conflict is not in doubt. That nations of the world have made concerted efforts to stem rising conflicts is also not in doubt. That several hardware, war equipment and nuclear warheads have been developed, stored and deployed, in some cases, to crush rising tensions and growing conflicts is also well-known. That there is failure in the expected results from such attempts in establishing peace is unquestionable, given the continued lack of peace. With the rising devastating conflicts and fading away of global peace, security, human and material safety, the global community is challenged and constrained to seek alternative approaches to peace and stability. So far, diplomatic missions have failed to achieve the desired trust and cohesion they are meant for. Hardware deployed for suppression, forced peace and wars have also failed in the achievement of global peace. Instead, such attempts have stimulated and escalated national exclusions, displacements, cold war and real conflicts. The question remains whether peace, with its fragile nature, can be achieved by means of extreme deployment of hardware of war in human conflicts? The near impossibility of such attempts so far, recommends alternative sources of peace in consonance with the fragile nature of the peace phenomenon. Thus, this study explores peace, its fragile nature and the application and contributions of alternative soft and fragile art of music and dance in peace building across traditional and contemporary African societies and how they apply to the quest for global peace. Using the historical, descriptive and analytical designs as well as secondary sources and personal observations, the paper presents recommendations that highlight the potency of music and dance arts in global peace building.
University of Nigeria Interdisciplinary Journal of Communication Studies
To explore the meanings of ‘peacebuilding,’ this article is divided into three parts, first looking at different conceptualizations of the idea of peace. The section titled Peace is based on the observation that the kind of changes peacebuilding actors are trying to implement will depend on their definition of peace. It starts with a critique of the liberal peace and then goes back to the origins of peace studies as a field to see what founding concepts of peace might continue to hold relevance today. In the second section, Peacebuilding, I explain why I consider this word as an umbrella term that includes various activities. I also point out the similarities between my concept of peacebuilding and that of other scholars. In the third part, Sound and Proactive Peacebuilding, I propose the formulation of a specific type of peacebuilding, in order to facilitate the emergence of numerous links between music and peacebuilding. This concept includes four modes: Inner Peacebuilding, Communicative Creativity, Planetary Awareness and Preventive Peacebuilding. My goal in this article is to advance a vision of peace in which anyone can play a role, with an emphasis on the concrete actions people can take in everyday life, building peace day by day.
Music and Arts in Action
Displacement, relocation, dissociation: each of these terms elicits images of mass migration, homelessness, statelessness, or outsiderness of many kinds, too numerous to name. This book aims to create opportunities for scholars, practitioners, and silenced voices to share theories and stories of progressive and transgressive music pedagogies that challenge the ways music educators and learners think about and practice their arts relative to displacement. Displacement is defined as encompassing all those who have been forced away from their locations by political, social, economic, climate, and resource change, injustice, and insecurity. This includes: - refugees and internally displaced persons; - forced migrants; - indigenous communities who have been forced off their traditional lands; - people who have fled homes because of their gender identity and sexual orientation; - imprisoned individuals; - persons who seek refuge for reasons of domestic and social violence; - homeless persons and others who live in transient spaces; - the disabled, who are relocated involuntarily; and - the culturally dispossessed, whose languages and heritage have been taken away from them. In the context of the first ever book on displacement and music education, the authors connect displacement to what music might become to those peoples who find themselves between spaces, parted from the familiar and the familial. Through, in, and because of a variety of musical participations, they contend that displaced peoples might find comfort, inclusion, and welcome of some kinds either in making new music or remembering and reconfiguring past musical experiences.
My Body Was Left on the Street: Music Education and Displacement
In the sensitive post-genocide cultural landscape of Rwanda, this research considers the significance of the recent revival of a musical group that was first popular in the pre-genocide Habyarimana era. Orchestre Impala was perhaps the most popular musical group of the late 1970s and 1980s, and its revival represents something of a novelty in Rwanda’s national cultural politics. Perhaps, we suggest, this may reflect a certain ‘normalization’ of culture, and a sense of continuity in Rwanda. Drawing on personal contacts with musicians, supporters, and observers, we conducted informal interviews, and analysed lyrics of songs still sung, those left behind and those newly created. What emerged was a careful and conscious process of selective recovery of past songs, and the creation of new songs, unified by their association with a genre known as igisope, a term explained in the article. Song texts, translated from the Kinyarwanda, are analysed as a form of historical commentary on the times that Orchestre Impala musicians survived and now find themselves in. We found that Orchestre Impala has been revived with great caution and sensitivity for the post-genocide context in Rwanda. Its popularity draws on shared social imaginaries across generations of Rwandans, and the band’s revival seems to signal improved possibilities in future for coming to terms with Rwanda’s pre-genocide past. We tentatively propose that revival of Orchestre Impala both reflects and helps to generate elements of cultural continuity in Rwandans’ musical landscape. The demands of surviving commercially as a band, implies that political praise-songs remain part of Orchestre Impala’s song repertoire today as during the Habyarimana era.
Cultural Studies
Transposition
In this essay, I interrogate the ideas that concern music and violence which are presented by scholars in this Transposition special issue. Although each article is very different, common themes emerge. I interpolate these with reference to my own research into the sounds of music in the Gallipoli Campaign (1915-1916). Following Nikita Hock, I examine the notion of metaphor as it relates to underground hideouts in a war zone. Following Victor A. Stoichita, I look at how music affords distinctive pathways in the fulfilment of or disengagement from acts of violence. Following Sarah Kay, I examine the ways in which contrafactum helps clarify the ambivalent positionality of Allied recruits in a foreign campaign. I also refer to Kay’s notion of “extimacy” when interpreting expressionist representations of warfare in the Dardanelles.
Transposition
What makes communities ‘sound’? One key feature noted in this article is resilience, though a more extensive list of features of sound communities is also addressed. The term ‘sound communities’ is intentionally polysemous and perhaps especially for this reason demands an intensely interdisciplinary approach to its definition for use within ethnomusicology. The keyword ‘sound communities’ builds on the work of ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon (2015) and puts the discussion in a much wider context of studies of community, communities of practice and performance, ‘sound praxis’ (Araujo, 2009), applied ethnomusicologies and peacebuilding. Case studies presented in this article are largely based on applied ethnomusicology approaches.
Music and Arts in Action
Transposition
Abstract This article sets out to bring sound and music to the field of visual studies in International Relations. It argues that IR largely has approached the visual field as if it was without sound; neglecting how audial landscapes frame and direct our interpretation of moving imagery. Sound and music contribute to making imagery intelligible to us, we ‘hear the pictures’ often without noticing. The audial can for instance articulate a visual absence, or blast visual signs, bring out certain emotional stages or subjects’ inner life. Audial frames steer us in distinct directions, they can mute the cries of the wounded in war, or amplify the sounds of joy of soldiers shooting in the air. To bring the audial and the visual analytically and empirically together, the article therefore proposes four key analytical themes: 1) the audial–visual frame, 2) point of view/point of audition, 3) modes of audio-visual synchronization and 4) aesthetics moods. These are applied to a study of ‘war music videos’ in Iraq and Syria made and circulated by Shi'a militias currently fighting there. Such war music videos, it is suggested, are not just artefacts of popular culture, but have become integral parts of how warfare is practiced today, and one that is shared by soldiers in the US and Europe. War music videos are performing war, just as they shape how war is known by spectators and participants alike.
International Affairs
The word ‘space’ has gained visibility in peacebuilding literature over the last few years, especially in literature on the dynamics of local peacebuilding processes. Regarding these processes, spatial approaches have extended knowledge of the role that narratives of space play in shaping individual and collective experiences of peace. These narratives include the contested meanings attributed to local landmarks or how notions of ‘safe space’ inform the design of peace-focused activities in particular communities. Adding to the complexity of usage around the term, musical performance itself has been described as a space through which communities can imagine and enact peace. Given these multiple understandings, engaging in a sustained discussion of the word space is an opportunity to identify ideas and approaches that can bridge emerging discourses on local peacebuilding processes and their relationship to music.
Music and Arts in Action
The armed conflict in Colombia leaves many families with no other option than to be displaced, which affects their social status and identity. This article reprises a qualitative study that analyses the life histories of eight families, all of whom were victims of the armed conflict, whose children participate in the Batuta National Foundation’s ‘Music for Reconciliation’ programme. The results of the study indicate that displacement impacted identity, resulting in the unsettlement of the social place of the participants. This was due to their anonymous state on arrival at their new places, with no support networks or social recognition. Together with the distrust created by the violence experienced, this led to attitudes of isolation, through which the individual became increasingly vulnerable to the dynamics of violence. This text analyses the concept of temporary musical identity, and the results show the possibilities that collective musical spaces offer for restoring the social place of the participants.
International Journal of Community Music
Individuation is the tendency to treat targets according to their unique traits and characteristics and not their categorical memberships such as race, gender, age, etc. An individual‘s musical identity can be considered a unique trait or characteristic; therefore, the purpose of the present study was to examine the effect of melodic and labeling individuation training on young children‘s implicit and explicit outgroup biases. Forty-two young children served as participants and were assigned to one of three conditions: melodic individuation training, labeling individuation training, and mere exposure as a control condition. Pretests and immediate, intermediate, and long-term posttests were administered on the Implicit Racial Bias Test (Qian et al., 2017a, 2017b) and a sociometric explicit racial bias test. Significant differences were found between time points using IRBT test scores. Significant differences found were short-term. No significant differences were found between groups using IRBT scores. Further, no interactions between the two factors were found using IRBT scores. No significant differences were found between time points or conditions using explicit racial bias test scores. Further, no interactions between the two factors were found using explicit racial bias test scores. Descriptive analysis showed lower IRBT scores for the melodic individuation training condition than other groups at all time points following the pretest. Open-ended questions following the sociometric explicit racial bias test revealed that participants most frequently cited facial features, clothing, and fantasized scenarios as reasons why they selected targets in hypothetical relationship scenarios. The findings of this study indicate, that for this population, melodic individuation training may be an effective intervention for reducing short-term implicit racial bias scores; however, explicit racial bias may be more resistant to remediation.
Can music effect social change? This is a complex question, because both music and social change exist in multiple forms and within diverse contexts. What types of music cause social change and what kinds of social change are generated by music are questions that deserve systematic empirical investigation. Addressing these questions may have important benefits for advancing society and for revealing the important aspects of the human connection to music. Several studies have begun to explore such questions, so it is useful at this stage to pause and consider what is actually meant by social change and what are the cognitive and emotional processes that underlie musical responses and behaviour, which is the goal of this interdisciplinary review paper. Social behaviour appears in different forms (e.g., collaboration, helpfulness), and contexts (e.g., dyad, group, community). At the same time, engagement in music involves a variety of behaviours (e.g., synchronisation). In order to better understand how these different musical and social behaviours interact, and in order to produce high-quality research in this area, it is necessary to carry out more investigations of the mechanistic basis of the links between music and social change. Such a research agenda will include a thorough deconstruction of music into its essential elements and, subsequently, and may involve a reconstruction of the most socially relevant components into novel forms of music.
Music & Science
Jourdan’s “The Role of Music-Making in Peacebuilding: A Levinasian Perspective” begins by contrasting two case studies from earlier chapters, one which celebrates the transformative role of songs in peacebuilding in Northern Uganda and the other which highlights the problematic “importation of music-making in the Western classical tradition into the West Bank Palestinian territories.” Jourdan argues that music-making, especially conceived as “ethical encounter,” has the potential to contribute to peacebuilding. Drawing on the work of the French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas she explores both the limitations and the extraordinary potential of music ‘to put a world in common’, to ‘look into the face of the Other’ and build non-violent relationships that can change societies.
Peacebuilding and the Arts
The aim of this article is to consider questions, issues, and debates about music in public policy, a topic that featured in the final session of the Musics, Selves and Societies workshop at the University of Cambridge in June 2018. The first part of this article provides a backdrop by defining key terminology and describing the political environment in relation to music, specifically in the UK. It deciphers the scope of the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) alongside public, professional, and charitable bodies as well as learned societies. The second part highlights three main areas of focus that were identified in the final session of the workshop: considerations about the value of music; considerations about the meaning of music; and considerations about policy-making. Each of these areas are discussed in turn before final remarks are put forward about steps for managing change.
Music & Science
This article presents findings from the Sri Lanka Norway Music Cooperation (SLNMC, 2009-2018) launched immediately after a twenty-four year long civil war in Sri Lanka. The project responded to a stated need of rebuilding a fractured society and re-establishing relations between Sinhala and Tamil populations of the island. The SLNMC comprised school concerts and public concerts, music education, heritage documentation and digitalization, in addition to skill training for musicians and technicians, festival organizers and other actors in cultural life.
Asian-European Music Research Journal
Conflict has detrimental effects on the dynamics in a community. The purpose of this research is to investigate to which extent music as an integrated part of a community project can contribute as a unifying factor in the community. The research included an investigation of the level of social transformation that may be possible through hosting a community project and utilised Brown’s model of social enhancement. Other important matters of interest were how the music of a community project such as the Lady Grey Passion Play serves as an emotive reward enhancer, as well as a helpful tool for persuasion and manipulation. Community projects have the possibility to accommodate change regarding mutual respect, reciprocity, group forming, cohesiveness and creating positive energy. Fourteen participants, selected by means of purposive sampling because of their specific knowledge and lived experiences of the Lady Grey Passion Play, were interviewed using open-ended, non-leading questions. The data was analysed using inductive analysis. It allowed me to build and decode its subjective reality and create meaning within the social context of the Passion Play. The main findings of the study can be summarised as follows: Through the annual presentation of a community event with integrated music, unity can be nurtured, boundaries may subside with resulting higher levels of tolerance, and conflict between the members of different communities may decrease. The practical implications of this study’s findings are that beliefs, ideologies and attitudes may lead to persuasion and manipulation through music. Music has an impact on mood and behaviour, and people become inspired by listening to it. There is, therefore, a possibility that unity can be promoted in a community through the use of music in a recurring community event.
In recent years, music-based interventions have been utilised as a tool for improving public health, reducing inequalities and promoting well-being of young people. Although some researchers have begun to draw links between music-related interventions and positive health outcomes, there is little understanding as to how such effects are produced. Realist evaluations—understanding what works, for whom and under what circumstances—are a particularly apt means by which we can open this ‘black box’. In this paper, we use a realist evaluation to assess a community-based music initiative designed and implemented to support the well-being of disadvantaged young people in Scotland. In order to gain perspectives on the range of contextual characteristics, mechanisms and outcomes, we collected quantitative and qualitative data in the form of pre- and post-questionnaires, as well as conducting interviews with beneficiaries and stakeholders. Our findings show that the intervention achieved a positive impact on the self-confidence, well-being and engagement of disadvantaged young people. This impact was achieved via an approach personally tailored to the individual needs of the young people; and an organisational environment characterised by trust, whereby young people felt safe to express themselves.
