Community music as health promotion: equity-related insights from urban context in Australia

Emma Heard and Brydie-Leigh Bartleet

Health promotion researchers and practitioners the world over are grappling with how to tackle growing health inequity. The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (Ottawa Charter) provides a framework for addressing inequity from an intersectoral, strengths-based, and social justice approach; yet this framework continues to be underutilized. Similarly, evidence suggests creative arts can support positive health and well-being but the potential for the arts to contribute to efforts addressing health inequity is underexplored. In this community-embedded, qualitative case study, we investigate the contribution community-centred music making can have across the five health promotion action areas outlined in the Ottawa Charter.

Findings from this study highlight the potential for community music to contribute to personal skill development in relation to maintaining a healthy and well life and engaging in equity-focussed change. Community music can create supportive environments through fostering social connections and activating community spaces. C

ommunity music can be a powerful means of strengthening community action by bringing communities together around local issues and activism. When integrated into social services, community music can support the re-orienting of health services by connecting people with services and by encouraging people to share health-related knowledge and resources.

Finally, our findings demonstrate that community music can shape public opinion and be a conduit to reach people in positions of power in ways that have the potential to influence healthy public policy. This study demonstrates that health promotion researchers and practitioners can and should look to communities’ cultural and creative assets in our efforts towards health equity.

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Community music for critical positive youth development: A cross-disciplinary literature review of implications for addressing social inequity

Emma Heard, and Brydie-Leigh Bartleet

Critical positive youth development (CPYD) is a promising framework for supporting young people in strengths-based ways to both thrive individually and address structural foundations of social inequity. This literature review explores community music for operationalizing CPYD. Database searches were supplemented with expert consultation and handsearching of identified articles and key journals. The authors used a purposive sampling strategy within a critical interpretive synthesis methodology to select 50 articles exploring outcomes of community music programmes with young people. They synthesized findings from these 50 cross-disciplinary studies to illuminate outcomes across the CPYD framework: competence, confidence, compassion, connection, character, contribution and critical consciousness. This study affirms the use of community music in contexts of youth development and implications for health and arts practitioners and researchers are discussed in relation to using music as a potential approach for CPYD to address social inequity with young people. Findings highlight the need for increased art-based research that explores how community music can support equity.

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How can Community Music Help Address Loneliness in Contexts of Social Marginalisation? Insights From Two Music for Social Connection Programs

Emma Heard, Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, Joel Spence, Kylie Dean, Sam Eyles, Jenny Martinelli, and Katie McGuire

This study explores how participatory music programs can help build social connection for people experiencing loneliness in contexts of social marginalisation. Loneliness is a growing, global public health issue with social and structural drivers. There is an urgent need to investigate innovative approaches to programming that go beyond opportunities for social contact to address the multiple domains of loneliness.

Designed collaboratively with two social sector organisations in an urban context in Australia, this study presents outcomes from two community programs that involved groups of people experiencing or at risk of loneliness engaging in music together.

Using a qualitative methodology that included semi-structured and brief interviews, focus groups and ethnographic observation, researchers identified positive shifts in relation to social loneliness (related to social contact), emotional loneliness (related to social bonds and meaningful connections), and existential loneliness (related to community connection and acceptance) for participants of the music programs. This study contributes to an urgent gap in understanding effective programming to support people experiencing loneliness and bolsters emerging evidence about the role arts can play in strengthening health, community and social sector efforts to address inequity.

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A different way to listen: the musician-in-residence as researcher

Chi Lui Flora Wong

Musician, educator, and researcher Chi Lui Flora Wong shares a variety of creative research activities that reimagine the Artist-in-Residence as a methodology for artists and researchers who work with communities and wish to do so ethically and with reciprocity.

Research in the field of community arts or socially-engaged arts is on the rise as the world grapples with rising inequity, but much of it relies on methodologies that sideline creativity and relationality. If we accept that art is inherently social, we must also embrace creative ways of doing sociological research, and discourage researchers from setting aside their artistic selves when conducting rigorous research.

Via a series of musical activities and offerings and a discussion of the role they play in her research, Flora demonstrates how an Artist-in-Residence methodology can provide a different way to listen, learn, and imagine the future with a community. Musicking is woven through her research; as literature, as data, as a site of data gathering, as analysis, and as knowledge-sharing.

This framework for understanding the Artist-in-Residence in a research context builds on artistic research, participatory action research, and autoethnographic methodologies, while drawing on place-based arts practices and the concept of artistic citizenship. By placing art-making at the centre of research design, Flora invites artists and researchers to reflect on how their practices can be interwoven.

How can community music shape individual and collective well-being? A case study of a place-based initiative

Emma Heard and Brydie-Leigh Bartleet

There is an urgent need to investigate innovative and creative approaches in health promotion that support work towards health equity. In response, this study explores the potential for arts, and community music specifically, to strengthen individual and collective well-being.

This study used a qualitative case study methodology that involved interviews, focus groups and ethnographic observation with participants, facilitator and support staff of an established community music initiative conducted in an urban community. Data collection was conducted across 2023 and data analysis drew on a socioecological framework to explore potential individual and collective outcomes from the perspective of those involved in the initiative.

