Expanding professional responsibility through prison music making: A musician-facilitator’s experience

Abstract

This research examines how the experience of working with prisoners might expand a musician’s understandings of their professional responsibility. It is an autoethnographic (Ellis & Bochner, 2000), arts-based (Leavy, 2017), examination of a musician-facilitator’s experience in a prison art project in Finland with 4 male prisoners and a group of artists. It consists of a literature review on community music and music making in prisons, a reflexive thematic analysis of the content of diary entries, poetry, and compositions, and final conclusions.

The research strengthens earlier findings that community art projects may expand the art facilitator’s understandings of professional responsibility (Solbrekke & Sugrue, 2011; Sutela et al, 2022) and direct the artist-facilitator to be more involved with their diverse local others (Bartleet & Higgins, 2018). Even though it can be argued whether community art is necessarily enhancing participants’ lives (Baker, 2021; Aakala, 2018), I explore how working with prisoners pushed my professional responsibility in a direction that is valuable for society which needs art professionals who can work in diverse environments (Sutela et al, 2022). Overall, this research contributes to wider discussions on community music and its role, impacts, ethical complexities, possibilities, and challenges in the prison environment.