Oxford University Press's Blog, page 348

Hearing to heal

At the 2014 OHA Annual Meeting, the African American Oral History Program at Story For All received the prestigious Vox Populi Award, one of the highest honors in the oral history world. Today on the blog we hear from Angela Zusman, the project’s Founder and Executive Director, about the inspiration for her work, as well as successes and lessons learned. Story For All has achieved important victories, building coalitions with local partners and officials that promote shared understanding and meaningful change.

Can you describe what a typical Story For All project or workshop looks like? What is it about your approach that makes it unique?

At Story For All, our goal is to expose disenfranchised communities to the power of oral history for the purpose of healing, building skills, elevating an authentic narrative, and ultimately transforming communities and systems through policy reform. We do this by training community members in oral history methodology, then supporting them in recording, archiving, and reflecting on their own communities’ stories and wisdom through art, dialogue, policy recommendations, and public presentations. Our process was designed with the understanding that the sharing of stories through oral history has multiple beneficial impacts, especially for historically marginalized communities whose stories, values, and cultures have been subsumed by the often-negative narratives promoted by the dominant culture. As stories have been weaponized to use against such communities, our narrative change approach is literally a method for individuals and communities to take back their story, as well as their culture. Additionally, by supporting communities in documenting their own stories, we create a culture of storytellers, like the griots of West Africa. Instead of the stories and wisdom being extracted from the community, they reside within the hearts and minds of present and future community leaders.

Using storytelling to heal is a key part of your work. Can you talk about what that looks like in practice? How does your curriculum enable healing, and what kind of results have you seen?

We all know how powerful it can be when we are listened to. Think about it. Think about a time when you were really listened to. How did that make you feel? Empowered, important, relevant, cared about. For many of the people we work with, especially youth of color and immigrants, this respectful attention is revolutionary in and of itself. Too many young people tell us that this is the first time they have ever been asked what they think about anything. So, our storytelling programs, whether they last an hour or a year, always incorporate multiple levels of acknowledgement so people feel heard. Then there is the listening component. Oral historians are great listeners, and a lot of our projects’ skill building revolves around listening, asking questions, and reflecting on what was said. The healing power of listening might best be summed up by this experience of one our youth participants, who said, “It helped me so much to hear that other people have gone through similar things as me, or even worse. I don’t feel so alone.” On a community level, when we are able to share the oral histories and associated data through exhibits, videos, books and reports, the impact on the community can be equally healing. For example, we created a survey for people who visited our R.O.O.T.S. exhibit last month in the Mississippi Delta. 94% of people reported that the R.O.O.T.S. exhibit made them feel hopeful about the future of youth of color in their community. Especially in communities mired in multi-generational poverty, hope may be the most powerful healer and motivator of all.

Griots Story Circle at an Oakland middle school. Photo credit: Angela Zusman

The SHINE program takes your work into local communities, empowering young men of color to make their voices heard. How did the program begin, and what was especially attractive about the cities you’re currently working in?

In 2012, we were blessed to design and facilitate a Listening Campaign for African American young men in Oakland. This was a life-changing experience for me personally. When I started the project, I thought I had an idea about what life was like for these young men, many of whom lived within a few blocks of me. After listening to their stories, the bubble of white privilege that I had unconsciously existed within was officially burst. These brave young men, and their stories, forced me to see the world in a new way. I also watched them blossom as they were nudged to share their stories and get out there in the community to listen to, and then represent, their peers. Over the following months, the project data helped to inform a new Public Safety plan for the City of Oakland. We began getting calls and emails from young men, mothers, educators and others around the country, asking us to bring the project to their town so the voices of their young men could also be heard. This type of project was the reason I founded Story For All, so we have focused most of our resources on answering the call.

One of your goals in Sunflower County is to put young African-American men in contact with teachers, police officers, and those with legislative powers to involve everyone in on the conversation. How do you introduce these conversations and what kind of results have you seen from the program so far?

We have been blessed to partner with the ACLU of Mississippi, the Mississippi Center for Justice, and others in a coalition created to disrupt the school to prison pipeline in the Mississippi Delta. Our partners had done an excellent job of building and unifying this coalition of stakeholders around the common goal of supporting young men of color by instigating school discipline reform. All of the project partners had deep ties in the community, giving our oral history project credibility and community buy-in. So when our interview team showed up at the courthouse with their iPads and microphones, when we called the Police Chief to come over for an interview, when we stopped community members in the streets to ask if they would share their stories, they were generally amenable. Many of them already knew about the project, and those who didn’t were often genuinely happy to see the youth out in the community asking good questions. This in fact is a key component to the narrative change – it’s not just about telling a new story, it’s about these young men being seen in a new way.

Now, as the project moves from data collection to policy reform, the oral histories have lifted up so many community voices that it’s hard for the data to be ignored. One of my favorite impact stories involves a leader of the participating school district. She came to one of the community meetings and was given a copy of our R.O.O.T.S. data report. As my colleague described it, the leader took that report into the back corner and buried her face in it for over an hour. When she emerged, she was clearly very moved. She offered her full support for the reforms being recommended, some of which were quite controversial, because, as she said, “I really see the whole community being represented here.” Her experience encapsulates what we are trying to achieve – lifting up community voices in ways that are authentic and emotionally compelling to motivate and inform policy change.

Griots interviewee with parents at Griots exhibit opening. Photo credit: Mi Zhou

In additional to policy change, we are also very interested in contributing to scholarly study and the collection of affirmative-based data around young men of color. The Griots of Oakland oral histories are archived at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland, and the R.O.O.T.S. oral histories are being archived at Jackson State University’s prestigious Margaret Walker Center so that scholars and others around the world can learn from these communities.