Health & Social Care in the Community
Look beyond - make a difference. Experiences from a music project in Lebanon
This article provides a review of literature from a variety of disciplines on the relationship between musical practices and transitional justice in the context of violence and human rights violations. In the first part, I give an overview of selected scholarly works on transitional justice, with an emphasis on truth commissions and commemorations as catalysts for collective memory. I also touch upon the interplay between memory and reconciliation. In the second part of the paper, I focus on the literature that deals with musical practices in the context of transitional justice. Taking into account existing critiques of transitional justice mechanisms as primarily topdown approaches that often do not consider local practices of transitional justice, but also survivors’ needs and expectations, I contend that scholars of music can contribute significantly to putting more emphasis on and increasing the visibility of such local practices and survivors’ voices. By practicing ethnographic methods and sensitivity towards cultural specificities, ethnomusicologists are well equipped to contribute to a better understanding of the culture-specific ways in which people affected by violence engage with a traumatic past. I conclude with some further suggestions for addressing the relationship between music and transitional justice.
Music and Arts in Action
The alignment of researchers’ and researched communities’ values is common in music research methodologies of applied ethnomusicology, applied musicology, community music studies, music therapy and some areas of music psychology and music for health studies. Such fields focus on use-inspired research (Stokes 1997). I define value alignment as occurring when values among different research participants seem consistent, complementary or aligned. In such areas of applied and community-based music research, researcher and researched community value alignment emerges often in the context of musical interventions made in community. What are the benefits and risks of aligning one’s values as a researcher with values in a music community, within research processes? What are directions and methodologies for related future research on researcher values, researched community values and intersections between the two? I argue that a critical approach to useinspired research on music, when it comes to values, could minimize various risks and maximize benefits of value alignment. I also call for new work on value fluidity. Value fluidity refers to the intersections of values of individual human beings and institutions (organizational or otherwise social) as well as which value systems these intersections create and how those fluctuate over time.
Musiikki
The high escalation of a conflict that occurred in the Middle East became a global issue which until now still has not found a solution. This situation is also complicated by the presence of US President Donald Trump's controversial immigration policy, which targets the Middle Eastern countries. Various efforts have been made by each state to reduce tension and maintain social and political stability in each country. In the midst of the many efforts made, the Divan Orchestra, an international music organization that runs Musical Diplomacy in the conflict countries emerged as a non-state actors trying to resolve the conflict. In this study, researchers will try to discuss The Divan Orchestra diplomatic roles as a representation of the message of peace from its members. The researcher will use the concepts of Musical Diplomacy, Soft Power, and Non-State Roles as Analysis Tools. While the research method used is a Qualitative Method using Literature Study.
Jurnal Ilmiah Hubungan Internasional
Esta investigación contribuye a comprender el concepto de tejido social y su relación con el campo de la música colectiva para la construcción de paz. La investigación tuvo como objetivo identificar los aportes de los espacios musicales colectivos con víctimas del conflicto armado a la reconstrucción del tejido social de sus participantes. Específicamente se centró en el programa Música para la Reconciliación de la Fundación Nacional Batuta en Colombia. A través de la metodología de historias de vida la investigación se acercó a 17 familias participantes en los espacios de formación musical y psico-social de cuatro centros musicales diferentes del país. La investigación encuentra que el conflicto armado y los procesos de desplazamiento forzado posteriores a las vivencias violentas dejan a las familias frente a pérdidas humanas, económicas y sociales que les generan una alta desconfianza y les avocan al aislamiento. Lo anterior genera un no-lugar donde el sujeto rompe su vínculo con la sociedad. El espacio musical colectivo logra generar las condiciones para brindar a los participantes una identidad musical temporal que les devuelve su lugar social aportando al alivio emocional, la reconstrucción de sus redes y la circulación de recursos intangibles cohesionadores que permiten la confianza en sí mismo y en los demás. This research contributes to understand the concept of social fabric and its relationship with the field of collective music for the construction of peace. The research aimed to identify the contributions of the collective musical spaces with victims of the armed conflict to the reconstruction of the social fabric of its participants. Specifically, he focused on the Music for Reconciliation program of the National Batuta Foundation in Colombia. Through the methodology of life stories, the research approached 17 families participating in the musical and psycho-social training spaces of four different musical centers in the country. The investigation finds that the armed conflict and the processes of forced displacement after violent experiences leave families with human, economic and social losses that generate a high distrust and lead them to isolation. The foregoing generates a non-place where the subject breaks its link with society. The collective musical space manages to generate the conditions to provide participants with a temporary musical identity that gives them back their social place contributing to emotional relief, the reconstruction of their networks and the circulation of cohesive intangible resources that allow self-confidence and the rest.
The complexity of the Colombian conflict has multiple origins in such issues as socio-economic inequality, social injustice, the fight for land, the use of violence and dispossession as a means to obtain individual wealth. This shows how the current peace agreement will require a long and sustainable process that involves combined strategies from academia, civil society and the government that allow sustainable peace to be built across the country. Besides, following the peace agreement between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the Colombian government (post-agreement stage), strategies for reincorporating ex-combatants into civil society are crucial for the process. In fact, academic communities and Colombian society in general have known very few aspects of ex-combatants’ cultural identities, their uses of culture, the role of arts in everyday life and, especially, their artistic experience, interactions and practices. Consequently, basic elements useful for understanding the role of arts in their identities are largely unknown. This chapter aims to describe the artistic and cultural practices of ex-combatants based on a study of interviews carried out in Colombia. This text will present a literature review and the initial findings from this work. As the ex-combatants come from different cultural backgrounds, it will conclude with a reflection on arts and cultural diversity for peace building.
Arts Education and Cultural Diversity: Policies, Research, Practices and Critical Perspectives
This chapter analyzes the theoretical concept of social fabric, as well as the damage which armed conflict has caused it and how art can contribute to rebuilding it. Affective and symbolic characteristics of art, engaging the body, and the act of collective interpretation-creation may provide the conditions required for the necessary intangible and tangible factors to rebuild a social fabric damaged by war. Artistic spaces, as shown by a case in Colombia, can be an important place to generate, especially, intangible factors which keep the flow of social fabric active, such as values and beliefs, sense of community, confidence, and emotional stability of the individual and the group.
Handbook of Research on Promoting Peace Through Practice, Academia, and the Arts:
The study explores the potential of arts education to contribute to the development of intercultural competencies and the challenges and possibilities for harnessing its potential. It does so based on an analysis of the impacts of a 2-year-long arts education project implemented in schools characterized by high levels of cultural diversity in Catalonia, Spain, and a focus group discussion with the participating teachers and artists. The results suggest that arts education can contribute to enhancing cultural awareness and knowledge, improving relations among classmates, raising awareness of cultural expression as a human right and enhancing perceptions of schools as places for expression of one’s own culture. However, impacts are not automatic and arguably differ by discipline. More targeted evaluation frameworks that capture a broader range of intercultural competencies would contribute to generating better understanding on the topic. At the same time, increased opportunities for specialized training for both artists and educators could contribute to better harness the potential of arts education to contribute to the development of intercultural capacities among students from diverse cultural backgrounds.
Arts and Cultural Education in a World of Diversity: ENO Yearbook 1
There are many possible readings of a music project taking place in a territory under occupation. By paying attention to the context, values and interests of actors involved in the Music Collaboration between Palestine and Norway (2002–2017), this chapter uses Boltanski and Thévenot’s framework of justification to examine possible narratives of the project. Three main narratives stand out, namely, a civic, inspirational and (development) industry one, all of which are tightly interwoven.
Kunst og konflikt
When group identities are collectively believed in, groups tend to behave collectively (Scheitle, Corcoran and Halligan, 2018). This means that group identity can lead to group cohesion and vice versa. Music is one social activity that has the potential to strengthen this process, creating a more resilient identity for practitioners. Ultimately, however, resilience is based on what the group believes, rather than what is empirically evident and thus, it could be considered a type of fiction. According to Harari (2015), collective belief in fictions is necessary for collective cooperation beyond small, personal social groups. This article attempts to illustrate how music can afford increased resilience of group identity through the shared belief in its own agency and how music therapy might provide an even more specifically useful approach in this context.
Music and Arts in Action
Ethnomusicology
This study examined the impact of a cross-cultural musical program on young Portuguese adolescents’ national prejudice. Two-hundred and twenty-nine sixth-grade pupils who attended public schools in the area of Lisbon, Portugal, were first presented with two tasks measuring national prejudice: a trait attribution task comprising positive and negative personality traits, and an overall affective evaluation of in-group and out-group people. Half of the pupils were subsequently exposed, at school, to a six-month musical program that included Cape Verdean songs as well as Portuguese songs. The other half was exposed to the usual program, which comprised no songs from Cape Verde but included all the Portuguese songs. Measures of national prejudice taken at the end of the program showed that the impact of the program was specific. In the experimental group, prejudice towards Cape Verdean people was reduced whereas attitudes to other groups were not altered (Portuguese and Brazilian). In the control group no reduction for any group was observed. Measures taken three months later showed that the impact of the experimental program was enduring.
Psychology of Music
Occurring widely at local levels, dance is a potential asset for the peacebuilding field especially as related to positive peace. The construct of positive peace is concerned with much more than the absence of war or direct violence, encompassing quality of life as a whole. Using an artistic and qualitative methodology, the authors discuss the politics of incorporating dance in peacebuilding programs as connected to quality of life. This chapter builds its case in two main ways: first, by identifying and mapping out some key ways dance is deployed in peacebuilding contexts; and second, by more deeply exploring an empirical case focusing on the dance experiences of peacebuilders in the southern Philippines. By engaging in a discourse from both international relations and dance studies, the authors seek to bring further light to the role of dance in peacebuilding. We propose that the personal, relational, and educational benefits participants described from involvement in creative dance and movement workshops show the intersections between processes of building positive peace and quality of life.
Dance and the Quality of Life
The nine ethnomusicologists who contributed to this volume present a diverse range of views, approaches, and methodologies that address indigenous peoples, immigrants, and marginalized communities. Discussing participatory action research, social justice, empowerment, and critical race theory in relation to ethnomusicology, De-Colonization, Heritage, and Advocacy is the second of three paperback volumes derived from the original Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology. The Handbook can be understood as an applied ethnomusicology project: as a medium of getting to know the thoughts and experiences of global ethnomusicologists, of enriching general knowledge and understanding about ethnomusicologies and applied ethnomusicologies in various parts of the world, and of inspiring readers to put the accumulated knowledge, understanding, and skills into good use for the betterment of our world.
Latin American leaders frequently deploy narratives that centralize youth, and yet young people are among those most vulnerable to rights violations in the region. To address this circumstance, and help youth engage with moral deliberations, nongovernmental organizations encourage young people to partake in events and debates mediated increasingly through hip-hop—a genre that is presented as an empowering device due to its counterhegemonic origins in the United States. With youth at the forefront, organizations promote the genre through a dual process of spontaneity and institutionalized training, to encourage mediated practices of peacebuilding. Based on research conducted in Bogot ́ a between 2014 and 2016, I argue that through hip-hop interventions, young people and their organizational sponsors perform peace while (re)creating images of urban youth. [youth cultures, hip-hop, peacebuilding, Colombia]
The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
In spite of a commendable proliferation of Muslim-Christian initiatives in recent years, progress has been slow. Islam and Christianity are essentially two rival belief systems each claiming doctrinal and theological superiority. Any serious dialogue that goes deeper into these issues and attempts to discover new hermeneutical bridges inevitably reaches its explanatory limit. In this article, I argue that there may perhaps be new ways to overcome this historic standstill. Borrowing from insights gained from a sociological approach to the study of religion, it becomes evident that it is necessary to distinguish between religion as a set of normative beliefs and the concrete implementation of those beliefs through religious practices. The application of theory into authentic forms of embodied religiosity is the responsibility of believers themselves. They concretize the normative prescriptions through a contextualized, local interpretation that is both pragmatic and meaningful in order to make sense of their everyday lives. To understand religion intellectually, it is necessary to consider its fundamental anthropological dimension. Hence, the study of religion must ultimately include the study of human beings in their natural context and from their point of view. Moreover, I provide evidence that true insight is contingent upon actual participation in the religious practices themselves. Building on this argument, this article suggests that Muslim-Christian relations would significantly benefit from including shared participation in sacred religious performances as part of the strategy for a successful encounter.
Transformation: An International Journal of Holistic Mission Studies
Peace Review
This book gathers international voices from the field of ethnomusicology discussing the socio-political relevance of the discipline. The articles draw from contemporary discourses that take into account the role of music and dance in shaping social and political realities. An important field connected to political relevance is heritage, either in connection with the UNESCO or with archives. Ontologies of indigenous groups and their relevance in knowledge production is discussed in ethnomusicology nowadays as well as the possibilities of decolonising the discipline. Two articles from ethno-choreology explore dance from the gender perspective and in the post-socialist political structures. Different approaches from applied ethnomusicology deal with social justice, participatory dialogical practice, and the socio-political relevance of performance. Forced migration is seen as comprehensive topic for future ethnomusicology. The contents of the book mirror influential discourses of ethnomusicology today that will definitely shape the future development of the discipline.
While sports and music diplomacy between North Korea and South Korea in 2018 revived hopes for peace and reconciliation, it is not so clear what impact exchanges like these have over the long term. This paper traces the historical context of inter-Korean music and sports ventures examining the motivations and reception of them in each half. It argues that sustained music and sports interactions between the Koreas have moved gradually yet decisively towards mutual accommodation. Nevertheless, there is some ambiguity regarding the simultaneous objectives of reaching out to the other side and legitimizing one's own political system.
