Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses
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ItemMusic therapy as an anti-oppressive practice: critically exploring gender and power with young people in school( 2018)This project sought to locate music therapy within broader health, research, and education contexts, as a participatory and anti-oppressive practice for young people in school to explore issues related to gender and power. In parallel, the research aimed to expand music therapy as an anti-oppressive practice (Baines, 2013), specifically focusing on deepening music therapists’ understanding of critical issues related to gender, power, and young people in education settings. Predicated on the notion that schools can be both sites of violence, and microcosms for change-making, the project occurred during a time of significant shifts across education settings worldwide to respond to endemic gender-based violence (Chandra-Mouli et al., 2017). Meanwhile, young people themselves continue to demonstrate new forms of resistance to gender-based violence and dominant gender and sexuality norms (Bragg et al., 2018; Keller et al., 2018). This project responds to a need for approaches that support young people’s autonomy and challenge processes of pathologisation and individualisation; approaches that seek to understand social structures, and the ways in which young people are shaped by their relationships with these social structures, and with each other (Brunila & Rossi, 2018). Framed broadly as a participatory action research project, the study was informed by a series of music-based workshops conducted in the first year, exploring the issues that young people identified as most important in relation to gender. The project then established a music therapy group program in a government school. The school was located in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, with an index of community socio-educational advantage below the national average, and a high percentage of students with a language background other than English. This primary project took the form of a critical ethnography, and generated a wide range of data over nine months. Interviews were conducted with five staff and sixteen of the young people who participated in music therapy groups exploring issues related to gender and power. Discourses of risk and deficit emerged as critical issues to respond to in the project, and became a key focus of the four chapters of results. The research revealed the complex forms of violence that can occur when exploring gender-based violence in a school context, and how these relate to young people’s layered subjectivities and social positioning. The findings demonstrated a need to problematise and expand upon current responses to gender-based violence in the context of Australian education settings, especially where Whiteness and colonial relations remain profoundly underexamined. Chapter Six overviews the five broad, salient themes that emerged in relation to the role of music in creating conditions for young people to explore gender. Chapter Seven outlines the role of music therapists in supporting young people to do so, the unique skillset and critical lens required in this emerging practice, and a new method developed in the project: ‘Insight-Oriented Narrative Songwriting’. Informed by anti-oppressive and decolonial approaches to reframing violence and harm, music therapy is ultimately constructed as a practice congruent with shifting understandings and paradigms related to trauma. Overarchingly, the research exposes the complex conditions of power in schools, and explicates the potential of music therapy within these conditions, to support young people to resist discursive positioning, and rewrite their own subjectivities.
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ItemAn emergent exploration into the musical beginnings of parental identity across the neonatal journey( 2018)This thesis describes an emergent research project exploring the musical beginnings of parental identity in the neonatal unit setting. While scholarship is calling for parentally- inclusive practices that support optimal health and well-being of premature infants and their parents (Benzies, Magill-Evans, Hayden & Ballantyne, 2013), there exists little music therapy research exploring parents’ unique experiences of appropriating music with their baby in this context. Moreover, research highlights the need to foster the process of becoming a parent to a premature baby in the neonatal unit to support the critical development of the parent- infant relationship (Gibbs, Boshoff & Stanley, 2015). However, no studies have examined music therapy’s role in contributing to parental identity constructs in the neonatal unit. This project aimed to respond to this gap through exploring parents’ experiences of musical engagement with their baby in the neonatal unit through a phenomenological inquiry, followed by a grounded theory study. Parents were recruited from across two in-patient, neonatal hospital facilities in Melbourne. An initial inquiry, adopting Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009) methodology explored nine parents’ experiences and perceptions of singing and using their voice with their premature baby in the neonatal unit. Findings emerged across four waves of analysis. Recurrent themes included: the intrinsic role of singing and voice to support the developing identity of parents and act as a fundamental bridge of connection to their premature baby; the supportive role of voice to meet the emotional needs of parents; and act as a self-soothing coping tool. The concept of time across differing stages of the acute neonatal journey and its influence on parents’ experiences and perceptions of voice inductively emerged across cases. Findings also highlighted parents’ singing and voice interactions with their baby as a critical dialogical encounter of perceived connection and recognition. Finally, the role of the music therapist was acknowledged as supportively educating and facilitating parents to ‘find their voice’ and connect with their baby. The second study of this thesis expanded on an interesting aspect of these initial findings that illuminated singing and voice interactions leading to the validation of a parent’s identity through their baby’s perceived recognition of their voice (McLean, 2016a). This grounded theory study explored how parents’ musical engagement with their baby contributed to their parental identity across their neonatal journey. Interviews with nine parents of a premature baby across varying time points in their hospital journey took place. To generate theoretical understandings of this topic, a Constructivist Grounded Theory approach was employed (Charmaz, 2014), with influences from Strauss & Corbin’s (1998) approach to analysis. Findings in the form of a substantive grounded theory illuminated the contribution of parents’ musical engagement on their sense of parental identity. Specifically, the centrality of their baby’s response during musical interactions as influencing these parents’ capacity to engage in musical dialogue with their baby emerged. It was through these early musical encounters, involving their baby’s powerful response, that parents’ emerging sense of identity across their neonatal unit journey was supported. This enabled parents to ‘do something musical’ for their baby and receive an ‘identifying response from their baby’. Specific conditions that acted as both barriers and fosters in parents’ musical engagement across a high- risk pregnancy and hospital admission also emerged.