And finally – the youth! I am inspired by the 19 young men who walked this R.O.O.T.S. journey, and came up with the name R.O.O.T.S., which stands for “Reclaiming Our Origins Through Story.” I watched them grow, literally and figuratively, as they formed friendships with each other, learned their history, branched out into the community, and became the spokespeople for the project, school discipline reform, and the greatness of our youth of color. They have emerged from this project more grounded, more confident, and more visionary than before. They have learned whose shoulders they stand upon, and how they can contribute to make this world a better place. This is what our work is all about.

Do you think recent political and social events have changed the project or its reception? 

Under Obama, there was an explicit, collective effort to improve health, academic and career outcomes for boys and young men of color. Importantly, there was increased recognition of the impact of systemic racism, as enacted through school discipline policies, mass incarceration, lack of educational opportunity, pervasive negative narratives, and other attributes of modern day slavery. The Black Lives Matter movement and mass protests around police brutality brought national awareness to racial inequities and the impact on our society. People were getting woke! And then came…the next administration. Immigrants, the environment, Muslims, women, etc., all came under attack. Resources disappeared or got scattered.  Racism exposed itself brutally and unapologetically. The hope I hold onto is that this administration is exposing the festering wounds of this nation. Only when a problem is exposed can it be solved. Racism and inequity are issues each of us must address, personally and in community, in order for our nation to live up to its promise and potential. As the late, great Viola Liuzzo said, “It’s everybody’s fight.” Are we up for it? Time will tell.

Youth interview a community elder for the R.O.O.T.S. project in the Mississippi Delta, June 2016. Photo credit: Andre Lambertson.

Have you had any particularly memorable successes or frustrations with the project?

We have had our share of successes and frustrations. When I see the light go on in a child’s eyes, I see success. When a shy young man evolves into a dynamic leader, I see success. When a group of teenagers crowds around an elder to hear his stories, I see success. When the stories and wisdom of historically oppressed peoples are celebrated and promoted, I see success. When policies are created that represent a community’s needs, I see success. All this success I have seen as a result of our work at Story For All, and it keeps us going. On the other hand, the greatest frustration comes not from those whom we oppose, but from our supposed partners. The non-profit business model is unsustainably competitive, funders change their priorities, and an unfortunate number of partners seem to be more invested in their own PR than in real change. Good people get bogged down. Innovation is underfunded. I could go on. Suffice it to say: when we talk about systemic issues, they really are systemic, and it’s going to take long-term collective action locally, regionally and nationally for there to be real change. I am incredibly humbled by the great people who have come before me and those I get to interact with every day. I believe that together we can make this change, and I will do my part.

For more about their work, check out Story For All on Facebook, Twitter, or on their website.  Chime into the discussion in the comments below or on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, or Google+.

Featured image credit: “Griots of Oakland interview team, Oakland, 2013” by Mi Zhou

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Why ‘tropical disease’ is a global problem

In 2015, the United Nations agreed upon Sustainable Development Goals  which set seventeen ambitious targets for the next two decades focusing on tackling poverty, reducing disease, protecting the environment, and driving forward an international community based on sustained commitments to – and improvements in – education, health, human rights, and equity. At first glance, infectious diseases in the tropics do not make headlines among the seventeen goals. On closer scrutiny, however, tropical medicine epitomizes issues that are woven into the heart of this sustained global initiative, and that are relevant to all of us with an interest in 21st century health, wherever we live and work.

Among the seventeen goals, ‘good health and well being’ (goal 3) is the most obviously relevant to tropical medicine, with a bold statement that sets out an agenda to be achieved by 2030, to ‘end the epidemics of AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria and neglected tropical diseases and combat hepatitis, water-borne diseases and other communicable diseases’. Within this goal are additional targets, including provision of sexual health services and access to essential vaccinations.

‘Clean water and sanitation’ (goal 6) is crucial for health and wellbeing in ways that are obviously fundamental and is pertinent to curbing the spread of waterborne diseases including hepatitis A, cholera, and typhoid. Less well recognized diseases are also tackled within this aspiration, including schistosomiasis (blood flukes) and dracunculiasis (‘guinea worm’).

Tropical and subtropical regions are particularly vulnerable to the spread of infectious diseases – the perfect storm arising from the intersection of poor sanitation, lack of education, inadequate resources and infrastructure for healthcare, and specific climates and environments. At the root of this all is poverty. ‘No poverty’ (goal 1) includes an aspiration that individuals, families, and society have sufficient reserves and resource to cope with a crisis – to access drugs and healthcare, and to continue to provide for their children throughout periods of instability arising from illness. Implicit in the aim for economic growth (goal 8) is the need to have a population of adults who are well enough to be economically active in contributing to productivity, development, and prosperity.

‘Quality education’ (goal 4) highlights a particular need to focus on girls and women, whose education is often neglected but whose literacy is known to impact significantly on the health of their children. Education is empowering per se, but also provides a specific foundation for women to become active participants in vaccinating their families, taking measures to prevent mother-to-child transmission of infection, compliance with therapy, promoting and developing better sanitation, and improving sexual health. Tackling inequality is such a key issue that it is also independently represented within goals 5 and 10.

“Malaria still kills over 290,000 children a year – that is a child every two minutes”

So how, and why, are these challenges aimed mostly at low and middle-income settings relevant to affluent, developed countries?

One answer is that we are part of a delicate global community, in which the health and wellbeing of all human populations is interdependent. In other cases, numbers provide a powerful answer to the question: in Africa, malaria still kills over 290,000 children every year – that is a child every two minutes. None of us should absolve ourselves of responsibility for continued investment in tackling this humanitarian tragedy.

But there are other answers: we are all vulnerable to threats which wreak their worst effects in the tropics – organisms like Streptococcus pneumoniae (a cause of pneumonia) and E. coli (a cause of diarrhoea and urinary tract infections) are common the world over.

