The Oxford Handbook of Community Music

Abstract

The Oxford Handbook of Community Music captures the vibrant, dynamic, and diverse approaches that characterize community music across the world. The chapters give a comprehensive review of achievements in the field to date, providing a ‘go-to’ volume that both deepens our understanding of what community music does and what it might become. The Handbook also looks to the future and charts new areas that are likely to define the field in the coming decades, such as social justice, political activism, peacemaking, health and well-being, and online engagement with music in community contexts, to mention a few. It features established and emerging practices of scholars and practitioners whose work crosses boundaries between theoretical development, practical engagement, and music-making. The volume features a diversity of topics and approaches, structured in five parts: Contexts; Transformations; Politics; Intersections; and Education. The wealth of insights and thought-provoking pieces will serve as a sounding board for the field now and well into the twenty-first century.

Music, Rhythm and Trauma: A Critical Interpretive Synthesis of Research Literature

“…Freire's (1993) pedagogical theories for education are often applied in community, and emphasizes the importance of political performative acts to bring about social change. Similarly, arts-based approaches have been theorized with social justice agendas, such as Community Music Therapy (Stige et al, 2010) and Community Music more broadly (Bartleet and Higgins, 2018). Although not specifically theorized for those who have had adverse life experiences, these discourses do have oppressed and marginalized persons at their center, with an emphasis on society's responsibilities for the conditions that allowed abuse, rather than centralizing the individual's experiences of it and certainly not the neural pathways in the brain.…”