Weaving Sound, Care and Belonging: Community‑Engaged Music Practices for Collective Wellbeing
This presentation explores music’s capacity to connect people, shape identity and foster collective understanding through community-based practice. Drawing on two decades of research into community music, wellbeing and social justice, it examines how participatory and co-creative music-making can support wellbeing while fostering meaningful and sustained community engagement.
The presentation features two community-based projects led by Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University. Creative Connections explores how community music can address loneliness and social marginalisation through collective music-making, shared decision-making and reciprocal relationships. Creative Transitions examines a co-designed music programme with women transitioning out of homelessness following domestic and family violence. Embedded in transitional housing, the programme uses collaborative songwriting, group singing and storytelling to support identity reconstruction, collective care and peer connection.
Together, these projects demonstrate how collaborative musical practices can create spaces for social bonding, mutual recognition, belonging and emerging communities of practice. The presentation considers how music can function not simply as an artistic activity, but as a means of building relationships, agency and collective wellbeing.
Prof Brydie-Leigh Bartleet
Professor Brydie-Leigh Bartleet FAHA is Deputy Director (Research) at Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University. For more than two decades, she has led research exploring how music and the arts can address complex social challenges and strengthen communities, with a focus on social justice, equity, inclusion and wellbeing.
Her research has been conducted with First Nations communities and in contexts including prisons, war-affected cities, remote regions, health and education settings. She serves on the Boards of Social Impact of Music Making and Queensland Music Festival, is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Community Music and an Affiliate Researcher at the Jameel Arts & Health Lab.
Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University