The Ebola virus, arising out of a tropical situation, was in no way confined by the bounds of Cancer and Capricorn; it had the potential to take hold in situations of poverty and limited infrastructure and then to spread fast, facilitated by its huge infectivity, and fuelled by human behaviour and environments including crowding, migration, and international travel. Other organisms, like cholera, measles, meningitis, and polio rear their heads in disaster situations; in a world so uncertain, none of us knows when this is around the next corner.

Food by PublicDomainPictures. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

Changes in climate and the environment allow creatures that are the reservoirs and vectors of infection to spread to new locations; the concern for the Zika epidemic in South America has been its rapid dissemination by a mosquito that has the potential to become ubiquitous. The spread of organisms that are resistant to multiple drugs is another major threat to global health. One example is Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the organism that causes TB, where multi-drug resistant (MDR) and extensively-drug resistant (XDR) strains are now well-established. Associated with a high burden of disease, high death rates, and difficult, expensive treatment, these organisms are by no means confined to the tropics.

And what about financial security? We value crops like tea, coffee, chocolate, and bananas which are the exclusive preserve of tropical and subtropical farmers; our supplies depend on their health and productivity. Rich natural resources – from coal to gold – are mined from these regions of the world, and the manufacturing, clothing, and electronics industries are built on tropical and subtropical manpower.

Infections that flourish in the tropics continue to cause a catastrophic burden at the level of individual patients, their families, and wider society at national and international level. They impose an enormous economic cost upon healthcare systems and society, related both to providing care and to the lost output of young adults who are unable to contribute to society through work or raising their families. Labelling them as ‘tropical’ identifies a strong association with some of the world’s most vulnerable settings – but perhaps we need to move on from the term ‘tropical medicine’ to considering ‘global health’

Despite being open to criticism for being too broad, too ambitious, too expensive, the Sustainable Development Goals do put emphasis on tackling the cause of problems rather than just trying to fix the end result. In order for our planet and its populations to thrive and flourish, the aims represented are crucial. The health, well-being, and future of our children and grandchildren are tightly bound to these bold aspirations, and the strides we make against ‘tropical diseases’ represent steps forward for us all.

Featured image credit: Street by aamiraimer. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Marc Chagall, religious artist

One hundred thirty years after the birth of Moishe Shagall, as he was known in his small Hasidic neighborhood on the outskirts of Vitebsk, and thirty-two years after the death of Marc Chagall, as he came to be known in the modern art world, we are starting to understand his vision. Somewhere in between his life dates, Chagall became the world’s preeminent Jewish artist at a time when the Russian Jewish intelligentsia fanatically directed itself towards universalism. His stained-glass windows opened onto the world from the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, the United Nations, and the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. It is interesting, then, that Chagall’s radical religious vision has been subsumed under his cultural one in debates over his national identity, whether Jewish, French, or American. However his internationalism manifested itself in his practical life, Chagall’s aesthetic internationalism did not seek to disavow but to embody both God and the nation-state within the unbound, undifferentiated experience of color and light.

Chagall’s most enigmatic expression of his radical religiosity is manifested in his crucifixion paintings, a motif to which he returned throughout his life. In his bestselling novel My Name is Asher Lev (1972), writer Chaim Potok has offered the most cogent if obtuse explanation of Chagall’s Jewish crucifixions through his thinly-veiled character Asher Lev, a Hasidic artist who can’t find a usable iconography for suffering in his own tradition so he appropriates Christian iconography to depict his parents languishing on crucifixes. Potok’s narrative achieves explanatory power but denies Chagall his profound religious vision. In Potok’s hands, Chagall becomes a derivative artist who manages to escape a parochial upbringing devoid of aesthetic sensibility for a bohemian life in Paris. Potok’s narrative elided with a postwar literary preference for the shtetl as the lost site of Jewish authenticity but it denies Chagall, as so many other Jewish artists, religious feeling.

Chagall may have sought a practical exit out of Vitebsk but his aesthetic struggle centered on expressing his religious vision. He tried to articulate his expansive sense of the world throughout his career but Chagall was not a worldly man. In 1915 Chagall sought spiritual guidance from the Hasidic master Rabbi Shalom Dov Ber Schneersohn (1860-1920) near his family’s summer home outside of Liozna. In his memoirs, Chagall recalled his anticipation for his private audience with the rebbe, apprehensive if “any other artists had filed their names with the court registrar.” Chagall sought the rebbe under the pretense of a move to another city but it was actually the pale-faced Jesus that “burned his tongue” for which he sought outlet. He did not muster the courage to ask and, when his wife edited the manuscript for the 1931 publication of My Life, she laid a cynical mirth over the episode and deleted Chagall’s concluding remark that, “if worse came to worse, I would have left with the Rebbe to his capital of Lubavitch.” What this missed opportunity suggests is that the pale apparition that had taken residence in his head was not a secular symbol of martyrdom, as he would later explain, but a profound religious meditation.

It’s too bad Chagall held his tongue. In 1915, Chagall was still a Russian provincial while Rabbi Shalom Dov Ber was a cosmopolite who had traveled throughout Central Europe, spoken with renowned scholars of his generation, been psychoanalyzed by Sigmund Freud and his colleague Wilhelm Stekel, toured Europe’s museums, and penned a philosophical treatise on the sexual identity of the Divine Name. He would not have been scandalized by Chagall’s Jewish Jesus and may have even seen it as an expression of the Hasidic concept of “avodah b’gashmiut” (worship through corporeality). We’ll never know.

Marc Chagall, White Crucifixion, 1938. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

We do know what Pope Francis saw in Chagall’s image of Christ nearly a century later when he admitted, on April 9, 2013, that Chagall’s White Crucifixion (1938) was his favorite painting. In singling out this particular work, Pope Francis also found a symbol par excellence for a post-Holocaust, post-Vatican II world for Chagall depicted Jews as victims persecuted in the name of Christ, effectively reversing the historical representation of Jews as Christ-killers. But, while this aspect of Chagall’s work will no doubt animate our collective consciousness, Pope Francis also acknowledged the religious nature of the work. If Potok understood Chagall’s Jewish Jesus motif as a derivative escape valve from religious frustration, Pope Francis made no distinctions between Chagall’s religion and his art. In the eyes of God’s representative on earth, Chagall’s White Crucifixion can no longer sustain a cultural interpretation rendered in a derivative style but a magnificent religious image on par with the world’s greatest religious masterpieces.

