Music for education & wellbeing podcast [43] TRANSCRIPT: Erin Johnson-Williams and Caz Creagh from the AHRC Hub for Public Engagement with Music Research

AH: Hello and welcome. In this episode, I’m talking with Erin Johnson-Williams and Caz Creagh from the AHRC hub for public engagement with music research, which is part of the Centre for Music Education and Social Justice at Southampton University. I should point out that AHRC stands for the Arts and Humanities Research Centre. So why I thought this was interesting is that the hub aims to connect music research to real world settings, and the really powerful bit is that it funds research that then informs government policy to have a lasting impact on people and music across the UK. So it touches on social justice and music research and evaluation, communications and influencing all the things I find absolutely fascinating, and I hope you will too. So a really warm welcome to you both, Erin and Caz, and thanks so much for taking the time to come on the podcast.

EJW: Thank you for having us.

AH: Brilliant to have you here. So that is quite a mouthful of a title that I read out then. Can I start by asking what the hub is all about in layperson’s terms? What does it do, firstly?

EJW: Okay, sure. So I’m Erin, and I’m the project lead for the hub, and I come at this as an academic, and then Caz, well, you can introduce yourself Caz, but Caz is coming at this from the monitoring and learning perspective. So with this hub, it’s a new scheme from the government, from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, that’s never existed before. So it’s for an academic institution, in this case, the Department of Music at the University of Southampton, to be the AHRC hub for public engagement and music research, which means that we get the privilege of funding, using AHRC money to fund four large projects on public engagement, social justice and music research, which is very, very exciting. So it’s a two year project. We’ll fund four projects. These are called spoke projects because of the sort of metaphor of the hub. Each project will be a collaboration between an academic and a non- academic partner, and each project will receive about £75,000-£100,000 each over about a 12-month period. So at the moment we’ve launched our call, we’re about to embark on a nationwide tour across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, to run networking events, and we’re really excited to see what applications can come in.

AH: Caz, did you have anything to add?

CC: Oh, that was a really great summary.

EJW: I’ve been working on it. [Laughs]

CC: I think I’d probably add that this is music research that is really outward facing, so we are really keen to connect with all the different values that music research brings through these projects. And because of that, the way that we are supporting the projects to grow and to learn includes lots of additional things that you wouldn’t normally see in a sort of a research grant setup. So there’s lots of focus on public engagement and policy and thinking about the value generated through the research process and maximising the use of that.

AH: And so what does it hope to achieve?

EJW: That’s a really great question. In really sort of bare bones terms, the hub hopes to achieve, you know, funding these four projects, and then each project does something really positive, and there’s some outcomes. I think, if we think of that in a really ambitious way, the hub is also starting something where we’re actually privileging social justice, public engagement, and privileging the voices of non-academics, particularly, you know, grassroots communities that tend not to have traditionally been included in a lot of funding proposal. So really ambitiously, the hopes the hub is hoping to achieve, kind of setting a little bit of a tone in exposing the types of things that can receive big funding for projects, and it may be demystifying what that looks like, if that makes sense. Now, Caz is really good. I’m going to hand over to you now, Caz, to take my ambition and put it into something measurable, because that’s your superpower. But yeah, in terms of achieving and mapping that. Yeah, what are your thoughts on that?

CC: Oh, I think, I think we’re sowing seeds. I think there’s a seed that we’re sowing around that sort of translation of knowledge from academic and non-academic worlds and the wider worlds that exist around those. I think we’re also sowing a seed around building a new kind of network and a communication, a way of talking about music research that’s maybe a little bit different to the past or builds on previous experience. And I think we’re sort of advocating for participatory research as well, so things that are really engaging with communities and building together and the idea is that we’re kind of offering tools towards doing that, and we’re also testing some learning around whether it works and what we can take forward, and if we did this hub again or for a longer period of time, what value are we bringing into that and can we build on that learning as we go. So there’s this really lovely opportunity to do lots of learning, which is where a lot of my role in the hub through evaluation comes in as well.

AH: And so you’re choosing four projects to fund, to build your learning around. Is that right?

