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

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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.