I lead the ICCM’s Music for Health in Morecambe project, exploring how value is understood and communicated across a music and health partnership in Morecambe. I am also Co-Investigator on ICCM’s MOVE (Music and Organizer’s Volunteer Exchange) evaluation, exploring how organizational learning has developed through 12 years of intercultural partnership working.
My PhD research considered the intersections of community music and cultural policy in the UK and my current research interests are focused on the role of music leaders in cultural policy. I am a visiting lecturer at York St John and a freelance cultural sector researcher, based in Glasgow, UK.
Thesis title: Been, being and becoming More Music: A critical ethnographic case study of the role and responsibility of a community music organisation
My PhD explores tensions in community music as cultural leadership when represented at an institutional position. I employ Bourdieu’s conceptual tools of field, doxa, capital and habitus as a way in which to understand how a community music organisation’s local and international position has influenced the way it understands its situated role and responsibility as a cultural leader. I invite Derrida’s hospitality, looking specifically through Higgins’ conceptualisation of community music as hospitality, as a theoretical lens through which to question the conceptual tensions of an institutionalization of community music, as it exists within the structures of arts and cultural policy in the UK.
Music for Health in Morecambe (funded by More More Music and Spirit 2012).