Culture and Empathy: International Journal of Sociology, Psychology, and Cultural Studies
This report was commissioned by Musicians Without Borders (MWB) in 2019 This report considers MWB’s peacebuilding agenda and examines how, and in what ways, it accords with the perceptions, needs and expectations of beneficiaries in two project localities, namely, Soy Música in El Salvador and Palestine Community Music in the West Bank. The report responds to a call by peacebuilding researchers and practitioners for more in-depth ethnographic research to better understand the psychosocial and political complexities that characterise conflict and post-conflict environments. It draws on interviews and focus group discussions held with a range of stakeholders in both project areas to build evidence of their respective needs and perspectives, and considers this data against MWB’s Theory of Change (TOC). Results from the study indicate that MWB projects are highly attuned to local social, cultural and political conditions and experiences, as well as responsive to shifting political parameters. Projects work with an adaptive definition of ‘peace’, as situations demand, and seek to build a range of local capacities to ensure cultural sensitivity, agency and local ownership. Some structural adjustments are advised to ensure trainee support in El Salvador and to strengthen training capacity and trainee networking in the West Bank. More broadly, the report aims to contribute insight to the recurrent conceptual and methodological problems that arise in many arts-based interventions from a one-dimensional understanding of conflict dynamics, and to demonstrate how cultural programmes such as those implemented by MWB may strengthen the place of culture in low intensity conflict and post-conflict peacebuilding agendas.
What does sound, whether preserved or lost, tell us about nineteenth-century wartime? Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense pursues this question through the many territories affected by the Crimean War, including Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Dagestan, Chechnya, and Crimea. Examining the experience of listeners and the politics of archiving sound, it reveals the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the media through which wartime sounds became audible--or failed to do so. The volume explores the dynamics of sound both in violent encounters on the battlefield and in the experience of listeners far-removed from theaters of war, each essay interrogating the Crimean War's sonic archive in order to address a broad set of issues in musicology, ethnomusicology, literary studies, the history of the senses and sound studies.
The current study investigates the psychosocial benefits of a cross‐community, intercultural dance programme for youth in Northern Ireland. Psychological theories, including contact theory and the ecology of childhood development, underpin the study, and results are discussed in relation to the programme's aims. The present study used qualitative, inductive methods; data consisted of interviews before and after the programme with facilitators (n = 2) and 10 (n = 10) programme participants (11–15 years old) of diverse races and nationalities. Latent themes were identified using thematic analysis. Findings reveal that participants have complex senses of identity. Worryingly, they also reported many instances of bullying, relating both to themselves and others. Results reveal three main psychosocial benefits of the programme, all of which promote positive mental health in adolescents. The benefits are increased self‐confidence, the formation of new crosscommunity friendships, and improved intercultural awareness and pride. It is argued that the programme is an exemplar of how the arts can promote peace as well as resilience in the face of adversity. Recommendations for future research are included.
Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology
This article explores how concepts of love, in particular compassionate love, can provide a way of promoting empathy and conciliation in intercultural community music contexts. Drawing on the work of Deborah Bird Rose and bell hooks, it considers how love is first and foremost a verb, a participatory emotion and a social practice that can both inform and underpin efforts at building connections with others through music. The article then seeks to ask two thorny and critical questions that can arise when community musicians conceptualize their intercultural music-making through the lens of love. These questions point towards the oftentimes irreconcilable complexities, cultural politics and legacies of colonization that underpin peace-building and conciliation efforts. To illustrate and unpack these ideas, the article draws on stories and experiences of a ten-year intercultural music collaboration with Warumungu and Warlpiri musicians in Central Australia.
International Journal of Community Music
Global music experts such as Campbell (Teaching music globally. Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 2004) suggest a “culture-bearer” may be helpful in negotiating the challenges associated with learning and engaging with music from unfamiliar musical cultures and traditions. Burton (World musics and music education: Facing the issues. MENC, Reston, VA, pp. 161–186, 2002) describes a culture bearer as “one raised within the culture who is a recognized practitioner of the culture’s music” (p. 178). The culture bearer approach makes sense, but also raises concerns (Vaugeois in Exploring social justice: How music education might matter. Canadian Music Educators’ Association/L’Association canadienne des musiciens éducateurs, Toronto, pp. 2–22, 2009). Will the culture bearer be able to effectively communicate with the musicians, and enable them to gain meaningful understanding of the music? Is it possible for one person, in a protracted period of time, to reasonably provide adequate knowledge of an entire musical tradition, let alone adequate knowledge of the entire culture in which the musical tradition developed? An Ontario adult community choir was recently visited by a guest conductor who taught and conducted music from the African-American Gospel tradition. This qualitative case study examines the impact on choir members of working with a culture bearer (the guest conductor) on repertoire from a particular musical tradition. Of primary interest is the intercultural understanding that choir members developed through their music making and learning in this context, and how any such development of intercultural understanding was facilitated. Qualitative data were collected through a focus group discussion and interviews with the choristers, and interviews with the guest conductor and regular conductor. Grounded theory practices informed data analysis: open coding followed by axial coding of emergent themes (Strauss and Corbin in Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. Sage, Newbury Park, CA, 1990). Two broad categories of findings are presented: the understandings that choir members gained, including musical understandings, social-historical understandings and understandings of self, and details of the culture bearer’s “cultural immersion experience” approach that helped the choir members achieve those understandings.
Arts Education and Cultural Diversity: Policies, Research, Practices and Critical Perspectives
In the phenomenon of the divided city – urban environments partitioned along ethno-religious lines as a result of war or conflict – projects seeking to bring segregated people together through community music activities face many operational and psychological obstacles. Divided cities are politically sustained, institutionally consolidated, and relentlessly territorialized by competing ethno-nationalist actors. They are highly resistant to peacebuilding efforts at the state level. This article uses an urban peacebuilding lens (peacebuilding reconceptualized at the urban scale that encompasses the spatial and social dimensions of ethno-nationalist division) to examine the work of community music projects in three divided cities. Through the examples of the Pavarotti Music Centre in Mostar, BosniaHerzegovina, the Mitrovica Rock School in Mitrovica, Kosovo, and Breaking Barriers (a pseudonym) in Belfast, Northern Ireland, we consider the contextspecific practices and discourses that are deployed to navigate the local constraints on inter-communal cooperation, but that also contribute to the broader goal of building peace. We find that music-making is a promising strategy of peacebuilding at the urban scale, with both functional and symbolic contributions to make to the task of transforming an ethnoscape into a peacescape.
International Journal of Community Music
The ethics of musical repatriation become especially murky when representative members of the originating culture disagree over whether certain musical artifacts should be repatriated at all. This may be due to linkages between the artifacts and violent histories, such that the artifacts carry the risk of inducing traumatic memories and contributing to ongoing political conflict. Centering on postgenocide Rwanda, this chapter employs a series of ethnographic vignettes to illustrate these ethical tensions. In 2007, the author came into possession of songs by Simon Bikindi, which were used by government-affiliated propagandists to incite the 1994 genocide. The songs are presently de facto censored by the current regime. In carefully reintroducing the songs to genocide survivors and witnesses, the author found that many did indeed support measures to suppress them, while others expressed an earnest desire to own and listen to them again, primarily as a facilitator for therapeutically remembering and narrativizing their own experiences of terror, loss, and recovery. In conclusion, this chapter does not aim to resolve this conflict, but to present it for the purposes of reflection and dialogue.
The Oxford handbook of musical repatriation
In this paper, I discuss the recent merging of two Irish traditional performances, the house-visiting tradition of mumming and the competitive tradition of Lambeg drumming, in the Shared Education Program in Northern Ireland. While the traditional tunes and rhymes performed by the professional mummers, the Armagh Rhymers, tend to be associated with Irish Catholic culture, the Lambeg drum is typically associated with Protestantism and particularly with the private fraternal Orange Order. I use participant observation and draw on several performance studies articles to argue that the process of folklorization made it possible for the Armagh Rhymers to perform in the unprecedentedly political setting of an Orange Lodge. By establishing themselves as a professional and international performance group, rather than amateur local actors as mummers traditionally are, the group was invited by the county council to take part in its initiative of developing children’s crosscommunity education with a focus on honoring Orange Order heritage. The emphasis on Orange heritage in this year’s project encouraged the Portadown Orange Lodge to open their doors to the Armagh Rhymers and Lambeg drum educator, Billy Hill to engage children of local Catholic and Protestant schools in 6 weeks of ritual drama involving the Lambeg drum. I draw on studies that discuss narrative in ritual drama and mythic storytelling, as well as in soothing social tensions in a political context. I examine the formal similarities in the rhyming and drumming traditions, and consider the project’s effectiveness in building friendly relations between the children, adults, and communities involved.
International Journal of Social Policy and Education
Peace Review
The purpose of this thesis was to examine the work of two Israeli ensembles that bring diverse musicians together through music and dialogue. Dialogue is a key tool for transforming conflict and building peace that hinges on critical, empathetic listening.1 Music ensembles, with their opportunities for participants to practice listening, are contexts in which participants and instructors can learn how to communicate and engage in dialogue to improve interpersonal relationships in pursuit of peace. The Polyphony Foundation and the Jerusalem Youth Chorus bring Arab and Jewish youth together in Israel to make music and practice dialogue. This thesis examines the techniques, programs, structures, and missions of these groups to illustrate how they use music and dialogue to promote understanding and empathy. Qualitative data from interviews conducted with members of both the Polyphony Foundation and the Jerusalem Youth Chorus are presented within a peacebuilding framework. Key findings from the literature review and field research speak to dialogue and empathy as existing at the heart of conflict transformation and the ways in which they may be enhanced through music-making. Application of this research can be used by ensemble directors to incorporate dialogue, listening, and empathy to the ensemble classroom. Implementation of these principles into higher education curricula may also follow the growth-trend of literature on music and conflict transformation. Both of these areas of application can equip musicians and leaders to create ways of using music and dialogue to transform conflict within their own lives.
The article describes 30 years of cultural activities in the field of music in Norway. From a small start multicultural music programs and intercultural communication has become a significant factor in the music field in Norway. The activities have also been of interest for several countries in Africa, Asia, South America and Middle East, which has led to several long-term music cooperation programs with Norway, as a part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ` Development Aid Program. Children and youth have been a major target group, and the schools have been an important arena to show the power of music as an agent of change.
Journal of Urban Culture Research
This article considers ways in which music can contribute to the development of social synchrony in situations of social uncertainty generated by global conflict and widespread population movements. Noting Lederach’s view that conflict resolution has an aesthetic and creative dimension, music can be seen to form a dialogic space in which shared meanings can be co-created and through which multiple and sometimes conflictual viewpoints can be expressed in order to facilitate peacebuilding. At the same time, the dialogic spaces entailed in musical interactions can promote empathy, whether these are initiated by individuals in naturally occurring social settings or on a larger scale by institutions committed to developing social inclusion or promoting conciliation. In exploring these issues, I draw on my current research involving newly arrived forced and voluntary migrant children and young people in Australia, in addition to research from the fields of music education, ethnomusicology, evolutionary musicology, psychology, refugee studies and peace studies.
International Journal of Community Music
Can music development programs such as large-scale public festivals help to repair the sociocultural divisions wrought by war and violent conflict? If so, under what facilitating conditions? This chapter engages with these questions, presenting research into the Sri Lanka Norway Music Cooperation, a partnership between Sri Lankan development NGO Sevalanka Foundation and Concerts Norway, the Norwegian state concerts agency that was funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2009 to 2018.
Kunst og konflikt: Teater, visuell kunst og musikk i kontekst
Peace Review
This book is the first in the field to explore the use of music in negotiation, conflict resolution and leadership development. Presenting grounded empirical data, it examines how adopting an ensemble approach to negotiation and problem-solving might assist in shifting adversarial combative and competitive frames towards a collaborative mindset. The book introduces a music-based cognitive metaphor and music-based pedagogy into the study of negotiation and problem-solving, considering the impact of arts-based learning strategies on the theory and practice of dispute resolution and enriching readers’ understanding of the design and implementation of such strategies. Specifically focused upon the rise of arts-based learning in professional business management education and training, this book explores the need for foundational change in conflict culture and leadership development, and how we might achieve it.
Music is not innocent. It often embodies many people’s hopes for peace in the aftermath of war, violence, and mass atrocities. And yet, already more than four decades ago, Jacques Attali warned us in Noise: a Political Economy of Music, that music may be as much connected with dissonance and violence, as it is with peace and social harmony. Attali’s study warrants a closer reading as he anticipated later critiques of a rather naïve belief in “music and peacebuilding” as somehow a natural paring or a means of social healing. Ambivalence regarding musical connections with violent and peaceful forms of social action and change, is now widely acknowledged both by practitioners and researchers, and those who combine both hats. Although human beings have played music for a very long time to promote peaceful outcomes (perhaps even before they could talk), they can use the same sounds, tones, and rhythms to stir up emotions that promote violence and send humans, and mainly men, into battle. Those of us who may advocate and research musical experiences as means of promoting well-being, common understandings, and peace, have to grapple with the “other side” of music’s power to move us—the “flip side” of music’s power to heal is its association with tendencies to incite violence and victimization.
Peace Review
This article analyses the function music has played in the construction of identities in Mali, arguing that these constructions have directly impacted the process of national cohesion since independence in 1960. The link between this idea and the implications of the 2012 crisis - involving the prohibition of music under Shari’a law - will then be explored. The absence of music, a crucial mechanism for social cohesion, contributed to the complete breakdown of social relations and brought into question the concept of a “Malian” identity. Therefore, amidst ongoing Islamist activity, music’s ability to reconstruct national cohesion has been impaired.
Contemporary Voices: St Andrews Journal of International Relations
Building Open Infrastructure at CUNY
Peace Review
International Journal of Community Music
Members of societies in conflict hold stable positive and negative views, and emotions of the in‐group and out‐group, respectively. Music is a potent tool to express and evoke emotions. It is a social product created within a social and political context, reflecting, and commenting it. Protest songs aim to change views and attitudes toward ongoing conflicts. Their message may be expressed positively (pro‐peace songs) or negatively (anti‐war songs). Previous research has shown that evoking emotions such as guilt toward the in‐group or empathy toward the out‐group may influence attitudes toward reconciliation. The present research, conducted in Israel, presents three studies investigating whether emotions evoked by positive or negative protest songs may influence in‐group members' guilt toward the in‐group (Israeli Jews) and empathy toward the out‐group (Palestinians). Studies 1 and 2 show that negative emotions evoked by negative protests songs predicted both empathy and guilt when the out‐group is considered as a whole (Study 1) or as a particular individual (Study 2). Study 2 in addition showed that empathy predicts an altruistic decision regarding an out‐group member. Emotions evoked by lyrics alone (Study 3) did not contribute to explained variance in either guilt or empathy, nor the altruistic decision. Results suggest that negative emotions expressed by negative protest songs, focused on the in‐group, are more effective in influencing attitudes toward out‐groups. Results are discussed in the context of group emotions in conflict and the role of protest songs in intergroup relations.