EJW: Well, it’s yes, so it’s, it’s four spoke projects. So the hub is going to exist for two years, kind of in the first instance, and we’re spending the first year, basically, we’ve designed it, we’re advertising it, we’ve put out a call. We’re getting all of the, you know, everything set up through Southampton to get this money. You know, the funding ready to dispense. The application process will start in January 2025, and we’ll be making final decisions about the final four projects by late spring 2025 and then the projects themselves will only run for 12 months, so it’ll be sort of July 2025 to July 2026. So it’s actually a really short period of time to make quite a lot of things happen, but that was one of the reasons we were sort of heavily invested in bringing Caz onto the project, because monitoring, learning and evaluating every single stage of that about what works, who have we reached, who have we potentially not reached, whose voices could we incorporate better? How are our decisions made? Obviously, data around how many people engage with us at the networking events and join our database and come to things and how, obviously, how many people apply, will then be data that we can kind of work with to think about what a funding hub for public engagement with music research actually looks like? Because, you know, we don’t know, and the AHRC doesn’t know yet. So we’re all learning as we go, which is, which is really exciting, yeah.

AH: So I’m sure, I know that there will be absolutely loads of people who listen to this podcast who are going to be interested in this and potentially, but I think they’ll have loads and loads of questions. So I guess one of the questions is, would they be eligible? And so looking at the definitions you talk about public engagement, you talk about research, what do you mean by both of those terms?

CC: So public engagement is a really broad term, and we are very flexible about what it means for different projects and different groups, but essentially, it’s the idea that within a piece of research, you might do a sort of literature review, and you look at your evidence that’s around your research question. With public engagement we’re looking outwardly into the big, big world, and we’re testing and building and creating our research with the people in the world out there to kind of inform decisions we make through our research process. And then also with the participants themselves who engage in that actual piece of work, we look kind of inward to them as well, about what they what they feel about it, how they’ve contributed, what they can learn, where their outcomes are, what difference it’s made to them. So there’s these sort of two levels of looking outwardly into the broader context and then looking inwardly into the actual people who are going to be talking to you through that research project. And I think it’s also quite different to what we might call dissemination, which is kind of sharing learning. And traditionally, it might be that you do your piece of research and then you tell people about it, but actually public engagement for us is much bigger than that, and it’s kind of ingrained in the whole piece of research. So we’d like to know that your community have been involved in shaping your research question, that your community have been involved in how you actually deliver it, even down to like operational things, like time of day, or do people need resource to come and be involved in your piece of work? Have you allowed for that? And then all the way through, really to that when you have got a piece of learning, rather than just telling people about it, we would really encourage discussion and debate about it and how it fits in other people’s experiences. So public engagement for us is really kind of shaping the whole project, and evidence sort of suggests that that makes your research more representative. And also makes it more translatable into policy kind of worlds. So essentially, if you create your research with people, it’s more relevant for people moving forwards, and that’s quite an extreme example of how you might do it. But even like small threads of that are really valuable for our spoke projects, and we do support that all the way through, I think as well, it’s worth saying. It feels like a lot, and that’s why we’ve built in a kind of mentoring phase into our application process, so that we can support people to unpack that a bit more. And also within the first phase of the application process, we haven’t actually asked for a research question, because we’re much more interested in the sort of outcomes that you’re hoping to achieve with your community, and then we feel like the research question can then be formed in collaboration, once you’ve set the stage to have those conversations going forward.

AH: Oh, that’s really interesting. Because one of my questions was going to be, you know, I can imagine there’s a lot of music organisations who are doing great work around music and social justice, music and education, music with young people, but they might find these definitions of, you know, public engagement and research, and they might sort of think, ‘Well, is this relevant to the work that I’m doing? And how do I put that across?’. So it sounds like if people are doing interesting work that they think deserves to be sort of researched further, that they come to you, and then there will be a process before they actually submit the application, where you help them with the research question, is that right?

CC: Yeah, absolutely. But broader than that, actually, there’s even a process. So if you go onto the website, you can register yourself as an academic or non-academic organisation, and we ask you to tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do and the types of questions you’ve got around the work you do. And then we’re compiling a sort of a matchmaking spreadsheet, if you like, where we can share that with other people, and we can use that to help find connections and build relationships and start to have those conversations too. Obviously, we can’t guarantee that everybody who fills that in is going to find a partner, but it’s a way of starting to bridge some of those gaps without the pressure of sort of immediately having to write your research question down in a funding bid. And also, people don’t have the time and the resource to do that. So we’re trying to make more space in the process for those conversations to happen,