And, Chagall’s crucifix scene is an avowedly Jewish image. Christ is wrapped in a loincloth made of a the ritual Jewish tallit, surrounded by Houses of Worship, Torah scrolls, and a lit seven-branched menorah that had long symbolized messianic redemption in Jewish iconography. These recognizable Jewish symbols are consumed in flames in a work that turns out to be a complete reversal of the crucifixion motif. Conventional Christian art represents the submergence of the world’s pain into the body of Christ. In Chagall’s painting, on the other hand, Christ’s body stretches out in complete repose while suffering emanates to the world around him. While the scene is surrounded by the chaos of a violent and suffering world, Chagall’s profound identification lies with Christ, into whose disinterested face Chagall poured a disproportionate attention. The painting may provoke contemplations on the love of God in the face of His indifference but the painting itself is a meditation on the affective experience of God’s indifference. As an artist, Chagall knew the profound excitement over one’s own creation. In imagining what it might feel like to experience neither pleasure nor torture from your creation, Chagall arrived at Jewish death. Chagall washes the scene with a white that contains all the colors of the spectrum, attempting to reach into the heart of the Creator, what Hasidim call devekut, modernists call the sublime, and Catholics call transcendence.

Featured image credit: “Detail of East Window, All Saints, Tudeley- designed by Marc Chagall”, photographed by Tony Grist.  Public Domain via  Wikimedia Commons .

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How to measure social pain

On Friday 24 June, 2016, I awoke in my Berlin apartment and eagerly logged on to see the news of the United Kingdom’s decision to remain in the European Union. As a British migrant who had called Germany home for 7 years of my adult life, I had come to have an acute sense of the importance of EU membership. While I could make any number of arguments in the abstract, at heart I had a personal vested interest in the Union, for it was my bread and butter. The news of a narrow majority in favour of Brexit was a profound shock. I grieved. The hollow, empty, gut-punched, sick feeling that leaves one weak and needing to sit and to hold one’s head in one’s hands: that was Brexit for me. The initial effect lasted a few hours. Afterwards, a benumbed sense of incredulity and denial set in, for many weeks, in which I daily looked for signs that the vote wasn’t binding, that there had been a terrible mistake, that what was done could be undone. While the terms of the departure are far from fixed, the denial is over, replaced by constant barbed reminders of what has been lost and of the meagre hopes of anything to be gained. Such are the painful stages of grief.

Against the grain of much twentieth-century research on the nature and function of pain in humans, which tended to focus on injury and the bodily mechanics of pain signalling, recent neuroscientific research has opened a new front in the study of social and emotional pain. The premise is simple enough: when a person says they are in pain, they are in pain. It doesn’t matter whether the cause is a broken leg or bereavement or social isolation, pain is pain. The question, then, is whether what is happening in the brain corroborates what people say about being in pain, irrespective of whether there is a physical injury.

It transpires that pain only becomes meaningful, only becomes pain per se, when ‘painful’ stimuli have been affectively processed by the brain. From two different research directions, we have come to understand pain as something that the brain constructs, according to the cultural context, experience, fears, anxieties, and aversions of the person in pain.

The first direction comes from the study of those with pain asymbolia, a congenital condition characterised by full sensory awareness of the kind of stimuli that we would consider likely to cause pain, but marked by a complete absence of any kind of affective response to such stimuli. There is no fear, no anxiety, no flinch when a person with pain asymbolia is met with what we might call threat. On a sprained ankle, such a person would not limp. Coming too close to a fire, such a person would feel heat, but not aversion. The dangers, of course, are obvious, and the problem has been located as a failure in the brain’s affective processing. In sum, ‘pain’ without affective meaning is not really pain at all.

If this is a negative deduction about the importance of affect in pain, the second research direction seems to confirm the relationship in a positive way. Naomi Eisenberger’s now famous ‘cyberball’ experiment showed that social exclusion – in this case, participants were excluded from an electronic game of catch – was affectively processed in the brain in a similar way to those enduring physical torment. Exclusion, it transpires, hurts.

As I bundled these research strands together with my own on the history of pain, I came to understand that, for most of history, people have had an implicit understanding of the reality of emotional or social pain. An etymological and translation journey through the languages of pain shows a clear and long-standing relationship between pain, grief, woe, toil, agony and despair. When people talk of their pain at the loss of a loved one, or at the end of a relationship, they are not employing a metaphor. Broken hearts are, in fact, painful.

All of which brings me back to Brexit, the feelings of which have since been augmented by a series of national calamities. I do not think it unreasonable to talk, under such conditions, of a nation in pain, and to mean pain literally and not metaphorically. Yet we are remarkably poorly kitted out to measure such a phenomenon, let alone treat it. The world is awash in happiness indices, and the politics of social happiness have become increasingly important in recent years. But what of pain indices? To what extent does a nation really suffer, as a collective? Can it be analysed, studied methodically, and can the pain be salved? If pain is caused politically, is there also a politics of pain relief? These are questions to which I have no answers, but we cannot begin to derive them until we first acknowledge the reality of social pain, writ large.

Featured image credit: Person Homeless Bullied Hiding by Wokandapix. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Embracing tension, space, and the unknown in music therapy research

Every three years, the international music therapy community gathers at the World Congress of Music Therapy. This meeting of students, clinicians, educators, and scholars offers opportunities to examine culturally embedded assumptions about the nature of “music” and “health”; to learn how the relationship between music and health differs across cultures; and to directly connect with colleagues from across the globe. The World Congress, this year held at Tsukuba, Japan, also provides the opportunity to reflect on three years’ worth of clinical, scholarly, and theoretical progress.

