Freedom Dreams: What Must Die in Music Therapy to Preserve Human Dignity?

Abstract

This commentary was written on the week of September 28, 2020, as grand jury decisions on the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, United States, were publicly announced on news and media outlets. Six months after Breonna Taylor's brutal murder in Louisville, Kentucky (United States), justice for her life has not been actualized. The author reflects on this injustice and discusses its relationship to anti-Black violence and systemic oppression in music therapy culture and practice.

Whose Power, Whose Language? Exploring Issues of Power and Language in Music Therapy

“…The language that is used to describe and represent people, music and processes in music therapy and the power related has been challenged from different perspectives. Examples are challenging the position of the "client" within resource-oriented music therapy (Rolvsjord, 2010), discussing identity-first vs. person-first language through the lens of disability studies (see the special issue edited by Hadley, 2014), using queer theory to challenge normative ways people are categorized (see the special issue edited by Bain & Gumble 2019), adopting a posthumanist perspective to question how goals and practices are typically conceptualized (Shaw, 2022), and confronting the White gaze through Black aesthetics (Norris et al, 2020). Music therapy is constructed in and through language (Ansdell, 2003).…”

Editorial

“…to:a) unearth the relationship between music therapy and the broader socio-political discourse,b) center a radical imaginative trajectory in music therapy theory and praxis,c) usher the looming changes desperately needed within our profession as ethical imperatives that stand between us and effective practice. (Norris, 2020: 2)…”

Book Review: Jessica Collier and Corrina Eastwood (eds); foreword by Savneet K. Talwar, Intersectionality in the Arts Psychotherapies

“…The impact of this tendency upon practice has begun to be challenged widely over the past two decades, and in recent years especially in music therapy literature published in North America therapy by therapists of colour. However, it must be acknowledged that change towards a widespread consciousness and acknowledgement of the impact of colour and class privilege upon the directions our profession have taken, and who this concerns, has been slow (Coombes and Tsiris, 2020; Gipson et al, 2020; Langford et al, 2020; Norris, 2020a, 2020b; Sajnani et al, 2017; Silveira, 2020; Webb, 2019).…”