Findings point to outcomes across socioecological levels with researchers identifying positive health and well-being implications for participants including joy, healing and a sense of purpose, creative self-expression, confidence, social connection and contribution. Positive outcomes for the wider community were also identified including developing community ties, promoting safety and shaping and sharing of collective identity. Findings suggest community-led opportunities for engagement can support healing and empowerment for people who are marginalised, and this can enable active community participation related to challenging the status quo and developing a shared set of values. Potential implications of these outcomes in relation to broader societal transformations are discussed.

This study highlights how community music, and the arts more broadly are working in communities in ways that support potential personal, community and societal transformations towards health equity.

By developing coalitions and collaborating with diverse sectors, including the arts and social sectors, health promotion practitioners and researchers can harness the creative strengths and resources that exist within a community to support positive individual and collective well-being.

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Mapping community music and social change across Australia

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Emma Heard

There is mounting international evidence demonstrating the social, emotional, physiological, cognitive, cultural, and economic benefits that can come from participating in music, including the role it can play in building social capital, social inclusion, social cohesion, well-being, and self-determination. Given the rise of social inequity across the globe, the Creative Change Project is building on this emerging evidence to investigate the role community music might play in supporting social equity. Social inequity occurs on a social gradient, often manifesting in locational disadvantage. As such, where a person lives, and their social positions, has profound implications on their wellbeing.

There is great potential for the creative assets and imaginative methods of community music to contribute to place-based approaches addressing social inequity, but community music is rarely considered in the design of social systems change work. To address this challenge, we conducted a national mapping process to create a picture of the current approaches to community music across Australian contexts where social inequities exist. This mapping process was conducted via an online survey as well as face-to-face and online interviews with people facilitating community music programs across the country. To complement this data, in-depth interviews were conducted with key sector stakeholders including state-level government music officers in each Australian state and territory.

With this presentation, we share the preliminary findings from this national mapping process, outlining the types of practice currently being used in communities, the goals and motivations of the programs, key outcomes and how communities are approaching evaluation, as well as current challenges the sector is facing. These outcomes provide insights into how community music can work to support the kinds of individual, community, and systemic changes needed for greater social equity to occur. Our mapping processes will be useful to inform broader international and national research aiming to capture the social outcomes that are being fostered by community music in a range of settings.

Listening in the Outback: community musicking and social change in remote Australian communities

Chi Lui Flora Wong

“Listening in the Outback” is an art-based presentation of creative musical works that form part of a qualitative research study into the role of community music in fostering social equity in regional Australia. The study is part of the Creative Change Project, a research project led by Australian Research Council Future Fellow Dr Brydie-Leigh Bartleet that examines the role of community music in addressing social inequity in Australia. As one of four case studies undertaken as part of the broader project, the study explores place-based community music practices in two remote towns in South-West Queensland, and how the social outcomes of these practices at the individual and community levels may or may not flow on to influence or shape systemic inequities.

The study combines artistic research with ethnographic research methodologies by situating the researcher as an artist-in-residence in the communities. This approach affords unique modes of relationship-building between the researcher and community members through engagement with local musicking and the production of place-based creative work, while generating rich qualitative data through interviews, focus groups, participant observations at a wide range of events and activities, and reflexive autoethnographic writing. Drawing on the concepts of musicking and artistic citizenship, this methodology allows the artist-researcher to assume a position that is both insider and outsider – or neither.

The musical works present some of the findings of this study in a way that foregrounds sounds and stories from two towns in “outback” Australia: Cunnamulla, on Kunja country, and Charleville, on Bidjara country. Weaving together excerpts from interviews, field recordings, and musical material created by the researcher in response to these recorded narratives and environments, the works invites listeners to consider musicking, knowledge-sharing and placemaking as interrelated social practices for communities.

This work aims to offer new insights into methods of researching with communities in addition to a deeper understanding of the role of that community music can play in fostering place-based approaches to addressing entrenched social inequities.

Community Music as Health Promotion: Working across the five actions areas for supporting health and equity

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet and Emma Heard

Presented at the 2024 Fostering Creative Health Conference, Melbourne University by Dr Emma Heard and Professor Brydie-Leigh Bartleet. Explores community music as health promotion describing examples of community music practice from across Australia working across the five actions areas of health promotion: developing personal skills, building healthy public policy, creating supportive environments, strengthening community action, and orienting health services.

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.

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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 draws on insights from her Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, the Creative Change Project, which examines the role community music can play in addressing entrenched social inequities in Australia. Specifically, the research explores the creative change that music can bring to place-based initiatives tackling social disadvantage in communities.

Professor Bartleet poses 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...

Entrenched inequity, high rates of reoffending...

Music has long been recognised as an important resource...

Research has identified that the creative process...

For more than ten years, Big hART has harnessed...

Produced with the Creative Change Project at the request...

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Asia Pacific Community Music Network Symposium

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, Joel Spence and Chi Lui Flora Wong

The Asia Pacific Community Music Network (APCMN) Symposium 2023...

The City Transformed, Green Institute Conference

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet

The Green Institute's 2023 national conference brings keynote speeches...

Home to half of humanity as well as countless other species...

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.

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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

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

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

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 Chi Lui Flora Wong

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.

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.

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

Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, Pearly Black, Emma Heard, Joel Spence and Chi Lui 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.