Unexpectedly, the expanding role of reflexivity in music therapy was a common thread. Reflexivity, according to Bruscia, is defined as “the therapist’s efforts to continually bring into awareness, evaluate, and when necessary, modify one’s work with a client”. The concept has important implications for the music therapy clinician and researcher.

For the clinician, reflexivity involves a challenge to be:

mindful of the cultural, social, and spiritual factors present in the therapy setting;
self-aware of personal motivations and how they may impact the therapist-client relationship; and
responsive to in-the-moment events that can inform or change the therapeutic process (e.g., a client becoming unexpectedly agitated to a familiar, oft-requested song).

Through these perspectives, music therapy clinicians can leave space for clients to be involved in their own therapy process, allowing for them to articulate their understanding of their own illness, disability, and needs, as well as to identify their personal goals for therapy. This movement moves towards a dynamic process of therapist-client collaboration—one in which problems, interventions, and goals are identified based on working together rather than being “prescribed.”

Such a process may occur, for example, in symptom management. A recent study highlighted the “silent and subjective symptoms” when articulating a case for strengths-based and resource-oriented treatment approaches for the chronically mentally ill. Traditional treatment approaches emphasize more observable symptoms (e.g., on-task responses to group activities) that can readily translate to treatment plans. However, in the process they may overlook or marginalize needs more crucial to the client (e.g., the need to feel belonged in their community). By considering the client’s perspectives and needs, music therapists are empowered to facilitate therapeutic processes more relevant to the client.

This process may also manifest when the music therapist is from a different cultural background than the client. Music therapists are extensively trained to facilitate – using voice, guitar, piano, and percussion – live music experiences that support clients to engage through their own musicking. However, this training has been largely predicated on a Western, classical tradition. What are best practices when an Indian client requests a raga, or a Mexican client requests mariachi? Do we attempt faithful recreations of musical genres that we are neither musically nor culturally trained in, or do we play recordings and risk upholding commonly held assumptions that music therapy is equivalent to a radio or CD player? Even if research was more conclusive on this topic, there is way to manualize the “right” way to respond given variations across therapeutic situations. Music therapists are therefore challenged to be mindful of (a) their cultural background and associated assumptions, (b) their client’s cultural background and expectations of the music therapist, and (c) how clinically-informed and culturally-informed goals can interact to address holistic needs.

A similar challenge arises for the music therapy scholar. Here, the concept of reflexivity involves a challenge to:

be adaptable to the research, philosophical question(s), and emerging data, rather than adhere to a pre-conceived agenda;
be daring to embrace potential tension and discomfort of what we do not know;
challenge our assumptions.


Education Minister John O’Dowd with music therapist, Jenny Kirkwood and pupil Tessa Martin at the official opening of new facilities for Tor Bank School in Dundonald. Image by Northern Ireland Executive. CC BY-ND 2.0 via Flickr.

Several music therapy scholars seem to be embracing these challenges and using them to spark innovative ways of approaching and conducting research. This includes, for example, developing music-based assessment for neurodevelopmental disorders, utilizing neuroimaging in development of music interventions with mental health populations, and expanding the breadth of multicultural competencies.

One development in particular—arts-based research—has demonstrated considerable growth over the past five years. There is a saying: Writing about music is like dancing about architecture. This suggests we may lose or distort something essential when one medium (music) is translated into another (written word).

Arts-based research seeks to minimize such loss or distortions by offering ways of designing studies, collecting and analyzing data, and reporting results that are authentic to therapeutic music interactions. This means embracing the hard-to-describe aspects of engaging in a music experience, aspects that more traditionally have been whittled into codes and themes. While more easily analyzed and understood, these codes and themes are also arguably less authentic to the music experience itself. Thus, arts-based research embraces mediums such as music, movement, and visual arts as valid to the collection, analysis, and reporting of research findings.

This growing understanding of reflexivity in music therapy has stimulated exciting new directions in research and clinical practice that will likely be sustained in years to come. We look forward to seeing what new areas of growth this summer’s World Congress will stimulate.

Featured image credit: piano by Clark Young. CC0 Public Domain via Unsplash.

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Boasting and bragging

No one likes boasters. People are expected to be modest (especially when they have nothing to show). For that reason, the verbs meaning “to boast” are usually “low” or slangy (disparaging) and give etymologists grief and sufficient reason to be modest. They tend to surface in print late and lack good cognates. For instance, one of the Old English words for “boast” was bōian, but dictionaries do not connect them, though the phonetic and semantic affinity between the two seems rather obvious. It is customary to compare bōian and Latin fāri “to speak,” both allegedly going back to the ancient root bha. If they are indeed related, Engl. fatuous “stupid and devoid of substance,” from Latin, can be related to fatus, the perfect participle of fāri, with the development from “something said” to “a silly thing said” (such an etymology, with a slight variation, has already been proposed in the recent past, and I believe it is not an exercise in fatuity). Another Old English verb for “boast” has become Modern yelp.

However, bōian might have had no “respectable” cognates and been a sound-imitative verb, a formation like Engl. boo (as in “he cannot say boo to a goose” or in “to boo a performer”). The earliest recorded sense of the verb boast, which surfaced in texts only in the thirteenth century, was “to threaten.” Boast is believed to be of French (Anglo-French) origin, but since its etymon is unknown, we end up exactly where we began. Could boast be bo-, as in bōian, to which a pseudo-suffix –st was added, on the analogy of roast, toast, and the like? (Incidentally, –st is a common Germanic suffix, as is seen in Engl. cost, rest, and many words outside English.)