Journal of Applied Social Psychology
The seven ethnomusicologists who contributed to this volume discuss the role and impact of applied ethnomusicology in a variety of public and private sectors, including the commercial music industry, archives and collections, public folklore programs, and music education programs at public schools. Public Ethnomusicology, Education, Archives, and Commerce is the third of three paperback volumes derived from the original Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology. The Handbook can be understood as an applied ethnomusicology project: as a medium of getting to know the thoughts and experiences of global ethnomusicologists, of enriching general knowledge and understanding about ethnomusicologies and applied ethnomusicologies in various parts of the world, and of inspiring readers to put the accumulated knowledge, understanding, and skills into good use for the betterment of our world.
Peace Review
In this article, we examine the contribution of a distinctive participatory intervention, the Brighton-based New Note Orchestra (NNO), to our understanding of the sources of subjective wellbeing for people who are dealing with addiction. The focus of the article is upon Solace, a performance piece generated through collaborative improvisation by NNO and presented at several public venues from December 2017 to March 2018.
Contemporary Music Review
This article explores how singing and ritual can constitute justice. Specifically, I look at how Arsi Oromo women in Ethiopia use ateetee, a sung indigenous women’s dispute resolution process, to protect, defend, promote, and assert their rights. I use thick descriptive ethnography, narratives, and experiences from fieldwork, musico-poetic analyses, and the voices of Arsi Oromo community members to explore how the sung ateetee ritual is a necessary and effective means for Arsi women to claim their rights in rapidly changing social environments.
Ethnomusicology
Music in “refugee camps” is commonly understood as ancillary to the more pressing issues of food, shelter, and healthcare. With a different ear, one can hear how songs and dances provide people with important ways of thinking, communicating, and feeling in places rife with precarity and inequality. In this dissertation, I examine the ways music, dance, and ritual intersect with subject formation and humanitarian politics through critical analysis informed by the histories and social life of the Kakuma Refugee Camp in East Africa. My analysis stems from eleven months of politically engaged ethnomusicological research conducted over two visits between 2013 and 2015. Guided in part by logics and sentiments of care, the United Nations refugee agency and their contracted agencies supported cultural engagements through funding and organizing public festivals and local music projects. More than just a site of altruism, however, Kakuma’s inhabitants enacted their social practices within a context of extreme social control beset with nightly curfews, cultural bans, and restrictions on movement and employment. Through delving into the musical experiences of hip hop artists, Dinka pastoralists, and religious congregations, my findings demonstrate the various ways Kakuma’s social actors used creative expressions to make claims to citizenship rights and related practices in a place where state and humanitarian forces impinged upon basic civil liberties. Some may view refugees and asylum seekers as individuals stripped of all political rights once they enter a “refugee camp.” Contrastingly, this study demonstrates that Kakuma’s inhabitants drew on a far-ranging array of cultural expressions to legitimize their needs and demands for citizenly rights and recognition amidst their subjection to wider disciplinary social forces. Through examining a range of sonic practices, this dissertation challenges and reimagines reductive and dichotomous distinctions between refugees and citizens.
This article suggests that the growing literature on sonic warfare has not been as sensitive to the work of law and legal institutions as it might be, and that it is exemplary in this respect of a lot of work in sound studies more generally. Just as jurisprudence must learn to think sonically, sound studies must endeavour to listen jurisprudentially. Across a series of examples – some well-known, others less so – the article draws out some key elements of the jurisprudence of weaponised sound. It shows how law is necessarily implicated in the story of sonic warfare, and not just insofar as it is prohibitive or emancipatory. Law doesn’t simply oppose violence; it authorises and channels it, and increasingly towards the acoustic. In this respect, it is doing more than just expressing or clearing a path for the expression of other forms of power. Law itself is a form of power that, by means of complex institutional architectures across multiple jurisdictions, crucially shapes our sonic worlds.
Sound Studies
There is a strong connection between creative arts and building capacity for peaceful transformation of entrenched conflict. While governments, warlords, militias and bureaucrats may control or dominate the overt peacebuilding process, artists of all disciplines work behind the scenes, in communities, cultural centers, refugee camps and war zones, building resiliency and peace from the personal level. This project explores how the creative arts stimulate and support peacebuilding: the nature and definition of peace itself, and the aspects of creative arts that render them powerful in the role of peacebuilding. The substance of this project is an extensive literature review, to better illuminate both the current understandings of peace from social psychology, and the literature on creative arts applications and projects for building peace. By obtaining the views and experiences of a selection of identified creative arts groups working in the field, synergies and shared experiences are identified in more clearly defining the role of the creative arts in building peace. The driving question of the project is in what ways do hands-on, participative creative arts projects support peace building? Keywords: peace, peacebuilding, creativity, creative arts, art, transformation, conflict, participation, shift, resilience
Two musical moments on the edge: At a black site in Thailand, Abu Zubaydah, the first high-v alue detainee in the “Global War on Terror,” is placed inside a confinement box less than three feet square. All the while, music—from death metal to Barney the Purple Dinosaur’s “I Love You”—blasts unpredictably, unrelentingly. Not only in the box but day and night Zubaydah was subjected to a musical assault that was inescapable, nailing him to an existential hell with no future, no past. Ama, an elderly fishmonger, regularly gets possessed by the mother of a pantheon of deities from northern Ghana. At shrine celebrations, she is no longer herself but a dancing god being praised by drum and song. As long as the mother is there, Ama is away. One musical experience is the ontological inversion of the other. For the Brekete shrines of the Guinea Coast, musical experiences are energy producing, life affirming, a being-with-others through the sacrifice of the one possessed. In detention cells, whether in Thailand or in Guantánamo Bay, they are life diminishing, isolating, sacrificial, though not a sacrifice of the sacred kind. American torture and African trance, as delimited here, meet at the boundaries of musical experience and in so doing refract each other in a mirrored play, a ring dance of being-there and being-a way. What follows is a talk of extremes, of musical experience at the margins, on the edge, limit experiences where selves are torn asunder and thrust into musical existences not of their own making.
Ethnomusicology
This paper addresses some of the major issues of Peace Education in schools and relates music and music education to this field of knowledge. Music can be a tool to contribute to building peace. Throughout history, music and musical practices have been used to enhance relationships; learning and sharing music has been used to transform realities in diverse ways. In this regard, the paper aims to review major concerns of Peace Education in relation to music in schools, to encourage teachers to promote musical practices aimed at transforming societies and to offer examples of different projects that have made use of music education to contribute to peacebuilding.
International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research
Under the name Stregoni, Gianluca Taraborelli and Marco Bernacchia have been organising workshop-concerts involving more than two thousand economic migrants, asylum seekers and refugees (from Africa, Syria, Afghanistan and the Indian subcontinent) who are hosted in reception centres and camps. This non-institutional project explores a way to promote intercultural integration through the practice of improvised music in Italy and Europe. Sampling the music that refugee and asylum seekers usually listen to on their smartphones, the two Italian musicians create soundscapes to improvise together in a concert. Stregoni represents an attempt to understand what is happening within and outside the borders of the EU, while providing an opportunity to promote communal spaces and experiences in the field of intercultural integration with the objective of letting migrants express their own ‘sonic citizenship’.
Contemporary Music Review
Music may not be an obvious area for a criminologist's attention, but there are many areas appropriate for analysis in the relationship between sound, music, rights and harm. The Use and Abuse of Music: Criminal Records explores how music is utilised to include, exclude, dominate and silence. Analysing the connection between music and crime from an expressly critical criminological perspective, the book is divided into three main parts. Firstly, focusing on the concept of 'harmful' or deviant music, genres such as UK drill music and heavy metal are examined to highlight the connections between certain genres and criminalisation. Moving away from specifics of genre, the second section considers the use of music in war and conflict. Finally, the book reflects on the censorship and silencing of subcultures and individuals through music, highlighting the inequalities surrounding who is permitted to make noise which is often exemplified by racist, sexist and prejudicial actions. This illuminating exploration of the deviant and transgressive nature of music is ideal for researchers, scholars and students working within the fields of criminology, sociology and musicology.
Let’s talk music (LTM) is a community-oriented music therapy group that was developed to enhance dialogue between Arab and Jewish students. Participants, most of whom do not have prior music skills, are involved in various music activities alongside political discussions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this “perspective-on-practice” article, we reflect on the roles that music has in LTM. Based on students’ written and oral feedback reports at the end of two of these groups, we found that music had six roles: to enhance musical capabilities, to express feelings, to develop togetherness, to get acquainted with “the other,” to raise political issues, and to create distraction from inconvenient (political) content. In the discussion, we compared these roles to those of music in other music therapy groups and in music for peace initiatives, and found that LTM was unique in that it uses music to raise political (conflictual) issues. Other roles that were found in LTM were found in other music therapy groups, but in LTM they had an additional cultural/political layer of meaning. For instance, music helped not only to develop togetherness or to express feelings in a social sense, but also in a political/national sense.
Nordic Journal of Music Therapy
This article examines music and music scholarship vis-a-vis research findings in addictions sciences. It explains how music is socially useful for preventing and treating addiction. Making music with others, and all of the social and cultural activities that go into doing so—musicking—can foster psychosocial integration and social cohesion, via specific cultural and musical mechanisms, and in ways that can salve addictions. Alexander’s social dislocation theory of addiction serves as the theoretical framework for the study. I draw empirical support for the discussion from my long-term ethnographic fieldwork on Indigenous addiction rehabilitation settings in Vancouver, Canada. My analysis of those settings finds that connecting socially via musicking in ways that can prevent and treat addiction happens through different ways of being, ideas and focuses of attention—such as constructs of ethnicity, around spirituality/religion, and social and political values —that are shared among musicking people and perceived via their eight senses (the auditory, visual, tactile, gustatory, olfactory, vestibular, proprioceptive, and interoceptive). This article responds to a lack of music and cultural research on the correlation between social disconnection and addiction as well as a lack of study on the social potential of musical cultures to prevent and treat addictions. The article lays groundwork for future research on the roles that musicking can play in addiction recovery.
Music & Science
The affordances of musical experience, its capacity to become our mode of being‐in‐the‐world, especially in ritual situations, can be turned against us into an aversive sonic attack that bends the social arc into a liminality without end, a time in between that goes nowhere. And when this happens, we have entered the realm of music torture, a relatively recent innovation in that dark art that was ushered into the world in full force at the beginning of the 21st century. Music became part of a regime of no‐touch torture inflicted upon detainees in the ‘global war on terror’, itself a war without end. In this article, the author argues for an ontomusicology that understands music as ritual and ritual as music – in this case, ritual that inverts Victor Turner’s notion of communitas, with all of its attendant modes of being‐with, into a solitary mode of existence with no hope of escape, a musical ritual torture, a perpetual intermezzo.
Anthropology Today
The nine ethnomusicologists who contributed to this volume, balanced in age and gender and hailing from a diverse array of countries, share the goal of stimulating further development in the field of ethnomusicology. By theorizing applied ethnomusicology, offering histories, and detailing practical examples, they explore the themes of peace and conflict studies, ecology, sustainability, and the theoretical and methodological considerations that accompany them. Theory, Method, Sustainability, and Conflict is the first of three paperback volumes derived from the original Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, which can be understood as an applied ethnomusicology project: as a medium of getting to know the thoughts and experiences of global ethnomusicologists, of enriching general knowledge and understanding about ethnomusicologies and applied ethnomusicologies in various parts of the world, and of inspiring readers to put the accumulated knowledge, understanding, and skills into good use for the betterment of our world.
In the Senegambia Region of West Africa, performers have long played a central role in conflict mediation. Historically, this has included both small-scale conflicts, such as those between neighbours, and larger-scale conflicts between groups. This article draws on evidence from ethnographic research with Gambian performers to explore contemporary perspectives on conflict and conciliation. I use analysis of three Mandinka-language songs relating to conflict within the family to show that performers work to promote conciliation through appeals to shared values of oneness, positive relationships and empathy. Examples include songs by hereditary professional musicians (jaloolu), a hip hop artist and female fertility society performers (kanyeleng). These songs are rooted in cultural frameworks of morality and goodness, while also reflecting gendered dynamics of risk and inequality.
International Journal of Community Music
The study aims at highlighting the relevance of Pakhtun Hujra (a sociocultural institute) with peacebuilding in Pakhtun tribal society of Pakistan. A qualitative study was conducted in District Bajaur of Pakhtun tribal areas of Pakistan. Data were collected from 50 local in hibitants of the area through indepth interviews using interview guide as a tool. Participants of the study were purposively selected based on their knowledge and experience with local peacebuilding mechanisms. It was noted that Pakhtun Hujra is one of local intuitions with peacebuilding functions. The local people call Hujra “Da Aman Kor” (The House of Peace) as it‟s a sanctuary for people in trouble. Further, Hujra also functions as a court room and parliament for the local villagers. It is concluded that Pakhtun Hujra is a peace friendly space of Pakhtun villages and is of vital importance to peacebuilding organizations. It is suggested that Hujra can be used a resource center for peacebuilding related activities by government and non-governmental organizations.
Pakistani Journal of Criminology
Peacebuilding is a contested concept. From liberal peacebuilding, to the emergence of hybridization and incorporating the local, to critical and emancipatory peacebuilding approaches, peacebuilding has increasingly become a space where competing epistemologies and ideologies converge. By examining the liberal peacebuilding model, we can explore how music programs could be incorporated into liberal peace initiatives to improve their effectiveness. Current peacebuilding practices have their roots in the liberal peace model. This approach to peace favors certain liberal ideals such as free markets, the rule of law, and democracy. Arts-based approaches to peacebuilding are a rather novel critical and emancipatory approach to peace. As such, this essay proposes a framework of music as emancipatory peacebuilding that is in response to the critiques of liberal peacebuilding. The aims of this essay are twofold: first, to describe the liberal peacebuilding model and second, to highlight the ways in which music-based programs, as a critical and emancipatory peacebuilding approach, can assist in the areas where the liberal approach falters.
Peace Review
In Croatia, campaigners for a more critical public reckoning with the memory of Croatia's 'Homeland War' (1991–5) and the national past confront embeddings of hegemonic myths of the war into everyday life. Among these are the stardom of a musician whose 'patriotic' music claims the same moral authority as the Croatian veterans' movement and whose public persona has embodied militarised masculinity since he became a wartime star. Popular music and youth engagement with it is thus among the sites where everyday understandings of peace are being contested. By exploring the audiovisual aesthetics of the song/video through which this musician re-engaged with veterans' activism in 1998, and showing that popular music spectatorship seeps into the everyday micropolitics of young people building and contesting peace, the paper argues that for critical peace and conflict studies to understand the affective politics of post-conflict masculinities, they must combine a feminist and aesthetic consciousness.
