Can Community Music Contribute to More Equitable Societies? A Critical Interpretive Synthesis

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Emma Heard

This article presents outcomes from a critical interpretive synthesis inquiry exploring whether community music can contribute to more equitable societies.

Drawing on 74 cross-disciplinary articles, we identify equity-related outcomes across three key categories: outcomes to improve the immediate wellbeing and life trajectories for individuals experiencing disadvantage; outcomes relating to the development of skills, knowledge and understandings empowering individual participants to enact positive social change within their communities; and outcomes with the potential to affect the root causes of social inequity.

This review provides a solid foundation for further conceptual and theoretical development within and beyond the fields of social justice research and community music. Our findings will also be helpful for translating the creative and cultural benefits that community music practice could bring to addressing social justice issues in a wide range of complex contexts.

Can Community Music Help Create More Equitable Societies?

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet

Social inequity can be understood as inexcusable disparities in the resources, opportunities, rewards, and rights a person has based on their position within society.

The foundations of social inequity are structural and relate to social systems of power that cause certain groups to thrive at the expense of others. Social inequity is escalating, with the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbating problems of long-term disadvantage in many communities. There are growing calls for place-based initiatives that bring together diverse stakeholders and sectors to work collectively with communities on addressing these complex challenges. In her talk Professor Bartleet will draw on insights from her Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, called the Creative Change Project, which is seeking to examine the role community music can play in addressing these entrenched social inequities in Australia. Specifically, her research aims to explore the creative change that music can bring to place-based initiatives tackling social disadvantage in communities.

In her talk, Professor Bartleet will pose the question: How can we become better at conceptualizing and critically framing how the positive outcomes from music-making lead to the kinds of macro, systemic changes needed for social equity to occur?

Creative Pathways for Juvenile Justice

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, Alexis Anja Kallio, Alex Roveda and Joel Alexander Spence

Australian youth justice systems are in urgent need of innovative programs to reduce the demand on custodial supervision and enhance community safety.

Entrenched inequity, high rates of reoffending, and acute concerns for children’s wellbeing highlight the imperative for a pro-active approach that prioritises diversion and primary prevention to keep young people out of detention centres and support them through adolescence to become fulfilled, healthy, and socially-engaged citizens.

Music has long been recognised as an important resource for youth identity construction, emotional immersion and regulation, and social connection. Recent studies identify 562 wellbeing benefits of participating in music, adding to a mounting evidence base of the social, emotional, physiological, cognitive, cultural, and economic benefits. Music has been seen to be particularly powerful in communities marked by systemic inequity engendering a strengths-based experience of creative fulfilment, cultural connection, and wellbeing in those who participate.

Research has identified that the creative process of participating in music can lead to numerous benefits for justice-involved youth, including a reduction in aggression, self-harm, and violence, and the support of self-esteem, self-confidence, self-efficacy, and promotion of pro-social coping skills, self-regulation, and empathy. Furthermore, as a distinct form of self-expression that fosters a sense of belonging, music programs are particularly effective in strengthening cultural identity and supporting positive identity-development amongst marginalised social and cultural groups.

For more than ten years, Big hART has harnessed these potentials of music in their work with young people in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, where the challenges of youth justice are particularly explicit. Fostering youth wellbeing, supporting the creation of positive relationships, connecting to culture and community, music has empowered these youth to lead a creative change in society.

Produced with the Creative Change Project at the request of Big hART, this report analyses evidence from 66 major studies to explain Big hART’s impact with young people and their community in Ieramugadu (Roebourne), Western Australia. Together with six Big hART evaluations, young participants’ own voices, and key community stakeholder’s perspectives (including Elders and the WA Police Force), we outline a solid evidence-base of the potentials for music as a primary prevention strategy and support for youth desistance, in order to inform decision-making on youth justice policy and practice.

Asia Pacific Community Music Network Symposium

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, Joel Spence and Flora Wong

The Asia Pacific Community Music Network (APCMN) Symposium 2023 took place from 13-14 July, 2023 at the Universiti Putra Malaysia, aiming to encourage better understanding and co-operation between community music educators and practitioners across the Asia Pacific Region. Prof. Brydie-Leigh Bartleet with PhD researchers Flora Wong and Joel Spence recount their symposium experience.

The City Transformed, Green Institute Conference

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet

The Green Institute's 2023 national conference brings keynote speeches, panels and workshops from activists, advocates, academics and change-makers of all kinds, sharing ideas, making connections, and planning the green transformation of our cities. During the conference, Prof. Brydie-Leigh Bartleet presented on place-based arts for more equitable cities.

Home to half of humanity as well as countless other species, cities are complex ecosystems of many kinds, from ghettoised, car-based wastelands and food deserts to interconnected homes of social cohesion and urban ecology. Today, they are changing rapidly, both for better and for worse. As the climate destabilises and old certainties collapse, these changes will accelerate.

A conceptual framework for understanding and articulating the social impact of community music

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet

This article outlines a conceptual framework for sharpening how we understand and articulate the social impact of community music.

This article builds on a mounting evidence base of research in our field that documents the multifarious benefits that come from participating in community music. However, it takes this research a step further by providing a conceptual framework for critically thinking through how these positive outcomes can lead to the kinds of macro, systemic changes needed for social impact to occur. As the field continues to grow and diversify internationally, against a backdrop of social, cultural and climate challenges, having ways to understand and articulate community music’s impact could enhance our practice and research, but also lead to greater influence in advocacy, policy and cross-sector domains.

