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- Volume 12, Issue 3, 2019
International Journal of Community Music - Volume 12, Issue 3, 2019
Volume 12, Issue 3, 2019
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Music as dialogic space in the promotion of peace, empathy and social inclusion
More LessAbstractThis 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 peace-building. 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.
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How concepts of love can inform empathy and conciliation in intercultural community music contexts
More LessAbstractThis 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.
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Making music in divided cities: Transforming the ethnoscape
Authors: Gillian Howell, Lesley Pruitt and Laura HasslerAbstractIn 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, Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Mitrovica Rock School in Mitrovica, Kosovo, and Breaking Barriers (a pseudonym) in Belfast, Northern Ireland, we consider the context-specific 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.
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To bring peace that stays: Music, conflict and conciliation in the Gambia
More LessAbstractIn 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.
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Music, the media and the Thai state following the death of King Bhumibol: Popular music’s role in orchestrating certainty in Thailand’s existential crisis
By John GarzoliAbstractFollowing the death of Thailand’s King Bhumibol Adulyadej on 13 October 2016, the country entered an official period of mourning. In an attenuation of existing practices rather than a departure from them, the unelected military government assumed control of all media and used it to curate the tone of national mourning. Music was then enlisted in the process to help shape the emotional register of the grieving process. Government-controlled media’s actions were exemplified in the broadcasting practices of the police-run radio station in the north-eastern city of Khon Kaen. It repeatedly played only a small number of structurally and aesthetically similar popular songs that shared hagiographic narrative themes of praise for the late king and emphasized national solidarity. The government’s use of its power, the importance of the king in the Thai imagination and the maintenance of societal equilibrium following his death are briefly explained through Bunn’s concept of ‘new censorship’.
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To write or not to write? That is the question: Practice as research, Indigenous methodologies, conciliation and the hegemony of academic authorship
Authors: Muriel E. Swijghuisen Reigersberg and Jessie LloydAbstractAcademic authorship is an important way in which new knowledge about Indigenous Australian music and history is shared. Academic analyses, however, do not always successfully convey the emotive nature of this new historical knowledge. Publishing is also an exclusionary activity, relying on an author’s academic training and familiarity with the protocols for publication. In this article I will suggest that instead we conceive of practice as research (PaR) in music as a method that is able to increase the participation of Indigenous people in the shaping of our communal understanding of Australian history. Performance as PaR allows more stories to be told by a diversity of people. In the hands of a good PaR researcher, performances are better able to communicate the emotive nature of colonial histories, broadening our understanding of Indigenous experiences of colonialism and how these impact on conciliation. Through documenting my work with Indigenous researcher and performer Jessie Lloyd I will argue that PaR is a method well suited to Indigenous contexts, reflecting Indigenous cultural practices using oral formats that rely on story, interpersonal relationships and participation.
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