Peacebuilding
This paper discusses the link between community music improvisation and the integration of refugees, asylum seekers and local residents, and proposes a new way of thinking about priority-setting in refugee integration and rehabilitation support schemes. Drawing on observations and interviews with an integrated music group in Wales, we explore the effect of participating in structured musical activities and improvisation in weekly meetings, as well as at public performances in community arts events. We observed that embedding improvisation led to four outcomes. It (i) encouraged individual unscripted performances, instilling confidence in solo performance, (ii) gave individuals who had experienced displacement and marginalisation a chance to lead in a safe, performative space, (iii) gave other participants a chance to follow and accompany this piece instrumentally or vocally, drawing on their own cultural traditions and thus creating innovative cross-cultural pieces; and (iv) provided participants and audience members with a unique and unrepeated, uplifting experience that triggered their imaginations, and prompted questions and further discussion between participants. These findings suggest that the combination of structured musical activity and improvisation may help to foster a sense of wellbeing and social inclusion, shift power dynamics, and create a space for cross-cultural dialogue. These unique outcomes highlight how music can create a community of people from seemingly completely different locations or situations. Furthermore, the well-established Welsh choral traditions and local community arts provided a receptive environment for this diverse group of performers. Therefore, it was not just the musical activities but their connection to the wider local community arts scene that delivered these individual, collective and wider societal benefits.
Contemporary Music Review
Music listening is a ubiquitous pastime for teenagers, but when that music contains themes of extreme violence, questions arise as to who listens to this music andwhy. Here, we show that fans of violent music differ from nonfans in personality, with lower conscientiousness and agreeableness. They also have different motivations for listening to music and contrasting emotional responses to violent music, with fans reporting feelings of power and joy, and nonfans reporting feelings of tension, fear, and anger.
Psychology of Popular Media Culture
Although there has been an increase in research considering the positive effects of music with prosocial lyrics on people’s behavior, little is known about the process by which this happens or about the factors that influence the effect of listening to songs with prosocial content. This study focused on the interaction between attention level and familiarity, two factors that, to some degree, determine the effect of this kind of music. Based on the general learning model, the reciprocal feedback model of music perception, and the elaboration likelihood model, an online experiment (n = 220) was conducted to test how people listening attentively to familiar or unfamiliar music with prosocial lyrics are affected, in comparison with those listening inattentively. The results yielded a significant interaction effect between attention and familiarity on prosocial behavior, indicating that only familiar songs with prosocial lyrics affect inattentive listeners, whereas attentive listeners are affected similarly by familiar and unfamiliar songs. Effects on emotions and an indirect effect of familiarity on prosocial behavior via activated pre-knowledge and positive emotions were also found. The results are discussed regarding their role in understanding the music reception process and their meaning for listeners’ prosocial behavior.
Psychology of Music
Arts & International Affairs
In this response, I have nothing particularly critical to provide nor do I have the space to respond to all of the valid and essential questions he asks about business and peace. Those questions set the agenda for conversations that will unfold over a considerable period of time. Instead, my aim is to draw some connections between the work I and others have done in the field of business and peace and connect it to Urbain’s articulation of the issues pertaining to music and peace. Thus, in the first section, I rely on his themes in exploring music for peacebuilding and connect those themes to the research on business and peace. In Section II, I suggest a structural model that may be helpful in dealing with the inherent ambivalence of both music and business as relates to peace and squarely address how such a structure might approach normative issues. That is, given the fact that both business and music can be used for negative (violent) as well as positive (peaceful) purposes, what are the ethical norms that direct to, well, accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. Finally, Section III extends some of these themes and structures in an experiment I currently am conducting with my business ethics classes where they are required to identify a piece of music that corresponds to a level of moral development as proposed by, and which I modified, by moral psychologists.
College Music Symposium
This paper considers the nature of work done in performances that seek to “create bridges” across cultures and to highlight shared heritage across political borders. What agendas are privileged, and what forms of representation are entailed? I explore these issues via case studies in musical collaboration along the “Silk Road,” the ancient trade routes brought to life in the contemporary imagination to link cultures from Europe to East Asia. I privilege the perspectives of the various actors involved, arguing that careful attention to the experiences of participants serve to texture our understanding of cultural border-crossings. Music-making, as a form of embodied practice, may serve as a way of deconstructing conventional narratives but it may also serve to uphold established hierarchies. I argue that in cross-border encounters musicians draw on diverse imaginaries—learned aesthetic norms, bodily habitus and imaginative resources—casting their collaborators as musical and social others in their efforts to make sense of what they hear.
The World of Music
While there is a bulk of studies about youth-led nonprofit organizations that advocates peacebuilding in postconflict areas, a very minimal research is available focusing on the factors that may influence their sustainability in post-external aid phase. Especially for youth-led non-profit organizations in developing and conflict-driven regions, there is a need to study their current sustainability status which will be the basis for proposing ways to enhance sustainability. Anchored on the organizational sustainability theory of Coblentz (2002) and of Hauser, Huberman, and Alford (2008), this research determines the current sustainability status of the organizations’ operations in post-external aid phase of Move This WorldPhilippines and Dire Husi Initiative, two youth-led nonprofits in Northern Mindanao. A total of 34 organizational sustainability indicators serve as basis in determining the current sustainability status of both organizations. Spiritual sustainability (89%) ranks first among the four dimensions, followed by technical sustainability (86%), then institutional sustainability (70%), and financial sustainability (38%) as the lowest. Challenges related to stakeholders, approach, and resources are identified. Especially for non-profit literature, the empirical data from this study contributes particularly on strategies of enhancing organizational sustainability of youth-led non-profit organizations from developing and conflict-driven regions.
Journal of Asian Review of Public Affairs and Policy
The Yale ISM Review
Over the years, the Music Center at the Jezreel Valley Center for the Arts has initiated many programs for peace education through music. Developing a child’s identity as an artist and a musician requires long term engagement. When children spend time making music together they have the opportunity to build a shared identity. This article presents past programs and analyzes the difficulties that occurred in their implementation. Conclusions include the need for a candid evaluation of success versus failure, and the need to better define the means and methods for each project’s implementation and evaluation.
Min-Ad: Israel Studies in Musicology Online
Over the last two decades community music has grown from differing local activities into a global field of study and practice. Despite this development, the term still lacks an agreed international definition. Building on over three decades as a community musician, I will give an understanding of community music values and methods as they are practiced in Ireland, the UK and increasingly internationally. Additionally, I will link community music values and characteristics to aspects of peacebuilding, specifically initiatives that are bottom up. I will also talk about how I used these community music methods over eight years working in Northern Ireland on projects to further peacebuilding.
Music and Arts in Action
Community musical theatre projects have played important roles in engaging young people of diverse ethnicities in multicultural and religious Malaysia to cross borders, deconstruct stereotypes, appreciate differences, and build interethnic peace. This essay provides insights into the strategies and dialogic approaches employed in two such community musical theatre projects that promote peace-building in Penang. The emphasis is on the making of musical theatre through participatory research, collaboration, ensemble work, and group discussions about alternative history, social relationships and cultural change. The projects also stress partnerships with the multiethnic stakeholders, communities, traditional artists, university students, and school teachers who are involved in the projects. Equally important is the creation of a safe space for intercultural dialogue, skill training, research, and assessments to take place; this a working space that allows for free and open participation, communication, play, and creative expressions for all participants.
The Oxford Handbook of Community Music
The following capstone literature review explores music therapy (and allied creative arts therapies) and their impact within the realm of conflict zones and conflict transformation. It defines the traditional approaches music therapy has taken with conflict survivors as well as makes a case for a movement towards community music therapy frameworks rather than consensus model individual therapy models. Delving into the history of critical theory and the impact of critical psychology and liberation psychology, the literature review advocates for incorporation of critical theory into more music therapy education programs. This is identified as a means to facilitate more culturally reflexive anti-oppressive practices by Western music therapists working with non-Western clients.
Dialogue used within music in peacebuilding includes social, musical, and educational processes of rehumanisation, while also disrupting oppressive knowledge that has been learned and preserved through structural violence, cultural violence (Galtung, 1990), and conflict. According to educational philosopher Paulo Freire, dialogue is an ‘act of creation’ (2000) through which individuals raise their critical consciousness in order to name their world. Developing this praxis requires dialogical musical spaces and ‘communicative creativity’ (Urbain, 2016), within which to explore and reflect upon values, narratives, realities, and power dynamics, to build more inclusive and equalizing communities, and potentially a just peace.
Music and Arts in Action
Throughout the world, violent conflicts negatively impact economies, cultural practices, and the social relations within societies. Focusing on a case study of a cooperative national and community effort that highlights musical and traditional cultural practices, this dissertation explores programs aimed at peacebuilding in post-conflict societies. The AfroCaribbean town of Libertad, Colombia, suffered violent ruptures during a rightwing paramilitary occupation between 1996 and 2004. In 2007, the Colombian national government began working with community members to implement a Collective Reparation Plan to assist in rebuilding the community and its social fabric. Based on local beliefs that cultural and artistic practices play key roles creating frameworks for collective action and community-building, they designed projects to revive traditional musics and cultural expressions as well as to create new works that resonate more directly with the youth. The revival of traditional funerary wake games and the construction of the musical genre bullenrap—a fusion of hip-hop and local bullerengue—exemplify local strategies for ameliorating problems such as the loss of traditional knowledges and intergenerational tensions in creative and nonviolent ways. Liberteño artists have built frameworks for solidarity and education through participatory performances that empower community members and address local issues through empathy. Based on long-term ethnographic research, this dissertation argues that these programs have been successful because they: 1) build upon a long history of using cultural expressions to foster community solidarity and collective action; 2) foster collective initiatives of local leaders and their social capital; 3) embody the creative resilience of artists in managing local cultural resources towards social ends, and 4) maximize the participatory approach within government programs, advocating sensitivity to local needs. Contributing to the literature in ethnomusicology and peacebuilding, this dissertation offers a methodology for research and design of programs that recognize the transformative potentials of musical and cultural practices in postconflict scenarios in Colombia and around the world.
The construction, popularisation and expression of emotions play a central role in peacebuilding pursuits, as well as the international and domestic conflicts they aim to address. The discourse surrounding peacebuilding is inherently emotion-laden, depending upon notions of hope, empathy and compassion (not to mention ‘peace’ itself). Relatedly, emotions such as fear, anger, solidaristic pride and disgust circulate freely during times of conflict. Because emotions are paramount in both musical practice and peacebuilding contexts, cross-cultural projects that aim to develop (or research) emotions must be informed by the ways the conceptualisation of various emotions is often culturally and historically bound.
Music and Arts in Action
This article outlines a reconfiguration of the “network” trope as a means of conducting reflexive, applied research on society, technology, and music, towards positive social transformation, with application in post-war Liberia. In the social sciences, the mathematical concept of graph or network has provided a powerful paradigm both for scientific explanation and humanistic understanding, through social network analysis. Its application in the present article transcends these applications through a shift in emphasis, from explanation and understanding to social transformations, induced by forging new transnational networks out of the collaborative, iterative cycles of participatory action research (PAR) centered on music, digital musical production, and sociomusical relationships. These networks are designed to address what the UN has identified as the “responsibility to protect” (R2P), as a means of mitigating that dehumanisation underlying all human rights abuses. Beyond explanation or understanding, I emphasise PAR networks as tools and instances of social transformation, not only as means, but as ends in themselves, holding that the right sort of transnational social network—a harmoniously interacting global community—is precisely what is sought. Further, whereas the network actor is typically either human (in social network analysis) or non-human (in much network science), I combine the two in applied research, building on Latour’s “Actor Network Theory” (ANT) in two respects. First, beyond joining the human and nonhuman I consider also their double intersection: the expressive arts (including music) as the human nonhuman; and dehumanisation as the nonhuman human. Second, I extend such constructivism to transformative participatory action research. The chapter charts the iterative formation of a transnational PAR actor-network, including Liberian refugee musicians, academics, students, and producers, constituting both method and objective for applied ethnomusicology. I identify the digital song (manifesting in multiple remixes) as flexible mediator, its potential remixes enhancing connectivity, forging harmoniously interacting transna tional actor-networks via people, technology, and music. Such networks not only facilitate a better world, they embody it.
The World of Music
During the summer of 2017, a musically and culturally diverse group of fifteen young musicians from Haifa, Israel, and fifteen from Weimar, Germany, came together for ten days in each city to form the “Caravan Orchestra,” a new ensemble that sought to reopen lost musical connections between cognate Jewish, Arabic, and European repertories. Seeking to explore an “often-overlooked historical, transnational cultural matrix” rooted in the long arc of the Ottoman empire, the Caravan project proved to be a wider voyage of discovery, in which a large group of stakeholders from two countries—ethnomusicologists, musicians, students, funders and institutions—explored what such a conversation might entail. Like many intensive musical projects, the Caravan Orchestra was a transformative experience for many of those involved, marked by the exhilaration of producing good music on a concert stage and validated by audience applause, dancing and ovations. Yet beyond aesthetic satisfaction, what kind of insights can such a project offer into the “disrupted musical histories” that it seeks to explore? In this article, I explore this question via three elements of the Caravan experience: musicianship, repertory, and identities.
The World of Music
Harmony’s semantic links across music and the social domain mean that when evoked in the context of music in peacebuilding, harmony provides both a description of musical action, and an aspirational projection of the desired social outcome. However, in both domains, harmony’s foundational values and implied practices raise questions of how apt it is as a representation, tool, or goal of contemporary peacebuilding. This article seeks to answer these questions. Conceptual in scope, it examines the multiple concepts attached to harmony in the musical and sociocultural domains, and discusses these in relation to peacebuilding, illustrating some of the possible alignments and alliances with examples of cross-community music projects. It offers a heuristic for considering harmony and its values, practices, affordances, and implications from a more critical and nuanced perspective.
Music and Arts in Action
The article begins by making explicit its disciplinary standpoint. Research on music in indigenous settings occurs in both ethnomusicology and indigenous studies, but each of these disciplines brings somewhat contrasting expectations to the fore. I then focus on definitions and usages of indigeneity, which are complex, and sometimes apparently contradictory, when viewed from a global perspective. The complexities that emerge from this discussion underpin the main body of the article, which is a consideration of cross-sections of research on musical appropriation and musical enculturation in and around indigenous contexts worldwide. Each case provides an opportunity to touch on concrete practices that music researchers have developed in working to create an environment of justice, mutual respect and equality, which I see as a necessary foundation for peaceful co-existence. Finally, in the Conclusion, I raise two further spaces where the professional music researcher can make distinct contributions to the establishment or maintenance of an environment characterised by greater respect for the world’s indigenous peoples and by inclusive engagement with indigenous music.