Exploring the role of place-based arts initiatives in addressing social inequity in Australia: A systematic review

Emma Heard, Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Geoff Woolcock

The arts remain largely absent from place-based policy, planning and programming in Australia, despite a long history of working in place-based ways to create positive social change in communities. This systematic review aims to address this absence, by providing a synthesis of evidence about the role that place-based arts can play in advancing social equity and addressing social disadvantage. Findings reveal a potential for the arts to create change across individual, community and societal levels, yet empirical evidence to support this potential is weak. Stronger evaluation frameworks that can support capturing the impact of localised place-based arts initiatives for translation into policy and practice are discussed.

Social justice in arts and health

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet

Hosted by the Creativity and Wellbeing Hallmark Research Initiative (CAWRI) and the Creative Arts Music Therapy Research Unit (CAMTRU) of the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne.

This event was underpinned by the growing need to value, understand, and develop evidence-informed arts routes to health and wellbeing for all. With a keynote contribution from Christopher Bailey, Arts and Health lead at the World Health Organisation, it tackled persistent and difficult questions about how to develop, appraise/measure, and implement performing arts and cultural practice for health and wellbeing outcomes. Brydie-Leigh Bartleet shared insights about the Creative Change Project on a panel about social justice (chaired by Dr Sarah Woodland).

The Role of Community Music in Addressing Entrenched Social Inequities

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet

From left: Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, Gillian Howell, Deanna Yerichuk and Olivia McLennan.

This SIMM presentation held in London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama, opened up a conversation about the role community music can play in addressing entrenched inequity. This presentation examined the ways in which community musicians are responding to this call. Drawing on early insights from a new Australian study called Creative Change, it touched on some of the most significant social outcomes fostered by community music and how these outcomes could enrich future place-based efforts to address social disadvantage. Specifically, explored how community musicians have the unique capacity to leverage the cultural capabilities and creative assets of communities to drive positive social change.

As we move further into the UN SDGs Implementation Decade (2020-2030), this presentation sought to put this global sustainable development agenda on the SIMM program, and explore the ways in which community music might contribute creative solutions to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 10, Reduced Inequalities.

A Systematic Review Exploring the Role of Music in Addressing Social Inequity with Young People: Preliminary analysis

Emma Heard and Brydie-Leigh Bartleet

From left: Emma Heard

Inequity and discrimination are among the most important issues currently facing young people across Australia. Creative, strengths-based approaches to both understanding and addressing these issues are urgently needed. There is a growing body of evidence that demonstrates positive health and wellbeing impacts that participating in music can have for young people, particularly those facing disadvantage. But the broader role that music might play in transformative change to shift entrenched inequity is less understood.

Preliminary analyses identified positive outcomes for individuals related to quality of life and wellbeing, confidence and self-expression, social connection and skills, and importantly, identity formation and affirmation and development of critical consciousness. These outcomes are potentially important building blocks, supporting young people to become empowered and active citizens able and equipped to actively strive for social change towards equity.

Connecting the arts and the social sector for social change

Emma Heard and Brydie-Leigh Bartleet

From left: Emma Heard, Marilyn Trad, Katie Bennett, Uncle Glenn Barry and Matt Hsu

There is an urgent need to strengthen current approaches to services and support (e.g. human services, health, education) in ways that not only acknowledge but strive to solve the entrenched and complex problems relate to social inequity for communities across Australia. The arts have a long history of working in place-based ways to create positive social change for communities. However, the arts sector is yet to be comprehensively integrated into the backbone of efforts to address entrenched and place-based disadvantage in Australia.

In this panel discussion at the Queensland Council of Social Services Conference (QCOSS), we heard from community artists, facilitators and participants about their experiences with programs that draw on a range of art modalities including visual arts and music. Facilitated by the Creative Change Project, we explored questions about the social equity impacts that these community and place-based arts projects are having here in Queensland, and began an important dialogue about the how arts and social sectors can work more productively together to achieve social equity.

Introducing the Creative Change Project

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, Pearly Black, Emma Heard, Matt Hsu, Joel Spence and Flora Wong

From left: Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, Flora Wong and Emma Heard

In this Lightning Talk we introduced the Creative Change Project. Our project seeks to explore the role community music can play in addressing entrenched social inequity in Australia. In doing so, we are aiming to highlight the ways in which music can amplify the voices, creative assets, and cultural strengths of communities often marginalised due to systemic social inequity and social injustices.

We shared some of our early collective thinking around key concepts, including ‘community’ and ‘community music’ and how these relate to notions of ‘social inequity.’ These concepts have strong relevance for the theme of ‘Absent Voices’ and we hope will promote fruitful discussion amongst colleagues.

How Community Music Might Address The UN’s SDG 10 Reduced Inequalities

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, Pearly Black, Emma Heard, Joel Spence and Flora Wong

During the project's first year, we presented to the Community Music Activities (CMA) commission, a community of academics we welcome as kindred musicians and critical friends. We introduced our team, shared how we conceptualise core concepts of community and community music. These understandings inform our exploration of equity, intersectionality, as well as the overall project design. At the heart of our project, we aim to advance our understanding of the role community music can play in addressing entrenched inequity.