Finally, it would be tempting to connect boast with boisterous, whose original sense was “bulky.” Boastful people talk big, so that the connection looks moderately plausible. Boisterous is a by-form of the now archaic boistous, another word of unknown origin. As we can see, wherever we turn, not a single word has a pedigree worth boasting of or about. Some have initial puzzling consonant groups. Thus, in Gothic (an old Germanic language) and Russian, the verb for “boast” begins with hv ~ hw, though hwopjan and khvastat’ cannot possibly be related.

To brag is even worse than to boast, because bragging presupposes pompous, arrogant, cocky boasting. Brag began its life in English as an adjective (“bold, spirited”; “boastful”), now lost. Phrases like my brag race horse are modern. The verb does not predate the fourteenth century. Its origin is predictably unknown. Similar br-verbs exist in Celtic, French, Dutch, and Scandinavian. If all of them are sound-imitative, with reference to noise (like, possibly, break), they might have arisen in all those languages independently. Nor is it excluded that some are borrowings. Slang (and that also holds for medieval slang) is often international, and people brag and boast everywhere in more or less the same way. Since the Dutch verb was attested much later than the English one, it could hardly have been the sought-for lender. The same holds for Celtic, but French, on the face o it is a thinkable source.

For quite some time, the best etymologists derived the French verb from Danish. At present, there is no enthusiasm for this hypothesis, and indeed it has little appeal. Instead of explicating many phonetic details, which the interested reader may find in Skeat, I’ll offer my own derivation of brag. It is as shaky as all the previous ones, but has the attraction of novelty.

Close to brag, at least in our dictionaries, is Old Engl. brēgan “to frighten,” which Junius, one of our earliest English etymologists, compared with brag. According to the rules of ablaut, the ruthless tyrant of etymology to which so many lines have been devoted in this blog, short a (as in brag) and long e (ē, as in brēgan) do not belong together, but ē in brēgan goes back to long œ, the umlaut of ō, as is seen from the noun brōga “terror, danger; prodigy,” and ō is a legitimate partner of a. It will be remembered that the earliest recorded sense of boast was also “to threaten.” If my hypothesis is correct, bragging, perhaps a word of the military vocabulary, referred not to noise but to fear or rather to attempts at intimidation.

Among other things, the origin of brag proved so hard to discover because the word ends in –g. Old English final –g regularly turned into –w in the Middle period, but stayed intact in Scandinavian. That is why a look at such etymological doublets as draw and drag tells us immediately that draw is the continuation of an Old English form, while drag is a borrowing from Scandinavian. Some English words do indeed have modern reflexes ending in –g: such are dog, stag, frog, and a few others, but originally they had long g. I suspect that the verb brag existed in Old English and had the form braggan, even though the complex brag– first turned up in our written monuments only in the thirteenth century, and all we have is the Middle English verb braggen.

What do they have in common? In Old English, the names of all three ended in long –g.

French braguer “to vaunt, brag” and brague “ostentation” were recorded about three centuries later than brag, so that, like their Dutch analog, they are not good candidates for the etymon of the English adjective and verb. Braggart is indeed a borrowing of French braggard, but it reached English only in the sixteenth century. Spencer’s word braggadocio is of the same age. Once again chronology militates against the borrowing of brag.

Braggadocio at its best.

If brag is of Scandinavian provenance (older books said “provenience”), it may be related to Old Icelandic bragnar “men” (and, by the usual extension, “warriors”), bragr “chief, prince,” its homonym bragr “poetry,” and Bragi, the name of the god of poetry, of the earliest skald (a court poet of old), and later a “regular” proper name. However, poets are not braggarts and have never been looked upon as such. The etymology of the words meaning “poet” tells us that poets were thought to be famous for revealing things, for stitching words together, or for “finding” plots and words (both troubadour and trouvère mean “finder’; Old English and Old Icelandic poets, as we read, also “found” words and plots). The function of some poets was seemingly to mock. But nowhere do we find epic or any other ancient poets renowned for bragging. I am afraid that we should leave the origin of Bragi in limbo (not that the conjectures on this subject ae lacking). What matters is that this word could not have yielded Engl. brag.   Bragr “prince” is perhaps a better candidate, for princes were commanders and could “frighten” or “threaten” their enemies. But the origin of bragr “chief” and its Old English look-alike brego (the same meaning) is unknown, and, according to the ironclad law of semantic reconstruction, one obscure word should never be used for explaining the origin of another word, equally obscure.

This is a troubadour, a finder par excellence.

Rather probably, brag is an Old English formation. Quite early it seems to have become part of the soldiers’ slang and infiltrated Dutch, French, and Celtic. It was “low” when it was coined and has never lost its vulgar overtones.

Image credits: (1) “Frog” by Couleur, Public Domain via Pixabay. (2) “Deer” by diane616, Public Domain via Pixabay. (3) “Weimaraner puppy” by Cedric Clooth, Public Domain via Pixabay. (4 and Featured) “Peresv b” by Viktor Vasnetsov, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. (5) FR 854, folio 49r, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Macronomics En Marche

Emmanuel Macron has completely upended French politics. Just over a year after founding a new centrist political party, En Marche (“On the move”), the former investment banker and Minister of Economy and Finance was elected president of France on 7 May by an overwhelming majority. Within the next few weeks, En Marche fielded a full slate of candidates for elections to the National Assembly and, on 18 June, won 350 out of a total of 577 seats. Given Macron’s popularity and commanding political position, he may well succeed in pushing his economic program through Parliament.

France has the sixth largest economy in the world and, after Germany and the UK, the largest in Europe. A healthy French economy will contribute to the revitalization of the European and world economies, and so it is worthwhile to take a closer look at ‘Macronomics.’

At the very top of Macron’s agenda is labor market reform which his Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, has pledged to enact by September. French employers have long complained about the inflexibility of labor law which sets wages on an industry-by-industry basis, mandates overtime for anyone who works more than 35 hours per week, and makes it nearly impossible to fire workers. These factors have led employers to get around the restrictions by using fixed-term employment contracts, some for as short as one month, and are widely seen as an obstacle to increased productivity and economic growth.

