Abstract
This chapter investigates approaches to trauma-informed community music practice that enable narrative through songwriting. The York St. John University Prison Partnership Project forms the locus of the explorations, where the Emerging Voices singing and songwriting project occurs weekly at a maximum-security women’s prison in the UK. Using the three strands of narrative inquiry as a framework for exploration of this complex community setting, this chapter considers approaches to practice through the lenses of temporality, sociality, and place, enabling a deepening understanding of both the participants, the context, and the creative process. The women’s stories are explored through the text of their songs as a way of engaging in both individual and collective narratives. The Five Values of Trauma-Informed Care (safety, trust, collaboration, empowerment, and choice) are unpacked both theoretically (as philosophical and ideological foundations for music making) and practically (as core values embedded in the weekly singing sessions). Considerations of the conditions of practice to support the women sharing their stories through song, point to the facilitators’ willingness to be open, reflexive, listen intently, and validate the individuals’ experiences by bearing witness, enabling an ethic of care to flourish, where individual voices can begin to emerge and be heard.
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Notes
- 1.
For more information on the YSJU Prison Partnership Project, specifically the Emerging Voices program, please see https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/working-with-the-community/prison-partnership-project/.
- 2.
Levinas explores, as one of his key philosophical ideas, the humanism of the ‘other,’ whereby our relationship with those who could be perceived as being different, changes when we recognize our responsibility to them as more important than our responsibility to ourselves. When society ‘others’ individuals or groups, as in the case of incarcerated citizens, it creates societal fractures. Community musicians often practice in contexts where their participants have potentially been ‘othered’ by society. For example, projects operate in homeless shelters (Knapp & Silva, 2019), with sex workers (de Quadros, 2011), with young people in challenging circumstances (Mullen & Deane, 2018), and people with lived experience of forced migration (Burnard et al., 2018). In each of these contexts, community musicians recognize their responsibility to the ‘other’ and have a deep understanding of an ethics of care (Noddings, 2013) towards their participants (see Higgins, 2012).
- 3.
Coral’s poems are published in a collection called Seen and Heard (2019) which are all written by parents and children impacted by incarceration.
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Birch, C. (2023). The Use of Trauma-Informed Community Music Practice in Enabling Narrative Through Songwriting. In: Griffin, S.M., Niknafs, N. (eds) Traumas Resisted and (Re)Engaged. Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, vol 36. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-6277-8_10
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