Music and Arts in Action
This volume explores the interrelation of international relations, music, and diplomacy from a multidisciplinary perspective. Throughout history, diplomats have gathered for musical events, and musicians have served as national representatives. Whatever political unit is under consideration (city-states, empires, nation-states), music has proven to be a component of diplomacy, its ceremonies, and its strategies. Following the recent acoustic turn in IR theory, the authors explore the notion of “musical diplomacies” and ask whether and how it differs from other types of cultural diplomacy. Accordingly, sounds and voices are dealt with in acoustic terms but are not restricted to music per se, also taking into consideration the voices (speech) of musicians in the international arena.
Music and Arts in Action
the world of music (new series)
Make Arts for a Better Life: A Guide for Working with Communities provides a groundbreaking model for arts advocacy. Drawing upon methods and theories from disciplines such as ethnomusicology, anthropology, folklore, community development, and communication studies, the Guide presents an in-depth approach to researching artistic practices within communities and to developing arts-based projects that address locally defined needs. Through clear methodology, case studies from around the world, and sample activities, the Guide helps move readers from arts research to project development to project evaluation. It addresses diverse arts: music, drama, dance, oral verbal arts, and visual arts. Also featured are critical reflections on the concept of a “better life” and ethical issues in arts advocacy. The Guide is aimed at a broad audience including both scholars and public sector workers. Appendices and an accompanying website offer methodology “cheat sheets,” sample research documents, and specific suggestions for educators, researchers, and project leaders.
Around the middle of the 1970s some musicians and music educators living in the Norwegian capital of Oslo met to discuss ways to create better harmony between the nature and extent of music activities in the capital and the increasing cultural complexity of its population caused by a sharp increase in immigration. This gave rise to the founding of the Intermusic Center, a pioneer organization working towards bringing the population at large into living contact with the rich cultural heritage of the variegated immigrant population. The competence earned through this pioneering work was later to form the professional basis for launching the first official research undertaking evaluating the potential of a large scale school music program based on these resources. It was launched for the purpose of promoting better social relations among students in city public schools with differing populations of immigrant students. The paper attempts to discuss the methodical issues connected with an evaluative research program of this nature as well as those connected with practical teaching. An historical overview of institutionalized multicultural music teaching in Norway precedes a description of The Resonant Community project itself and is followed by an evaluative description of results and aftereffects. A concluding section discusses the future of multicultural education in Europe on the backdrop of the economic downturn and extremist actions.
Journal of Urban Culture Research
Arts & International Affairs
Music in relation to peace and conflict, whether constructive or destructive, has had deep and profound effects that unite people based on commonality and shared interest. The IsraeliPalestinian conflict is no different when it comes to these two dichotomies. There are those who use music for protest to either escalate conflict or use it as a social and political platform. Then, there are those who use music for resolving their differences, to promote peacemaking and peacebuilding, further unifying and embracing the diversity that’s between them. The ethnographic approach that I took in this research gives insight and a perspective to those who may dismiss the ethnomusicological aspect to this topic of study. Understanding how music speaks in the context of a culture can also give insight to understanding a people. Once we gain this understanding, then we know how to approach them. Additionally, through my exploration of the construct of modern identity, I examine musical identity and how both can affect each other. Moving through these identities and addressing them can bridge the interethnic gap. The applied methods and theories behind such movements, as peacemaking and music, is what I have sought to explore in my research; further aiming to discover if there is anything tangible and sustainable in their attempt to build lasting relationships through music.
Music is often believed to be a universal cultural language that may bring different people together, in harmony. In this article, we review studies that examined interrelations between music and prejudice reduction during youth development. More specifically, our aim is to reflect on potential circumstances under which music listening and music making reduce cultural prejudice in childhood, adolescence, and emerging adulthood. We argue that this research theme is important but understudied. Nonetheless, the rare published empirical studies that we found (N = 13) cover a broad repertoire of research methods and outcomes that point to pertinent research directions for cultural attitude change, intergroup processes, positive intergroup contact, and empathy. Overall, although more research is needed, these preliminary findings suggest that music may have some potential to reduce cultural prejudice during youth development.
Musicae Scientiae
Music is usually divided into two main types: liturgical music to encourage people’s faith in God and secular music for people’s entertainment, including music accompanying dance. Musicians and composers have developed their skills and musical abilities through the ages resulting in music of high quality, complexity and theoretical sophistication. Music masters of each school transmit their music heritage continuously. The growth of science and technology resulted in social change from agricultural to manufacturing economies and finally business services and music became a commodity. Businessmen produced music to suit people’s needs and tastes without awareness of musical value, good or bad. The question is “what is music for?” Music is supposed to be a beautiful object for appreciation, and should shape people’s minds and morality. Over 50 years of my experiences as a musician and teacher, I have learned that music is a good tool for breaking the ice between international colleagues and me, leading to us becoming good friends. But I still don’t know how to make friends with people who are fighting and bombarding out there, especially the weapons-makers and war-creators who are completely filled with greediness and selfishness. In term of “music as ambassador for world peace,” music itself must be good and powerful enough to reach the deepest mind of people to reduce their greediness and selfishness and help them become lovers of humanity and nature. This job cannot be accomplished by any one individual, but by composers, musicians, music educators and music education.
Academic Journal Bangkokthonburi University
This thesis will examine the peacebuilding discourse, alongside current findings in the music discourse, to determine whether the integration of music could enhance current peacebuilding practices. Music is an important albeit overlooked aspect of human development, having effects on health, communication and education. By examining peacebuilding and transformation this thesis will explore the potential contributions of music programming for peacebuilding practices. The influences of music can be found on the individual, community and international levels with varying degrees of success. There appears to be a stronger relationship between music and transformation at the individual and community level. This thesis will address the need for more research on the influence of music, to determine whether it could positively contribute to large scale peacebuilding programs. The case of El Sistema Venezuela is analyzed to determine if music can impact individuals and lead to desired social change.
This book explores the power music has to address health inequalities and the social determinants of health and wellbeing. It examines music participation as a determinant of wellbeing and as a transformative tool to impact on wider social, cultural and environmental conditions. Uniquely, in this volume health and wellbeing outcomes are conceptualised on a continuum, with potential effects identified in relation to individual participants, their communities but also society at large. While arts therapy approaches have a clear place in the text, the emphasis is on music making outside of clinical contexts and the broader roles musicians, music facilitators and educators can play in enhancing wellbeing in a range of settings beyond the therapy room. This innovative edited collection will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners of music, social services, medical humanities, education and the broader health field in the social and medical sciences.
This paper addresses music’s role in social movements, using work in mediation, assemblage, and actor-network theories to address the complex, contradictory, and contentious status that music often assumes within political protest. Three premises guide the discussion. First, if music is multiply mediated, then it follows that music’s mediation of other activities (including protest) is likewise multiple. Second, this constellation of mediations may be productively conceptualised as an assemblage, with music forming part of movement-assemblages, and movements forming part of musical assemblages. Third, this mutual imbrication of musical and political assemblages—and the reversibility of positions it entails—introduces a source of potential friction. To illustrate these points, the second part of the article examines the controversies surrounding the drum circle that animated Liberty Park during the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011.
Contemporary Music Review
Music is part of every society, but it is not aesthetically isolated, being forever associated with a myriad of extra-musical parameters such as gesture, customs, settings and power relations. It has thus far been difficult for scholars to ascertain just what music accomplishes in the social world, since any analysis ends up being like analyses of other social activities. Despite this, the belief in the special status and power of music proliferates both within the professional musician classes, those who consume music and those with the means to organise social music programmes. Music strongly interacts with memory, identity, emotion and belief (Robertson, 2017), which goes some way to demonstrate how music is believed to have such power regardless of any evidence shown, and this is supported by recent neurological research (Patel, 2010). Conflict transformation, if it is to be successful, requires an understanding of the identity formation processes, since ideally a new shared identity evolving from those involved would emerge. How this process works requires an understanding of how identity belief is related to emotions and memory, and how all these affect behaviour, past, present and future. It has been suggested by a number of international mediators that music and the arts provides a metaphor or amalgam for conflict transformation, albeit in a safer environment (Lederach and Lederach, 2010, p. 206). This paper shows how two choirs, one in Sarajevo and one in London, have approached music as a metaphor for the conflict transformation process.
Music and Arts in Action
Music therapy has previously been identified as a way to foster processes of mental health recovery. However, little is known about the specific factors apparent in group singing which can promote recovery. The current project aimed to address this gap by exploring the conditional and contextual factors involved in group singing which may promote recovery for people with mental illness. Adults who were in mental health recovery were recruited from a number of different singing groups in inpatient and community mental health contexts around Melbourne, Australia. Twentythree people participated in interviews, and a grounded theory approach was adopted for analysis. The findings of this study are presented as a grounded theory of group singing which describes how participants experienced triggering encounters with music, and used the supportive conditions of the group singing context to regain a sense of health. A new term, musical recovery, was developed which depicts a process of regaining healthy relationships with music to promote mental health recovery.
Nordic Journal of Music Therapy
In this article, two musical projects organised at the beginning of the French military intervention in Mali lead me to question the politicisation of Malian musical stages that went along the start of the armed conflict in 2012. These projects allow me to consider firstly the role of musical interactions in the making of often contrasted ideals of peace and national reconciliation. Secondly, I study the backstage of the representations of peace, and the ambiguous place occupied by Tuareg musicians, considered as spokespersons of the « rebels » but also as guarantors of national cohesion. Finally, I draw on the articulation of ethnic, national and global representations to advance some considerations on the construction of contradictory identity markers that characterise the Malian nation in the midst of conflict
Politique africaine
In this article, two musical projects organised at the beginning of the French military intervention in Mali lead me to question the politicisation of Malian musical stages that went along the start of the armed conflict in 2012. These projects allow me to consider firstly the role of musical interactions in the making of often contrasted ideals of peace and national reconciliation. Secondly, I study the backstage of the representations of peace, and the ambiguous place occupied by Tuareg musicians, considered as spokespersons of the « rebels » but also as guarantors of national cohesion. Finally, I draw on the articulation of ethnic, national and global representations to advance some considerations on the construction of contradictory identity markers that characterise the Malian nation in the midst of conflict.
Politique africaine
For musicians and students of human musicking, advances in scientific and philosophical research and scholarship in recent years offer an opportunity to address some enduring questions about this universal human behavior and its role in our daily lives and the development of our species. This paper will suggest an integrated perspective on musicking, specifically by exploring and linking together insights from a range of disciplines. While ethnomusicology has demonstrated the diversity of specific functions attributed to music around the world, a meta-analysis of this work reveals a common thread across diverse cultures; we express the sense that musicking connects us to our environments – social, physical, and/or metaphysical. To explore the significance of this seemingly abstract sense, I will draw on work in neuroscience and cognition, beginning with the Santiago theory of Maturana and Varela. One of the several components of the Santiago theory important to this paper is the idea that with a sufficiently complex nervous system, we “bring forth” both inner and outer worlds, and connect them through structural coupling. Put another way, we have as a foundation a biological correlate for the discourse concerning the value of music found in cultures around the world. Musicking can be understood as essentially an emergent connective or ecological behavior, a view consonant with current work in evolutionary musicology, “4E cognition” and auditory neuroscience. In turn, this view suggests areas for further research, including the potential of musical activities aimed at improving the state of our relationships with our various environments. These might include, for example, education, peace-building, or fostering ecological awareness. The text that follows is a synopsis of the paper presented at the conference.
Proceedings of ICMPC15/ESCOM10
This article argues that when recent writers in sound studies claim primacy for nonrepresentational experiences of the sounds of military weaponry in definitions of the “ontology” of wartime sound and audition, the result is that a universalised, Western, male listener and the sounds of weaponry are positioned as the proper subject and object for writings in sound studies on war. Turning to the sonic lifeworlds of women and children (as soldiers, civilians, mothers, widows, and so on) in Sri Lanka’s civil war (1983–2009), I argue that wartime sound and audition are best described as processes that structure wartime endurance at several overlapping temporal registers, through culturally-determined ontologies of personhood, violence, sonic efficacy and sonic protection.
Sound Studies
This article examines the early stages of the development of an intercultural lullaby choir in Melbourne, Australia. The community choir emerged from an applied ethnomusicology collaboration between researchers from the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne, and Victorian Cooperative on Children’s Services for Ethnic Groups (VICSEG) New Futures, a not-for-profit community organisation that provides training and support to newly arrived and recently settled migrant communities. The project’s shift from an open-ended exchange of personally meaningful lullabies to a formal ensemble will be interrogated, revealing how ethnomusicological research is defined by the relational dynamics and social arenas within which it is conducted. By way of ethnographic vignettes, this article outlines key stages of the project’s chronological development while also providing insight into participants’ experiences of the resulting musical encounters. Given this dual focus on process and outcome, ethnographic research findings are framed by theoretical work on intercultural contact zones and organised cultural encounters. Sites of intercultural encounter will be brought into view, highlighting how organisational decisions are experienced by participants in corporeal, temporal and affective ways. Like many applied ethnomusicology projects with intercultural objectives, by virtue of its institutionalisation the choir does not embody the transgressive and unexpected characteristics of sites of encounter. At the same time, the sensory embodiment of actively participating in intercultural music-making, learning and teaching manifest key components of “meaningful encounter.” In addition to exploring how participants‘ multiple social identities are constructed, legitimated and challenged in musical contact zones, this paper addresses the procedural, ethical and theoretical methodological implications that have arisen from the research.
The World of Music
The problem of peace education is in the sharp demand in the modern world. The art in general, and music in particular, have significant impact on a person and the content of his usual activities. Music, as a logical and expressive construction and a psychological phenomenon, contains possibilities for harmonization of personal, social and planetary life. Temporality of music, its actualization of the present, orientation to the eternal meanings and values, archetypeness and plasticity of the content and the ways of its perception, form the basis for understanding music as a universal communication mediator and an important factor in stabilization of contradictions and conflicts. The study demonstrates the potential of arts education to act as one of the instruments of peacebuilding at the present stage of human development.