EJW: I mean, and I think just one thing to add to that, and we’re, at the moment, we are planning to go on Monday for our first networking event in Cardiff, which is really exciting, but one of the activities I’m planning to do for the networking event, and this comes into don’t worry so much about the ideal research question, but think about the voices that are privileged. This is where social justice comes into. It is the questions I’m going to ask people is, what does public engagement mean to you? Like no judgment on what the answer to that is. Just really interested to know whose voices are heard in your project, and then what outcomes would you like to see? But I think that whose voices you heard in your project is really important question because it’s about tone. So a lot of the tone of potentially more traditional bits of academic research that were classed as having public engagement elements would be an ordering of the academic does the research, and once the research project is completed, then they go and take it into a school, for example, or a community organisation. We are more interested in research projects where the non-academic participants help to frame the questions, and where the questions are framed in dialogue between the two, and that’s where the power structures can be more equitable, and actually hopefully, like really creative projects can come from that. So to that extent, I guess, in going back to your question about defining public engagement, we’re really interested in using the hub as a way for those definitions we can, like our participants to help us work on definitions of that phrase that are really equitable and actually not defined by academics, but actually defined by the wider creative sector of the UK that engages with us.

AH: Fascinating. It just sounds like a really smart, well thought through process that’s very different from the usual research projects that come out of universities. It’s quite different, is that right?

CC: That’s our aim.

EJW: And I think it’s an issue of equity, isn’t it? It’s an issue of equity. And in terms of, if you look at like the sorts of sectors that tend to get the biggest grants to do creative projects. It’s often the same organisations, and that goes for arts organisations, as well as academic universities and conservatoires and other degree granting institutions. And I’ve experienced this from the vantage point of being an academic, that the moment you were in a well-funded university setting, there is huge amounts of incredible support available for doing funding applications. And so even when Ben Oliver and I were writing this funding application a year ago for this hub, our university was amazing and helped cover some of our marking workload and helped, you know, make sure that we had days workloaded just to write the grant. And as we were writing the grant and experiencing that institutional support, we were writing into the grant, how do you create a funding landscape where people without that institutional support can still get the funding. So one thing we’re going to do, once people make it through to that to the short listing stages, we’re going to offer mentoring and training in writing the big grant, but at the first stage in the phase one of expressions of interest, we’re just interested in their ideas and the voices behind their ideas and the outcomes, and then we’ll provide the mentoring and training on developing those grant writing skills. So that even if you’re shortlisted and you don’t get funded, we’ve helped you through a process you can see almost as like a little you know, training course that’s free, for example, that demystifies some of the barriers to writing a big grant, which then hopefully means that more arts projects will be successful with future funding beyond the hub.

AH: I’m seeing more funders doing that, actually working with people who, well, not a lot more, I suppose. I’ve seen a couple of funders doing that actually, that they work with applicants, so that whatever the the outcome of the process those applicants have benefited from the experience. That’s fantastic. So to make this more tangible for people, is there anything you could say about what you’re kind of looking for? I’ve read on the website that it was about ambitious ideas that lead to change in policy around music and education and social justice. Am I right? Did I read that correctly?

EJW: Yes. So we’re interested. Well, the policy angle, I wouldn’t say, is that anybody worry about right now if you want to consider applying to us, because that’s training that we can provide. So we have really amazing support from our public policies Southampton unit, which will offer a policy associate who is going to be a sort of three month post to mentoring each spoke project, who will advise them on pathways to policy in their project. So policy is a huge element of it, but by all means, you don’t have to have had any experience of policy or any kind of research knowledge of policy to apply. So to that extent, what are we looking for? We’re looking for creative ideas, and we’re looking for projects where we can see that there’s co-creation, where we can see that the project has been designed, not just by the academic but by the non-academic partner as well, and projects that fit into the large, you know, umbrella themes of the AHRC, which is creative education, health and wellbeing, civic and cohesive communities and technological innovation. But beyond that, we are not going to be prescriptive. We’re really interested in being a listening ear to the sorts of ambitious ideas that come in, and to thinking how we can mentor those ideas towards fundable applications.

AH: Is this about testing new ideas? So you talk about projects where people need to be, in a sense, setting up a new project, or would this be researching existing practice through an existing brand of work that somebody’s doing?

EJW: Yeah, that’s a great question, and it’s one that came up in the webinar we delivered last week. Again, we’re very open to just hearing ideas. What we don’t want to fund is something where the research has already been done, and then the project simply wants to sort of take that research into non-academic spaces, because we want the actual research to be co-created, if that makes sense. You could have a project where, say, an academic has done a big research project, and then the proposal is that they share that research with non-academic participants, and the non-academic participants inform something new that the research does. If that makes sense, it’s a subtle but actually really important distinction about co-creation of voices.

