The pedagogy of a prison and community music programme: Spaces for conflict and safety

Abstract

Using theoretical concepts taken from the field of human geography to analyse the conflictual elements within music programmes, this paper presents new empirical research that unpacks the complex pedagogy employed by community musicians with the aim of beginning to address two recent criticisms of community music scholarship: a) community musicians only report positive outcomes and b) community musicians are not interested in scholarly analyses of their work.We begin with a review of literature presenting positive findings and discuss the methodological challenges of community music research. We introduce the key geographical concepts used to analyse the empirical data. After a presentation and discussion of facilitation pedagogy, we finish by suggesting that understanding the work of the community musician through geographical concepts provides a new way to analyse and theorize how a community music facilitator works, thus acknowledging the conflictual element of such work that is often tacit in research.

Captive Christmas: Unwrapping the third space

“…Throughout seven decades of ethnographic accounts, we see seasonal rituals used as a means of transporting the outside world in for the holidays and transforming the physical and metaphysical prison environment into something new. Existing third space scholarship on prisons opened an avenue to explore carceral spaces in a way which broke down the binaries of free/captive, inside/outside and keeper/kept (Crewe et al, 2014;Henley & Parks, 2020;Wilson, 2000Wilson, , 2003Wilson, , 2004. Using these and other theoretically-informed works provided a point of entry to examine Christmas in captivity and to broaden this corpus of work.…”

Creating a Benevolent World: Exploration of a Music-Based Rehabilitation Program for Formerly Incarcerated Individuals

“…The literature on music-based rehabilitation programs that focused on therapeutic and educational interventions during incarceration shows improvement in FIIs’ wellbeing ( Bilby et al, 2013 ; Brewster, 2010 ; Cohen, 2007 ; De Viggiani et al, 2010 ; Harbert, 2010 ; Kougiali et al, 2018 ; Tuastad & O’Grady, 2013 ; Winder et al, 2015 ). Such studies were done in European countries such as the UK ( Doxat-Pratt, 2021 ; Henley & Parks, 2020 ; Henley et al, 2012 ; Kyprianides & Easterbrook, 2020 ), the Netherlands ( Hakvoort, 2002 ; Macfarlane et al, 2019 ), Norway ( Gold et al, 2014 ; Gold et al, 2021 ; Hjørnevik & Waage, 2019 ; Tuastad & O’Grady, 2013 ), and other countries such as the US ( Cohen, 2012 ), Australia ( Tuastad & O’Grady, 2013 ), China ( Chen et al, 2014 ), and Israel ( Bensimon et al, 2015 ; Ze’evi et al, 2022 ). However, research on music-based rehabilitation programs after the release from prison is scarce ( Bensimon, 2023 ; Bensimon & Gilboa, 2010 ; Tuastad & O’Grady, 2013 ).…”

Environment, intention and intergenerational music making: Facilitating participatory music making in diverse contexts of community music

“…Urie et al (2019) suggest that hospitality 'interrupts ourselves and disrupts our social settings' (2019: 80), a disruption that is necessary for participants in the sessions to imagine something different. This recognition of music making in prisons being 'disruptive' or 'challenging' is important as Henley and Parks (forthcoming 2020) suggests that much research on community music in prisons has a history of 'over positivity' due to the evaluation culture of arts in prisons programmes; a culture that is engrained within the 'what works' agenda of criminal justice.…”