Macron has advocated increasing labor market flexibility by decentralizing the wage-setting process, allowing individual firms to negotiate with workers over working hours and pay rather than be bound by sector-wide agreements.

Despite his popularity and parliamentary majority, labor reform may prove tricky to implement. Labor union leaders are cool to these reforms and, unsurprisingly, have urged the government to proceed slowly and with caution. Previous attempts at labor market reform have backfired on the presidents who proposed them. Macron’s immediate predecessor, François Hollande, abandoned a modest labor market reform in the face of strikes and parliamentary opposition in 2016. President Jacques Chirac was forced to back down on a 2006 youth labor law reform in the face of widespread opposition. Following through on this campaign promise will be an early test of Macron’s ability to lead France.

 Given Macron’s popularity and commanding political position, he may well succeed in pushing his economic program through Parliament.

Macron famously campaigned on the slogan, “neither the right nor the left.” And on fiscal policy he brings a bit of both to the table. From the right, he has promised to bring France’s budget deficit down to three percent of GDP, in line with the European Union’s target for member states. He has pledged to reduce spending by €60 billion per year and to cut 120,000 civil service jobs through attrition. He has also called for cutting the corporate tax from 33% percent to the European Union average of 25%, and to reduce some individual taxes and social insurance contributions.

From the left, he has promised to increase public spending by €50 billion over five years on training, energy and the environment, transportation infrastructure, health, and the modernization of the government services sector. His plans envisage reduced class sizes, particularly in poorer areas. He has called for recruiting another 10,000 police officers and increasing the number of prison spaces by 15,000. This agenda will completely satisfy neither left nor right, but if he can pull it off, it may reinvigorate the French—and European—economies.

In terms of governance, Macron supports tougher regulations on parliamentarians, banning them from doing any consulting work and from employing family or friends. Presidential candidate François Fillon’s chances were sunk when it was discovered that he had paid his wife more than €800,000 as his parliamentary assistant over the course of 15 years. Such a reform is long overdue.

Finally, Macron is both a staunch Europeanist and, more generally, a globalist. Distinctly different from Marine le Pen, his opponent in the presidential run-off election, Macron is fully committed to the European Union and more open immigration policies. He has proposed increasing the fiscal powers of the EU, giving it a finance minister and debt-raising capacity, a proposition which is not likely to appeal to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who remains suspicious of any moves that would leave Germany on the hook for the budgetary messes of its EU neighbors.


Macron has proposed bringing France’s defense budget up to 2% of GDP to meet NATO’s target for member countries (currently only the United States, Greece, Estonia, the UK, and Poland meet that target). And he supports the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada, the US-EU version of which was killed by Donald Trump.

Emmanuel Macron has set out an ambitious and sensible agenda, including labor market reform, reducing the size of government, targeted fiscal expansion, and government reform. Perhaps most hopeful is that he is pursuing an emphatically globalist path. With recent retreats from openness, as illustrated by Britain’s Brexit folly and America’s ill-advised election of Donald Trump, we can only wish Emmanuel Macron bonne chance.

Featured image credit: Macron President, Emmanuel Macron campaign poster, Paris by Lorie Shaull. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Flickr.

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Ezra’s executive order

In one form or another, executive orders have long been issued by the highest office in the land to implement policy or highlight priorities. In theory, an executive order is not new law, yet a controversial aspect is the power of an individual to control the laws of the land with the stroke of a pen and the net effect may be an actual change in law.

The manner in which Ezra singlehandedly addresses a pressing matter can likewise be viewed as an implementation of existing law. He is in Jerusalem for a mere four months when some of the officials approach him with a charge: the people of Israel, the priests, and the Levites have not separated from “the peoples of the land”—that is, foreigners—and they have married foreign daughters (Ezra 9:1-2). This charge is formulated on a pastiche of texts from Deuteronomy and Leviticus and presented as an act of sacrilege. Unwilling or unable to take care of what they see is the problem themselves, these officials challenge Ezra to act.

Ezra ultimately rises to the challenge and issues an order:

“You have trespassed by bringing home foreign women, thus aggravating the guilt of Israel. So now, make confession to the LORD, God of your fathers, and do His will, and separate yourselves from the peoples of the land and from the foreign women.” (Ezra 10:10b-11, NJPS)

After some initial hesitation, Ezra’s order is implemented after the guilty parties are identified and the foreign women along with their children are expelled from Jerusalem (Ezra 10:12-44). As the end of this episode suggests, in Ezra’s Jerusalem, the buck stops with Ezra.

This episode does not rank among the most edifying parts of the biblical text. Rather than dealing directly with the guilty parties, Ezra forces the separation of families and, in what amounts to a swift and sweeping deportation without due process, expels non-Israelite women and children. For his role, Ezra has been labelled as an anti-assimilationist and the one who with a single stroke of his pen officially codifies the biblical ban on inter-cultural marriage.

As harsh as it appears, we should at the very least try to understand the rationale behind Ezra’s order. When the returnees from Babylon arrive in Jerusalem with Ezra, they are returning to a city that is under the rule of a foreign power. Included in the population are “the peoples of the land.” With this geo-political situation in mind, some of the followers of the Israelite cult foresee an extreme scenario: if every Israelite male marries non-Israelite females and the children born to them do not identify as an Israelite, then no one will be left to ensure the upkeep of the Israelite cult through the proper observance of any of its commandments. With the arduous task of the reconstruction of the Israelite cult in Jerusalem at hand, the responsibility to prevent a catastrophe falls on Ezra.

