Community Music in Contested Spaces: Towards Abolition
By: Erika Severyns
Introduction: Community Arts in the UK
I first encountered the community arts movement in Britain as a political movement, one that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s out of artists’ conviction that everyone should have access to meaningful participation in culture, and from a belief in the ideal of cultural democracy. The movement was, of course, never singular or unified – it was an assemblage of diverse practices, ideas, and people, and the history of community arts in the UK is therefore a complicated, non-linear, and sometimes contradictory one.
Early community arts initiatives such as Welfare State International and Inter-Action were not only concerned with access to culture, but with reconstituting social relations through collective creative practice. Working across housing estates, hospitals, and prisons, these projects gestured toward forms of cultural production that moved beyond institutional limitations, and art historian Claire Bishop (2012, 177) suggested that community arts provided “the blueprint for participatory democracy”. It’s within this history that community music developed, offering a musical response to the call to spread creative practice across all sectors of society.
In practice, community music usually takes the form of collective music-making where participation is more important than expertise and perfection. This might involve a group of people coming together to sing, write songs, improvise, or create sound collaboratively. The emphasis is on shared ownership and the relationships that emerge through making music together, and on using music as a medium through which social relations are formed, contested, and reimagined.
Community Music and Border Abolition
I began my own practice as a community musician working in Direct Provision, Ireland’s reception system for people seeking international protection. I came to this work out of a commitment to migrant justice. As a migrant myself, I can only imagine how the ordinary social and cultural challenges of moving countries are compounded by an asylum regime that withholds recognition and belonging.
I entered Direct Provision holding firmly to values of cultural democracy, equitable participation, and inclusion. Yet, it quickly became clear that this framework did not fully account for the structural conditions in which the music-making happened. How does migration policy shape the lives of workshop participants? What is my role as a facilitator in this environment? Which narratives do I reinforce through my practice? And when does the impulse to care for participants risk reproducing the system’s logic of control?
While community music as a field often positions itself in terms of inclusion and empowerment, celebratory narratives of intercultural exchange and self-expression can obscure the structural conditions in which community music takes place, particularly in contexts shaped by migration governance and carceral control. Abolitionist theorist and longtime activist Harsha Walia (2021) conceptualises borders as tools of racial capitalism rooted in colonialism, extraction, and imperialist legacies. If migration governance is a mechanism that produces global inequalities, migrant justice should interrogate the legitimacy of carceral border regimes.
Meanwhile, the emphasis on inclusion and participation in community music, while important, can at times align too comfortably with institutional priorities, leading to projects that stabilise rather than unsettle carceral infrastructures. Within this tension, an abolitionist perspective becomes necessary, extending the commitment to power redistribution and structural transformation in the contested spaces in which participation can take place.
This raises a broader question about the relationship between cultural democracy and abolition. Cultural democracy seeks to redistribute power through cultural participation, yet it operates within a liberal democracy that remains entangled with state violence and carceral structures. In this sense, its transformative potential is limited.
In Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois offers a way of thinking through these considerations with his concept of ‘abolition democracy’, based on prefigurative practices that consider “alternative modes of citizenship beyond the material, ideal, and embodied limits of liberal bourgeois democracy” (Obst 2022).
While Du Bois does not explicitly centre culture, his emphasis on “the feeling of equality and good will” points to the importance of affective and relational dimensions in building a just society (Du Bois ca.1937, 125). It is within this domain that community music might play a role, supporting the abolitionist work of power redistribution while prefiguring different ways of being together, grounded in love, recognition, and creativity.
Community Music and Abolitionist Imagination
Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free. (adrienne maree brown, 2017, 18)
For people navigating carceral migration regimes, freedom cannot be realised through imagination alone, but is a part of a collective and material struggle against the systems that determine whose futures are imaginable in the first place. Access to creative participation usually isn’t deemed as urgent as access to basic needs like shelter and food, yet abolitionist struggles foreground imagination, allowing us to conceive of alternatives to the world we live in. As adrienne maree brown stresses, our world largely depends on “who gets to imagine the future” (brown 2017, 163). Community arts aim to redistribute access to imagination, ensuring equitable participation in creative practice. As abolitionist educator Bettina Love (2019, 101) argues, art holds particular power for those on the margins, who:
refuse to be invisible. Their art makes them visible and makes clear their intentions for love, peace, liberation, and joy.
Some community music projects already gesture towards alternative futures – IMAJIN: Caring Communities is an international music and justice inquiry network that focuses on how music-making in carceral settings might support communities of care. Mary Cohen, one of its co-founders, is currently leading the Inside Outside Collaborative Songwriting Project that partners incarcerated songwriters with songwriters on the outside. This work places relationality at its centre, challenging cultures of punishment and working toward sociality rooted in care rather than revenge. Such practices create spaces where participants are invited not only to express themselves, but to rehearse different ways of being together.
Community music, however, is often fraught with contradictions. It can be co-opted, instrumentalised, and constrained by institutional funding structures. Community musicians often struggle to survive amidst budget cuts in the cultural sector. These tensions are well-documented and familiar, not only within community arts, but across different fields. While it is easy to turn towards critique, it is equally important to keep looking for pockets of possibility and hope and notice where dreams and imagination might emerge.
Conclusion
If community music is to contribute meaningfully to abolitionist futures, community musicians must move beyond the language of empowerment and inclusion towards structural critique. This means situating our practice explicitly within the context of carcerality rather than sidestepping the political conditions that shape our work.
Since community music runs the risk of offering legitimisation through our presence, it is important to resist instrumentalisation by institutions, refusing integrationist agendas and embracing the creative gifts of participants. In doing so, community music can become a space in which different social relations are rehearsed, offering a glimpse into a collective life where social relationships are reimagined for a just world.
As Robin D.G. Kelley (2002, xii) reminds us:
Without new visions we don’t know what to build, only what to knock down. We not only end up confused, rudderless, and cynical, but we forget that making a revolution is not a series of clever manoeuvres and tactics but a process that can and must transform us
Community music alone won’t dismantle prisons or abolish borders. But it can cultivate and nurture the imaginative capacity through which structural transformation might become thinkable and prefigure relationships and affective experiences that might support that transformation.
This requires community musicians to embrace solidarity over charity, to engage in reflexive accountability, and to interrogate our own complicity within the systems we claim to challenge. Rather than asking how to work within carceral regimes, it’s time to ask how community music might support us in the struggle of moving beyond them.
Erika Severyns is a community musician and doctoral researcher at Ghent University. Her work explores power dynamics in community music practices with people on the move, drawing on abolitionist and critical theory.
References:
Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso.
brown, adrienne maree. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1935) 1998. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Free Press.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1937) 2007. A World Search for Democracy. Edited by Herbert Aptheker. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Kelley, Robin D. G. 2002. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press.
Love, Bettina L. 2019. We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom. Boston: Beacon Press.
Obst, Anthony. 2022. “Revolution of Thought and Action: W. E. B. Du Bois’s World Search for Abolition Democracy.” Lateral 11 (2). https://doi.org/10.25158/L11.2.3.
Walia, Harsha. 2021. Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. Chicago: Haymarket Books.