Philosophy and Cosmology
What Politics?: Youth and Political Engagement in Africa
Music- and art-based interventions in organizations have become more common, yet to date little research-based evidence has existed to support the claims of efficacy of such approaches. This article presents a mixed methods research study that explored the effects of introducing a music-based metaphor and pedagogical approach to teaching, learning, and resolving conflict. The study provides insights into whether and how the musical ensemble metaphor might assist in shifting adversarial, combative, and competitive approaches toward more collaborative, settlement-oriented mindsets and outcomes. In addition, the study offers an understanding of whether and how music-infused pedagogy might assist in developing enhanced skills and practice behaviors that would lead to more desirable outcomes. Results from this initial study suggest that non-musicians in non-musical contexts are able to learn from musical metaphors and concepts related to ensemble music-making and that such cognitive, affective, and behavioral learning translates into changed and more effective behavior in practice. In simulated scenarios, study participants who were introduced to the musical metaphor and other music-based learning outperformed colleagues who were not exposed to similar music-based learning. Engagement with music appears to reconnect people to their creative potential and thus to lead them to see the value of employing creative thinking in professional settings that traditionally over-emphasize analytical and critical thinking. Such music-based collaborative approaches appear to have the potential to shift traditional norms and behaviors.
Journal of Business Research
The Future of Interfaith Dialogue
Social media and music are fundamental components of everyday life for today’s youth. The uses and functions of social media and music provide valuable insights for a better understanding of marginalized groups, subcultures, and gangs. Data are based on in-depth, semistructured interviews with gang members and gang affiliates in Trinidad and Tobago and combined with an analysis of social media content. The findings reveal that street gangs use music and social media to glorify gang life, to display power and send threats, to generate motivational support for criminal activities, and to bond socially and mourn collectively. In our analysis, social media, music, and music videos appear to be intimately interconnected phenomena; we thus call for a broader focus on gangs’ online behavior.
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice
This book contributes to key debates in peacebuilding by exploring the role of theatre and art in general. Premaratna argues that the dialogical and multi-voiced nature of theatre is particularly suited to assisting societies coming to terms with conflict and opening up possibilities for conversation. These are important parts of the peacebuilding process. The book engages the conceptual links between theatre and peacebuilding and then offers an in-depth empirical exploration of how three South Asian theatre groups approach peacebuilding: Jana Karaliya in Sri Lanka, Jana Sanskriti in India, and Sarwanam in Nepal. The ensuing reflections offer insights that are relevant to both students and practitioners concerned with issues of peace and conflict.
This article argues for a shift in how we relate to legal thought, practice and experience. It argues for a specifically acoustic jurisprudence, an orientation towards law attuned to questions of sound and listening. The argument is made in the abstract before moving on to an example intended to establish the political stakes of the intervention. My example is the Long Range Acoustic Device, invented at the turn of the century and used increasingly today by military and police forces as a way of amplifying the authority of the state and, in some instances, enacting serious acoustic violence.
Law, Culture and the Humanities
The task of increasing trust is central to restorative peacebuilding. Between confidence and faith, trust bridges actions, beliefs and feelings of the past, present and future. Musical interaction can help build trust between participants. This is one of the reasons musical projects can be an effective part of conflict transformation. In this contribution I consider answers to key questions about trust offered by competing universalizing theories and culturally distinct groups of people, before suggesting a broad processual definition. I also show some of the ways music making relates to trust through a consideration of musicological literature and my own research in Colombia.
Music and Arts in Action
Colombia's protracted civil war is characterized by cycles of pervasive distrust and violence. The people I work with are involved in projects across the north of the country aimed in part at breaking these cycles. In this dissertation I offer an applied ethnographic analysis of the dynamic relations between local forms of trusting, music making and (non)violence. While I recognize music's impact is sometimes minimal or negative, I focus on projects with demonstrable positive impact as part of my commitment to the struggles of my interlocutors. My account is comparative, describing individuals and groups from different towns, sub regions, and positionalities within the conflict, and engaging with similar but contrasting musical styles and projects. I show that musical practices in which participants aim to maximize the breadth of participation (the number of people engaged) tend to foster thin trusting across a broad radius of people, whereas musical practices aimed at the maximum depth of experience of a reduced number of performers tend to generate thick trusting among reduced pools of people. Peacebuilding requires both thin and thick trusting, but the latter can preclude broad organization. I consider festivalization of the musical practices I describe as a means of constructing a parallel peace. While partly successful it can reproduce in miniature some of the violences associated with clientelistic coercive trusting. I present one national project as an exemplar of best practice. The Legión del afecto works to generate an imbricated peace through radically inclusive projects in which young people practice and champion both thick and thin trusting, and peaceful living together, using a wide range of musical practices as part of an integrated, reflexive methodology. My arguments are based in, and seek to finesse, semiotic and phenomenological accounts of music as social life.
This article outlines the development of an appropriate research approach, including methods from diverse disciplines, for researching the Colombian state-funded social music programme Music for Reconciliation (Música para la Reconciliación) . After outlining the Colombian context and the literature, a pilot with ten participants is discussed. Findings show the contributions of sound postcards as part of life histories for capturing the experiences of displaced people in a country recovering from war. Their evocative capacity enriched the interviewees’ narrative, illustrating diverse sonorous landscapes throughout their lives that evidenced the changes generated by both the violence and programme participation. The conclusions offer suggestions for readers based in the arts, health, social sciences and beyond, interested in the uses of music and music education for other-than-musical purposes.
British Journal of Music Education
The article provides a critical review of a wide cross-section of ethnomusicological research into violence, conflict, and music, leading to proposal of a new model for field researchers. The article begins with a contextualization of selected analytical positions, as offered by theorists of violence and conflict. The main body of the essay then assesses notable contributions from the already substantive ethnomusicological literature on music and violence. Music is not inherently peaceful: instead, it frames and commemorates conflict, making its impacts resound. Music is put to contrasting, and even conflicting, usages by those in, or recovering from, situations of hurt, hostility, or overt conflict. The article provides examples from research carried out in many parts of the world and in the shadow of numerous types of violence, from the re-imagining of a heroic individual to the systemic antagonisms of colonization or poverty, and from the recruitment of extremists to the selfregulation of inmates. Finally, a new model for applied ethnomusicological involvement in the area is briefly presented. Its component parts – naming, witnessing, intervention, and survival – are briefly explained and discussed, showing how an ethnomusicologically trained researcher can contribute to peacebuilding via musical research, listening, and participation.
Music and Arts in Action
This article examines how some Irish republicans have used ‘rebel songs’ as a means to resist the hegemonic power of the British state, and how militant republicanism is invoked musically, through sonic and physical references to gunfire. It explores how the use of rebel songs has changed, the inherent tensions within today’s scene, and how republicans attempt to co-opt other conflicts as a means to strengthen their claim as resistance fighters. The article also analyses more nuanced resistances within the rebel music scene, exploring how competing republican factions use the same music to express opposing political positions, and why some musicians ultimately leave the scene on account of the musical and political restrictions placed upon them. In so doing, the article connects with ongoing attempts to rethink, remap, and develop new approaches to resistance within anthropology, while contributing to the developing subfield of ‘ethnomusicology in times of trouble’.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
This thesis examines what happens when the worlds and knowledges of war, international development, and music education intersect. It investigates the practices and experiences of music interventions, a term used in this thesis to describe structured programs for music learning and participation in places that have been unmade by war, taking shape within the structures and funding arrangements of largescale international aid and assistance. It explores the work of three specific music interventions—the Pavarotti Music Centre in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hadahur Music School in Timor-Leste, and the Afghanistan National Institute of Music in Afghanistan—with the goal of identifying how these kinds of projects are shaped, and their potential for sustainability in a volatile and mutable environment. These case study sites offer interesting contrasts of timeframe (longevity of the music intervention and retrospective distance from the wartime experiences); scale (of ambition, funding, and external drivers); and approaches to the teaching and learning of music, in particular their efforts to regenerate local music traditions. The research was designed as an ethnographic, multi-sited, multi-case study project. Semi-structured interviews and document review were the principal data sources, offering diverse perspectives that bring both positive and critical voices of participants and local community members to the fore, alongside those of organisers and practitioners. Data were coded and analysed thematically, using grounded theory methods. As a result of this process, the thesis argues that the phenomenon of music interventions can be understood as evolving across six critical junctures—sites of negotiation between the various actors—that produce decisions and actions that critically shape each project. The critical junctures—Aims and Motivations, Buildings and Facilities, Pedagogy and Learning Materials, Organisational Culture, Internal Engagement, and External Engagement—also have implications for sustainability, as they represent points of active interface between contrasting constructs and ideals, and therefore can generate instability and conflict as well as harmony and growth. The critical junctures model offers practitioners and scholars a tool for understanding, planning, operationalising, evaluating, and handing over music interventions in waraffected contexts. It sheds light on internal practices, and helps to reveal the influence that the complex wider context can have on shaping and sustaining the music activities. The model of critical junctures for shaping and sustaining music interventions is the central theoretical contribution of this research. In addition, the thesis makes methodological, empirical, and practical contributions to what is a nascent subject of inquiry, mapping three radically different music interventions in their achievements and their missteps, and presenting empirical data from multiple perspectives. In a world that is as much at war as ever, and an aid environment that is increasingly recognising the importance of cultural development and creative expression to human development, this study has deep and immediate relevance to an audience of music and development practitioners, policy makers, and scholars in the fields of (applied) ethnomusicology, music education, community music, music sociology, music therapy, cultural development, and international development.
A contribution that music education provides society with is its making of education and culture of peace. In this paper we analyze the theoretical assumptions that research in both areas has in common nowadays. A catalog of shared categories is proposed; the development of them entails a strengthening of their transversal meanings, while describing how the convergence between the two subjects constitutes an emerging topic of research. Besides, an explanation of the political implications that are discovered in the curricular relegation that they have suffered in the last years thanks to the neoliberal policies is offered, together with a proposal of epowerment from their own resources. | Una aportación que la educación musical hace a la sociedad es su contribución a la educación y la cultura de paz. En este trabajo se analizan los presupuestos teóricos que la investigación en ambas áreas tiene en común a día de hoy y se propone un catálogo de categorías comunes cuyo desarrollo comporta un fortalecimiento de sus significados transversales, a la vez que se describe como la convergencia entre ambas constituye una línea emergente. Además, se propone una explicación de las implicaciones políticas que se descubren en la relegación curricular que han sufrido en los últimos años merced a las políticas neoliberales, y una propuesta de empoderamiento desde los propios recursos.
Revista Electrónica Complutense de Investigación en Educación Musical - RECIEM
Applied Practice: Evidence and Impact in Theatre, Music and Art engages with a diversity of contexts, locations and arts forms – including theatre, music and fine art – and brings together theoretical, political and practice-based perspectives on the question of 'evidence' in relation to participatory arts practice in social contexts. This collection is a unique contribution to the field, focusing on one of the vital concerns for a growing and developing set of arts and research practices. It asks us to consider evidence not only in terms of methodology but also in the light of the ideological, political and pragmatic implications of that methodology. In Part One, Matthew Reason and Nick Rowe reflect on evidence and impact in the participatory arts in relation to recurring conceptual and methodological motifs. These include issues of purpose and obliquity; the relationship between evidence and knowledge; intrinsic and instrumental impacts, and the value of participatory research. Part Two explores the diversity of perspectives, contexts and methodologies in examining what it is possible to know, say and evidence about the often complex and intimate impact of participatory arts. Part Three brings together case studies in which practitioners and practice-based researchers consider the frustrations, opportunities and successes they face in addressing the challenge to produce evidence for the impact of their practice.
A Distinctive Voice in the Antipodes: Essays in Honour of Stephen A. Wild
This article explores the ways in which the relationships between music, health, wellbeing, medicine, and ethnomusicology are being researched internationally. It shows that while there is a widespread global interest among a variety of disciplines in studying these relationships, there is still an absence of disciplinary and international collaboration. This absence of collaboration, I argue, is caused by a variance between disciplines and countries in epistemologies, modes of dissemination, professional jargon, and national languages. This diversity of professional practice influences the sharing of information about music and wellbeing, often slowing down the creation of new knowledge, potentially to the detriment of those receiving musical care. Here I present the results of a short participatory action research study investigating the professional practices of ethnomusicologists, (neuro)psychologists, and music therapists researching the links between music and wellbeing. My findings are based on observations made in the United Kingdom, Austria, Finland, the United States, and Australia. I conclude by urging researchers to examine their practices and epistemologies reflexively, and not to assume other disciplines are homogenous. I also suggest that, for ethnomusicologists, grounded theory and community music therapy might be areas for future collaboration and that a proactive approach is needed to ensure knowledge about the links between music, health, and wellbeing are examined at a faster, more collaborative pace.
Journal of Folklore Research
The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure
Zimbabwe has a history of violence stretching back to the pre-colonial period. The country gained political independence in 1980 after a protracted armed war with the illegal Smith regime. The liberation movement, under whose banner independence was gained, has carried over and almost normalised the cultures of obliterating difference, muting dissent, cronyism and systematic economic marginalisation of citizens. Incidences of ethnic, religious inter- and intra-political party violence, and individualism are rife. As a result, most of the local conflicts experienced in Zimbabwe are symptomatic ‘electoral conflicts’ fuelled by political competition and polarisation, leading to economic collapse and social fragmentation (Ncube 2014, Heal Zimbabwe Trust 2015: 5). The conflicts have arguably weakened Zimbabwe’s strongest attributes and institutions, which include the church, the family unit and good-neighbourliness. This thesis aims to show how conflict transformation can be brought about in the Mkoba community, using Participatory Action Research. It engages a select group of musically gifted citizens into establishing a cosmopolitan music and dance ensemble with a view to strengthening the community’s social capital and improving the quality of life of the residents. The study therefore brings out how music and dance, and by extension participatory performing arts, can serve humanity as a platform to initiate dialogue and cooperation among conflicting residents. In addition, the study details how entertaining and interactive gatherings in broken communities have the power to heal residents psychologically, replacing pessimism and lassitude with optimism and a proactive approach. Unique to this multi-disciplinary study is its binding together of theories concerning music for social change, social entrepreneurship and asset-based community development, all of which are undergirded by conflict transformation. This ethnographic account suggests how to develop and sustain community-based organisations and/or activities using the holistic sustainability frame, which emphasizes the importance of artistic vibrancy, community relevance, capitalisation and good governance. This holistic and eclectic approach thus creates an organic platform through which the community can act for social change.