Ezra addresses the situation through his own expertise. He is a “priest-scribe, a scholar in matters concerning the commandments of the LORD and His laws and rules to Israel” (Ezra 7:11, NJPS) and has access to “the scroll of the Teaching [torah] of Moses” (Neh. 8:1-3, NJPS). This Teaching is commonly thought to be the Pentateuch in some form. Ezra grounds his order on a commandment in Deuteronomy: “Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons” (Deut. 7:3, NJPS). Ezra, however, goes beyond the laws in Deuteronomy. Whereas Deuteronomy prohibits marriage with the Canaanite nations (see also Deut. 20:16-18), Ezra’s order reflects a much more expansive application of his legal source—he bans not only marriage with any foreigner but also any contact with a foreigner.

Ezra’s order is not actually new law. It is a directive, albeit one informed by a very broad understanding of existing law. Ezra agrees that a crisis is looming within his own community and his order, as extreme as it appears, aims to preserve his cult by eliminating the possibility, however remote, that a foreign population will mingle with the Israelites and eventually overwhelm the cult.

In theory, Ezra’s executive order on the separation from all foreigners addresses the challenges of maintaining his cult under a foreign power. How this actually translates into practice is open to interpretation. It is debatable if Ezra achieves his goals or if his order’s intended and unintended results are desirable. Some communities may even uphold Ezra’s order as the justification for banning any action that could threaten the future viability of a particular culture. Other communities may dispute the legality of Ezra’s order and, just as any executive order is subject to review, the merits of this order deserve to be scrutinized by its critics.

Featured image credit: Codex Amiatinus (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, MS Amiatinus). Public doman via Wikimedia Commons.

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A farewell to former OUPblog editor, Dan Parker

I have been fortunate enough to work on the OUPblog every single day I’ve been at Oxford University Press. When I first started in the UK Publicity team nearly six years ago, I was responsible for commissioning, editing, and coding blog posts, and I instantly fell in love with the channel. As my responsibilities for the OUPblog grew, so too did my attachment to it. It was a huge honour to become the editor of the OUPblog last May.

My favourite thing about the OUPblog is the breadth and diversity of the content we publish. It has been an absolute pleasure to work with content for the blog and learn something completely new each day. I guess that’s one of the reasons the OUPblog has been so successful for the past eleven years, and why it continues to appeal to a large community of devoted readers.

I want to say a huge thank you to all the previous editors and deputy editors who made my job infinitely easier. I’m also grateful to all of the incredible contributors and authors who write for the OUPblog. I have enjoyed editing and reading your articles over the years. And a special thank you to Alice Northover, the editor who handed me the reins back in May last year and who taught me everything I needed to know.

The OUPblog tagline is “Academic Insights for the Thinking World”. I am confident that we have upheld that mantra during my time as editor. I may not be working on the OUPblog anymore, but I will be reading it every day. I hope you will join me.

Fare thee well OUPblog – and adieu, dear readers.

GIF via Giphy.

Featured image credit: Night sky. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay. 

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Systems of law and the European project

Since the end of the Second World War, the European project has met with difficulties and even crises. Its momentum has, however, been strong enough to fend off these turbulent undercurrents, and it has developed incrementally in the decades since. Supported by its two pillars, The Council of Europe and the European Union, it is a Europe built on law, and the project is progressively taking on the contours of a new legal system.

The Council of Europe was founded in 1949, and within its framework the European Convention for the protection of human rights and fundamental liberties was adopted in 1950. Focused on the rule of law and the safeguarding of liberties, it developed over time to cover all of wider Europe, including Russia and Turkey, bringing together forty-seven states and 820 million citizens.

The European Union was created on the basis of the initial treaties, which created the first three communities—the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Economic Community, and the European Atomic Energy Community. The Single Act (1986) and the Treaties of Maastricht (1992), of Amsterdam (1997), of Nice (2001) and of Lisbon (2007) gave it its current shape. The Treaty of Lisbon incorporates the Charter of Fundamental Rights, adopted in 2000. From its initial six members, the Union has enlarged to twenty-eight present members, though the prospect of Brexit will reduce this number to twenty-seven.

London Brexit pro-EU protest March 25 2017 36”. CC0 Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Within the framework of the European Union, the treaties making up the primary law envisaged a body of secondary law, principally made up of regulations and directives; these have become an important source of law for the Member States and, in a growing number of fields, also for individuals. More and more, these different legal texts, together with the European Convention, are applied both by the Court of Justice of the European Union (which includes both the Court and the General Court) and the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg. In close touch with domestic jurisdictions, these courts are developing a European law in their jurisprudence. A common hierarchy of norms is developing, which combines the supremacy of constitutional norms of each State with the superiority of European law over domestic law. Shared guiding principles—non-discrimination, proportionality, subsidiarity, and legal security—are taking root. At the same time, a common understanding of the principle of fair trial before an independent and impartial tribunal is crystallizing.

Within this construction, domestic law plays its full role and European law synthetizes the principles of its different systems. The reciprocal interaction goes between constitutional courts and domestic supreme courts, on the one hand, and the European institutions and courts on the other. Increasingly, comparative law is for each State a source of inspiration. A cross-fertilization of systems is taking place as a consequence, on the basis of the domestic laws, EU law, and the law of the Convention. In this way a European public law is born from mutual influences acting in concert. Borrowing both from common law and from civil law, it is emerging as an original model that is taking up its rightful place amongst the great legal systems.

For those States that are members of the Council of Europe, the European Convention of Human Rights is a powerful mechanism for the collective protection of fundamental rights. Even in those countries that have for a long time offered legal protection for human rights, the Convention, dynamically applied by the Strasbourg Court, exercises an influence on the law, contributes to the evolution of case-law, and casts a light on blind spots. Within the European Union, the solidarity and convergence are even stronger. The nature of the law of the European Union gives it a particular force and authority.

Beyond Brexit, the countries of Europe find themselves, by reason of their law and their courts, on the move towards a central system of European law. The manner in which domestic administration is conducted, too, is evolving in the direction of a shared model. What this will mean for the world at large remains to be seen, but its consequences are sure to have global reach.

Featured image credit: “European flag in Karlskrona 2011”. CC0 Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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