CC: Yeah, I was thinking about that word ambitious. And actually, I think maybe when we say that, people might imagine really big scale, but I think it’s more about think being ambitious about the intended benefit that could come out of it. So it’s not saying you have to come up with a massive, really kind of groundbreaking, big scale, lots of people kind of piece of work, but it’s more about identifying something that would make a real difference, and be able to evidence that through having worked with academic and non-academic partners together as a team. And then being able to go through a process together to find out more about that and then be able to share it in a way that is outward facing and useful. So I think the ambition is really to be very intentional about the research that you’re proposing to do, and why that brings the potential for some really good change in the future.

AH: So for example, if there was a community music organisation that had been doing work with young people for some time. They realised that there were wellbeing impacts to do with their work, and they were interested to know about the particular aspects of their practice that brought about those wellbeing impacts, or they were just interested in having some kind of robustness to their understanding, so that they have some assumptions about their practice and the impact it has on young people, but actually, they’ve never had that academic research around it. Would that be suitable? Because that feels to me that that would apply to so many organisations.

EJW: Yes, absolutely. That would be the sort of project that we would say this is ideal for us, not just because it fits the umbrella theme, but because it’s about developing skills, upskilling, capacity building, and building confidence in applying for funding that has lasting impacts in communities.

CC: And the other thing that’s great about that is that the initiative already exists, and that there’s potential then to take that learning and the non-academic partner can then use that evidence to leverage more arts based support, whilst it also can feed into bigger policy things around health and wellbeing, and the research it’s had, you know, starts to build a bank of knowledge in an area so there’s some benefits across the sort of translational pathway, I suppose, that would be really great and part of our kind of mentoring process is to create a logic model, which is a way of trying to map those change pathways. And it really helps you think about actually, all these people are involved in this potential piece of research, what’s it going to bring for them, and how do we make sure that this piece of research maximises that for them?

AH: Absolutely fascinating. So we’ve mentioned policy a few times, and we did sort of have a touch on it. I’m really interested in policy, the policy aspect of this, that because being able to influence policies where the real change can happen. And sometimes it feels as though, as arts organisations and music organisations, we’re often ‘tinkering away’ at the edges and not really able to influence real change. But if only we could connect with those policy makers that’s where systemic change can begin to happen. And it feels like there’s so much of a big barrier between people making change happen on the ground and people in policy. So I wondered if you can just bear a couple minutes to talk me around the support available as part of this project in terms of policy and what you hope will happen as a result.

EJW: Absolutely. So it’s something that we’re really looking forward to, to monitoring and tracking and also to getting a bit of feedback on how the people we fund feel about the policy pathways. But the support available through public policy Southampton is that the hub will fund a policy associate, normally a PhD researcher, who’s affiliated with public policy Southampton, our policy research unit, who will advise and meet regularly with every spoke project and monitor and mentor them through pathways into policy, so they will be able to facilitate, if applicable, ways to correspond with politicians, ways to create policy briefing documents. So that might be a one page A4 summary of policy related recommendations that each research project could come up with that are aligned with the department for media, culture and studies areas of research interests, for example. And that’s a really doing that if you don’t have a policy background, is a really overwhelming task, isn’t it, sort of, you know, okay, well, the you know, the government said it’s interested in this area, but how does that relate to my research? So each policy associate will have regular meetings with each funded project to say, okay, you know, their job is to read the news every day. Their job is to keep on top of all of the policy developments coming out. And they’ll come to the spoke projects and say, ‘Okay, how is your funded project going? Now, this just came out in the news, and we think that this particular MP, for example, or this particular government meeting, relates to work you’re doing’. And can we facilitate either a conversation or maybe a white paper, or the sometimes called gray papers, of examples of lived experience or recommendations that seem to be in line with research that the government and the civil service is already going to be doing. One thing that I am realising more and more that the further conversations I have with public policy Southampton is that I do think that politicians are very interested in all of this, and I do think they can see the relevance. It’s just setting up the pathways to have those conversations, and so that’s what the policy associate element of the hub is going to try to offer.

AH: So the other area where you’re breaking down barriers, which is again, a kind of unique selling point in this project, is you have a mechanism for connecting music organisations with universities. Because that’s another thing, another sort of challenge, really, is that often an organisation will feel that they’re doing really good practice, and they’d really love to have an academic partner, but they wouldn’t, absolutely would not know where to start, and frankly, they don’t have the resources or time to start forming those relationships or researching them in the first place. So can you tell me a little bit about how you’re going to connect people up with academic partners and vice versa?