This study has been done to understand the role of music in inter-community reconciliation and to examine music as a cultural solution area between Turkish and Greek communities in Cyprus. The main focus of the study is on musical dialogues towards the reconciliation between Turkish Cypriot and Greek Cypriot communities. Accordingly it touches upon the contributions of music to the reconciliation between two communities and how it is being used to create a mutual identity. Therefore, bi-communal gatherings, sense of entertainment, songs as a method of a self-expression, and instrument sessions of two communities have been reviewed in the contribution of music in the reconciliation. Although people are still researching whether music can be effective in inter-community reconciliations or not, the role it plays in reconciliations and conflict has been discussed with examples. The view of music creating conflict and reconciliation between communities has been examined under the concepts such as cultural reconciliation, cultural identity, the pragmatic use of music and multiculturalism.
Athens Journal of Mediterranean Studies
Dance answers the call for creativity in peacebuilding through diverse perspectives of space, relationality, and embodied interactions. While there is growing interest in using the performing arts in peacebuilding, there remains limited theory or research regarding dance in this context. This study contributes to the scope of arts-based peacebuilding research through practice-based field research focusing on dance in peacebuilding in the Asia–Pacific region. It focuses on two island nations, the Philippines and Fiji, each with complex conflict histories, and investigates the experiences of local facilitators, participants, and the researcher as both a reflective practitioner and practitioner-researcher. The qualitative research methods employed include strategies of the reflective practitioner, participant semi-structured interviews, and sensory ethnography. This thesis argues that dance activates multiple ways to observe, create, and understand space, dialogue, and relationality. Through these embodied ways of knowing, dance contributes diverse approaches and knowledge to expand the range and diversity of peacebuilding practice and research. It first considers space from an embodied perspective and then explores dance as a form of non-verbal communication and dialogue in peacebuilding. This thesis introduces micro-storytelling and the “embodied dialogic moment” as ways dance can potentially diversify dialogic approaches and analysis. Next, dance is explored in terms of creating options for increased practitioner self-awareness and connections to quality of life and options for building relationships across difference. Last, it considers that movement activates multiple ways of understanding and that dance provides a pathway to explore and understand diverse concepts of space, including Indigenous approaches that, from a dance perspective, potentially provide new lenses in peacebuilding. These diverse and embodied ways of knowing open the possibility for further exploration of multidimensional approaches in peacebuilding while acknowledging the potential limitations and risks of using dance in peacebuilding.
Music and Empathy
Diversos estudios han puesto de manifiesto la capacidad de la práctica musical conjunta para contribuir a la construcción de espacios de paz en aquellos lugares en los que sus ciudadanos han sufrido situaciones de violencia. Sin embargo, no existe en la literatura científica un estudio de revisión que analice los impactos de este tipo de espacios musicales colectivos sobre el tejido social. Este artículo explora los efectos de experiencias con prácticas musicales colectivas en diferentes contextos con comunidades que sufren o han sufrido situaciones de conflicto armado o guerra. Con este fin, se ha realizado una revisión sistemática de la literatura científica y un análisis exhaustivo de los estudios localizados. La muestra final seleccionada comprende un total de quince estudios en los que se muestra la capacidad de los espacios musicales colectivos para servir de soporte a las personas y comunidades víctimas, tanto durante como después del conflicto.
Co-herencia
A rising number of public and nongovernmental organisation (NGO) leaders are employing the arts in efforts aimed at encouraging social change. Meanwhile, scholars have offered a number of theories concerning the character of political agency and its exercise, and contended that effective use of the arts may result in individual and group epistemic change. Far fewer analysts, however, have married such theorisations of aesthetics with empirical investigations of how professionals actually use the arts to promote such shifts. This article addresses this concern by studying the strategies adopted by two international nongovernmental organisations (INGOs), American Voices and Bond Street Theatre, that have worked to encourage peace through music and theatre-making in light of changing conceptions of agency and the power of aesthetics to stimulate its exercise. We outline the approaches these NGOs adopt to do so and the mechanisms by which their leaders believe their work catalyses changes in values at the individual and community levels. We argue that understanding these dynamics more thoroughly and in light of conceptions of agency and aesthetics leads to a stronger theorisation of whether and how arts-based peacebuilding efforts can lead to sustainable community cultural change.
Global Society
This monograph offers a unique analysis of social protest in popular music. It presents theoretical descriptions, methodological tools, and an approach that encompasses various fields of musicology, cultural studies, semiotics, discourse analysis, media studies, and political and social sciences. The author argues that protest songs should be taken as a musical genre on their own. He points out that the general approach, when discussing these songs, has been so far that of either analyzing the lyrics or the social context. For some reason, the music itself has been often overlooked. This book attempts to fill this gap. Its central thesis is that a complete overview of these repertoires demands a thorough interaction among contextual, lyrical, and musical elements together. To accomplish this, the author develops a novel model that systemizes and investigates musical repertoires. The model is then applied to four case studies, those, too, chosen among topicsthat are little (or not at all) frequented by scholars.
Often labeled "neo-Nazis" or "right-wing extremists," radical nationalists in the Nordic countries have always relied on music to voice their opposition to immigration and multiculturalism. These actors shook political establishments throughout Sweden, Denmark, and Norway during the 1980s and 1990s by rallying around white power music and skinhead subculture. But though nationalists once embraced a reputation for crude chauvinism, they are now seeking to reinvent themselves as upstanding and righteous, and they are using music to do it. Lions of the North explores this transformation of anti-immigrant activism in the Nordic countries as it manifests in thought and sound. Offering a rare ethnographic glimpse into controversial and secretive political movements, it investigates changes in the music nationalists make and patronize, reading their puzzling embrace of lite pop, folk music, even rap and reggae as attempts to escape stereotypes and craft a new image for themselves. Lions of the North not only exposes the dynamic relationship between music and politics, but also the ways radical nationalism is adapting to succeed in some of the most liberal societies in the world.
Mexico is consistently ranked as one of the least peaceful countries on Earth, which impacts citizens’ negative perceptions about their government. A study conducted by Meschoulam, Hacker, Carbajal, De Benito, Blumenkron, and Raich (2015), detected significant distrust of the mass media, which is another factor that, according to prior studies (Institute for Economics and Peace [IEP], 2016), may encourage peacelessness. This study sought to broaden the perspective of those investigations through 80 semistructured qualitative interviews with Mexican residents. The interviews explored the factors that caused participants to distance themselves from the media and the aspects that attracted participants to specific media outlets. In addition, this study explored the perceived relationship between the media and the government, and also perceptions regarding the news coverage of violence. The results of this investigation revealed that the interviewees distrusted the media because they perceived that it is controlled by the government. Furthermore, participants reported sentiments such as anger, fear, frustration, and apathy as a result of what they perceived to be an excessive exposition of violence by the traditional media in their news coverage. Most participants preferred to use social media as alternative sources of information. However, many of the interviewees also reported that they distrusted social media. Therefore, the participants stated that they valued journalists who demonstrate objectivity and critical thinking, provoke reflection, question the government, uncover corruption, and promote debate about solutions. If, as prior studies have indicated (IEP, 2016b), corruption and the lack of a free flow of information are correlated with peacelessness, then every effort should be made to better understand how to develop a healthier relationship between the media and society to improve conditions for Mexico’s future.
International Journal of Peace Studies
This article explores the ways music might serve as both a vehicle and a model of God’s peacemaking, the peace God intends and has made possible between groups in conflict. Attention to various senses and types of musical harmony can do much to illuminate and clarify different conceptions of peace and peace-building already in use, as well as generate fresh and perhaps neglected ways of conceiving them and practicing peacemaking in the future.
Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology
This article explores the ways music might serve as both a vehicle and a model of God’s peacemaking, the peace God intends and has made possible between groups in conflict. Attention to various senses and types of musical harmony can do much to illuminate and clarify different conceptions of peace and peace-building already in use, as well as generate fresh and perhaps neglected ways of conceiving them and practicing peacemaking in the future.
Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology
In recent years, empathy has received considerable research attention as a means of understanding a range of psychological phenomena, and it is fast drawing attention within the fields of music psychology and music education. This volume seeks to promote and stimulate further research in music and empathy, with contributions from many of the leading scholars in the fields of music psychology, neuroscience, music philosophy and education. It exposes current developmental, cognitive, social and philosophical perspectives on research in music and empathy, and considers the notion in relation to our engagement with different types of music and media. Following a Prologue, the volume presents twelve chapters organised into two main areas of enquiry. The first section, entitled 'Empathy and Musical Engagement', explores empathy in music education and therapy settings, and provides social, cognitive and philosophical perspectives about empathy in relation to our interaction with music. The second section, entitled 'Empathy in Performing Together', provides insights into the role of empathy across non-Western, classical, jazz and popular performance domains. This book will be of interest to music educators, musicologists, performers and practitioners, as well as scholars from other disciplines with an interest in empathy research.
This article describes the ways in which music is an important part of identity, and hence serves some similar functions to other forms of identity-related communication (e.g., language). It will describe how music is used to incite intergroup hatred (e.g., among soccer fans, military music) and to support valued identities (anthems, etc.). Relevant literature on stereotyping (including stereotyping of groups related to music) is included. The article also discusses how music is used to reduce intergroup hostility (e.g., via cross-cultural musical collaboration and contact). The article connects the various literatures from communication, social psychology, sociology, and ethnomusicology, providing a broad overview of the many connections between communication, music, and social identity. It closes with a research agenda for those interested in studying intergroup communication and music.
Review of Communication Research
Recent empirical evidence suggests that – like other synchronized, collective actions – making music together with others fosters affiliation and pro-social behaviour. However, it is not yet known whether these effects are limited to active, interpersonal musical participation, or whether solitary music listening can also produce similar effects. This study examines the hypothesis that listening to music from a specific culture can evoke implicit affiliation towards members of that culture more generally. Furthermore, we hypothesized that listeners with high trait empathy would be more susceptible to the effects. Sixty-one participants listened to a track of either Indian or West African popular music, and subsequently completed an Implicit Association Test measuring implicit preference for Indian versus West African people. A significant interaction effect revealed that listeners with high trait empathy were more likely to display an implicit preference for the ethnic group to whose music they were exposed. We argue that music has particular attributes that may foster affective and motor resonance in listeners.
Psychology of Music
Music therapy has been employed as a therapeutic intervention to facilitate healing across a variety of clinical populations. There is theoretical and empirical evidence to suggest that individuals with trauma exposure and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), a condition characterized by enduring symptoms of distressing memory intrusions, avoidance, emotional disturbance, and hyperarousal, may derive benefits from music therapy. The current narrative review describes the practice of music therapy and presents a theoretically-informed assessment and model of music therapy as a tool for addressing symptoms of PTSD. The review also presents key empirical studies that support the theoretical assessment. Social, cognitive, and neurobiological mechanisms (e.g., community building, emotion regulation, increased pleasure, anxiety reduction) that promote music therapy’s efficacy as an adjunctive treatment for individuals with posttraumatic stress are discussed. It is concluded that music therapy may be a useful therapeutic tool to reduce symptoms and improve functioning among individuals with trauma exposure and PTSD, though more rigorous empirical study is required. In addition, music therapy may help foster resilience and engage individuals who struggle with stigma associated with seeking professional help. Practical recommendations for incorporating music therapy into clinical practice are offered along with several suggestions for future research.
Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain
Music move us personally and with more meaning than any other medium in the world. In the past few decades, modern advances in neuroscience have proved via neuroimaging that musical processing involves almost every region of the brain, a task that no other stimulus can achieve. Science can show what is happening in our brain, but humans have intuitively known and utilized music for healing purposes since the beginning of humanity. This research examines the dynamics of continued scientific advancement in light of Non-Western ways of knowing. The study is an attempt to shorten the distance between music, healing and conflict. Through a qualitative research methodology, the correlation of music and healing was explored by interviewing musicians and healing practitioners in New England. Musicians and healers shared stories that help explain the role of music and healing in Western society and how they might transform conflict. This paper offers space for the peacebuilder interested in music and healing to pause and consider the weight of their work.
Music, Theology, and Justice
Abstract Young people in the criminal justice system experience significant health and wellbeing issues that often stem from poverty and disadvantage and, in turn, are linked with offending and reoffending behaviour. There is ongoing interest in interventions such as participatory music programmes that seek to foster social reintegration, support mental wellbeing and equip young offenders with life skills, competencies and emotional resilience. However, there is a need for a situated understanding of both positive and negative experiences that shape potential outcomes of music projects. This article reports on a research study undertaken between 2010 and 2013 with 118 young people aged 13–21 years across eight youth justice settings in England and Wales. Using mixed methods we explored the experiences of young people and their responses to a participatory music programme led by a national UK arts charity. Here, we explore the impact of young people's encounters with music and musicians with reference to the notion of ‘musical affordances’ (DeNora,). We examine the ways that such affordances, including unintended outcomes, are mediated by features of the youth justice environment, including its rules and regulations, as well as issues of power, identity and social relations.
Sociology of Health & Illness
This article analyses how intangible cultural heritage can contribute to peacebuilding processes during post-conflict periods. In so doing, it aims at enriching the debate about the current peace process in Colombia. The research uses a qualitative methodology with data collection techniques, such as observation, interviews with experts, communications with relevant people, and documentary analysis. It argues that the use of cultural heritage enables a greater participation of the population in peacebuilding and a greater ownership of the process. It can help rebuild the social fabric affected by the war, and reduce the cultural and structural 282 violence present in post-conflict societies. More specifically, it can promote transitional justice, the social reintegration of former combatants and the peaceful transformation of conflicts. However, despite this potential, cultural heritage can also perpetuate exclusionary practices against certain social groups or extol the use of direct violence. Post-conflict periods are propitious to carry out reforms in the intangible cultural heritage and to make it more inclusive. | Este artículo analiza cómo el patrimonio cultural inmaterial puede contribuir a los procesos de construcción de paz durante periodos posteriores a la firma de acuerdos de paz. Asimismo pretende enriquecer el debate alrededor del proceso de paz que vive actualmente Colombia. La investigación utiliza una metodología cualitativa con técnicas de recolección de información como observación, entrevistas a expertos, comunicaciones con personas relevantes y análisis documental. Argumentamos que el uso del patrimonio cultural permite un mayor involucramiento de la población en la construcción de paz y apropiación del proceso. Puede ayudar a reconstruir el tejido social afectado por la guerra y reducir la violencia cultural y estructural presente en la sociedad posconflicto. Más específicamente, puede promover la justicia transicional, la reintegración social de los excombatientes y la transformación pacífica de los conflictos. A pesar de este potencial, el patrimonio cultural también puede perpetuar prácticas de exclusión hacia ciertos grupos sociales o ensalzar el uso de la violencia directa. Las etapas de posconflicto son propicias para acometer reformas en el patrimonio cultural inmaterial y hacerlo más inclusivo.
Estudios Políticos (Medellín)