(Un)doing Music Therapy in Palliative and End-of-life Care
This global webinar, part of the IACAET Arts & Health Series, brings together leading voices from around the world to reflect on Arts in Health as a rapidly growing and evolving field. We will explore its history, current frontiers, and emerging futures examining how this discipline has developed across different regions, cultures, and contexts.
In recent years, music therapy in palliative and end-of-life care has been characterised by various practice, research and policy developments. Examples include advancements in our understanding of musical care in palliative and end-of-life care, the publication of best-practice research agendas, as well as developments in advance care planning and assisted dying. All these developments have implications for music therapy practice and research which are currently underexplored.
In this webinar, we seek to offer some critical perspectives on the (un)doing of music therapy drawing from our practice and research experience in palliative and end-of-life care in Scotland, England and Norway respectively. We share the various ways we engage and experiment with collaborative practices with music therapy participants, research methodologies, and outreach work. On the one hand, we focus on the 'doing' of music therapy with attention to the materiality and social geography of the work. On the other hand, we promote a critical 'undoing' of processes of knowledge generation, their analysis and potential for participation, dissemination and interdisciplinary discourse.
We present practice and research examples for how we employ 'gentle', participatory and productive methods, staying with people and contexts over time, co-creating and embodying 'knowledge'. We show how we experimented with data analysis and dissemination, and how this led us to the identification of next research and service development questions, informed by all people involved.
Drawing on music therapy-led consultations, ethnographic and arts-based projects, we seek to collaboratively imagine how such approaches can be further developed and integrated to support and instigate changes in cultures and social policy developments for death, dying and bereavement.
