Music and Social Intervention Network - Excellence, inclusion and intervention in music: navigating contexts and building sustainable working practice

The project aims to explore inclusion and excellence, two key concepts that shape the field of community music and music education. Often used as indicators for measurements of success, and consequently further funding, these concepts have been principally used together as descriptors for many projects that involve participatory music making. The proposed network activities will extend our understanding of these ideas both philosophically and as they pertain to practice. It will encourage scholars to share how these notions are utilized in different fields of study and explore what methods are employed to judge whether they have been implemented successfully or not. For example, how do people working in the criminal justice system determine inclusivity? When employing a community musician how is this communicated - what are the differences and similarities between the two and how can both parties determine whether or not the project has excelled in this area?

We will do this by bringing together a wide range of practitioners and scholars to:

- Identify the current understandings of excellence and inclusion and how they are applied in practice;
- Unpick these understandings in order to see how useful they are to practitioners, service providers and funders, and to challenge the ways that they are currently used to measure the success of a participatory music project;
- Rebuild understandings of excellence and inclusion based on shared knowledge that can inform practitioners, service providers and funders and be used as a platform for further research and scholarship.

All of our networking events will be held in different parts of the UK enabling us to reach local professionals from London, York, and Glasgow. We will invite local people working within the areas connected to the network, including musicians, music educators, music therapists, those working in criminal justice, psychotherapy, health, and psychology to these events. Our intention is to include all participants in discussions and dialogue. Travel bursaries will be offered to doctoral students for attendance at the open debates. Sessions will always be planned to facilitate maximum collegiality ensuring that a multitude of voices will be heard.

The website hosted by the International Centre for Community Music (ICCM) will provide a continuing online forum for exploration and dissemination of thought surrounding inclusion and excellence in participatory music making. Encouraging contributions from those within the network, participants of the symposia and conference meetings, plus a broader invitation from the wider circles indicative of the various disciplinary representations, our aim will be to create a dynamic online space to not only aid the focused outcomes, such as journal articles, but also as an important 'text' itself that has a life beyond the network funding.

It will benefit network participants and other future users by:
- Providing a platform that enables practitioners at each sited event (London, York, and Glasgow) to share their experiences of inclusion and excellence;
- Providing an internationally useful online forum for discussions and information exchange, with links to relevant resources and other symposia opportunities;
- Fostering dialogue between academic constituencies and those from outside HEIs thereby enriching understanding of ways the key concepts can be employed within collaborative enterprises;
- Highlighting the problem of creating 'false' boundaries between fields of practice;
- Producing articulate statements regarding the key issues and potential approaches in addressing them.

Community music is an emergent academic field that has seen an exponential growth in practices, courses, programs and research, as well as scholarly books, chapters and journal articles. This growth in practice and scholarship has also been reflected in organizations for community music such as the International Society for Music Education's Community Music Activities Commission, the Asia Pacific Community Music Network and Sound Sense the UK professional association. Within this context, new debates about the nexus of practice, pedagogy, research and ethics have been emerging and new voices have begun broadening the agenda to consider settings where community music is engaging in social justice, political activism, peace-making, health and wellbeing, and online engagement, amongst other fields. As an emergent field we have questions surrounding a potential demarcation of its boundaries at such a young point in its existence. Concepts intrinsic to unlocking what we perceive as a false sense of 'bounded practice' reside in the key concepts of inclusion and excellence. This makes it an ideal topic in which to find common ground between academic researchers invested in both its theory and practice, and those who engage with community musicians as part of their profession such as those working in the criminal justice system and health professions. Our aim is to foster discussions between these constituencies by creating an interdisciplinary space for practitioners and academics to share experiences, better understand present conditions, and look toward a working future together.

This is an interdisciplinary project and its academic beneficiaries will include musicians working in community, health, education, and criminal justice settings. It will also include those from the broader fields of criminal justice, psychotherapy, health, and psychology. Core network members will write papers and short position statements that will be distributed online. The network activities are organised strategically to envelope some key international conferences including the Research in Music Education and ISME conferences. A vital part of the dissemination process will be collating information on calls for papers for other conferences and symposia, and the core Network will create a co-ordinated strategy for submitting proposals such as round-table sessions and symposia at major conferences to maximise its impact.

Through our Network we will also be exposed to the mechanisms by which other disciplines already collaborate, for example those in social work and community music. These types of discussions will help reveal current 'silos' and point toward how they might manifest in the future, providing fuel for strategies to resist further compartmentalization and for clearer statements regarding interdisciplinary collaboration. In turn, this will lead to future collaborative research projects.

Bringing together academic audiences (academics, researchers, doctoral students) with non-academic audiences (community musicians, healthcare workers and social care workers) will foster cross-fertilisation of research and practice. As practitioners engage with research through the Network's activities, they will be encouraged to reflect upon their practice and identify areas that can be developed; thus allowing the network activities to permeate into practice. Likewise, through engaging with practitioners, researchers will be helped to develop new research questions relevant to practice. Thus the impact of the project will be two-way: research into practice, and practice informing research.