CC: Well it’s interesting because my background is around community arts, really, both music and theatre and dance to build those sort of relationships up. And the one thing that really strikes me about that is the level of resource that’s available for a lot of those community organisations. So you’ve immediately got that kind of power imbalance. So a lot of the things that we’re doing at the moment is to try and redress the balance a little bit, things like making sure things are just in plain English, clear as possible. Thinking about actually, if you’re a voluntary organisation, can you actually make it to the sessions that we’re running? Can we help you to do that? Can we offer support, bursary, whatever that looks like, and then in a sort of co-creation process, within the mentoring, we’ve got kind of resource to get people to where they need to go, and provide child care support, if it’s needed, and all those little things we’re trying to preempt some of the challenges that might be there for arts organisations. And also within the actual grant itself, we’ve noticed that in the past, often the researcher will receive the grant for doing the research, but the organisation they work with doesn’t actually get part of that funding towards being able to deliver. So we’re after a more equitable budget really. We want to see more resource going into the community organisations who are participating. And actually, Erin will agree that quite often, we sit in a room as colleagues and we’re challenging each other around the equity of things based on our different perspectives. And we know there’s going to be learning to be done there too. And we really want to capture some of those reflections as we go so that we can create a sort of a blueprint of how to do that better in the future and share that with other organisations. And we’re really fortunate that the AHRC are also interested in the learning around how we make this work in practice.

AH: So potentially it could influence other academic institutions in the way they’re doing research with grassroots organisations that’s really good, and in terms of the matchmaking with universities. So you, you mentioned a spreadsheet that you’ll be putting together based on what people have said in answering the questions on your form, which I actually filled in so I remember that, and it was really interesting to fill that in. So you’re going to be looking at those and perhaps making introductions between organisations and universities?

CC: Yes, yeah, absolutely. So there are two ways to use that. One is that, if anyone’s listening and is interested in seeing who’s put their name in the ring and would like to have a conversation, please get in touch with us and we can share that with you. Everybody on it has agreed to sort of share their details publicly, so we can help bridge those gaps and help those conversations to happen. The other thing is, sign up to a community event. There’s an online one if you can’t get to one in person, and that’s another opportunity to even just to get a sense of who is interested, as well as identifying specific people you might want to touch base with. And then the final thing is, yeah, we’ll be having a really good look through that spreadsheet, and if we can see opportunities to make introductions, that will be part of our planning as well.

AH: And can you tell me how people will find all this information? I know it’s on your website, and I know there’s also a very long URL. So perhaps, what terms should people Google in order to get to this information?

EJW: Absolutely. So you can do it a couple ways. If you search for Centre for Music Education and Social Justice, it will be with the only one in the world, so that that will come up, and then we’re listed as a grant research project under that or if you simply search for AHRC hub for public engagement with music research, you can see our page there on the University of Southampton’s website. And then you can find everything in there related to our call for spoke projects, our events, links to our Eventbrite pages, and the webinar we recorded last Thursday is now up there on the website as well with the transcript.

AH: Oh, that’s so helpful. And when are the kind of events running.

EJW: So by the time this podcast comes out, we’ll have probably already had a couple of these sessions, but we’re going to be holding in-person networking events in Glasgow on the 10th of December and Belfast on the 11th of December, and then an online networking event on the 3rd of December. We’ll also be running several online training sessions with Southampton’s public engagement with research unit in late November and mid-December. So you can find the ways to register for that on our website, and those are all free, and then from every Friday morning at 10, starting in late December and going up until the expression of interest deadline, including on the 3rd of January, we’ll be having online drop in sessions where, if you can just book a 15-minute slot, and we’ll meet with you on Microsoft Teams.

AH: So exciting, so many opportunities for people to get involved and gain something from that. So finally, I usually ask people to share either three practical pieces of advice or three calls to action for others working in music for wellbeing, education and social justice. So can I invite you to to choose one of those?

EJW: Caz, do you want to go first?

CC: I think mine would be ask the ‘so what?’ question. So lots of the way we think about this hub is around being outcomes led, and that means thinking about changes that you can potentially make through your work, and who benefits from those. And one of the ways you can do that is by taking something that happens in your project and then asking, so what? And if you ask it three times, quite often, you can get to the point of where policy makers are sitting. So for example, you have a participant who is involved in a research project. So what? So they build some confidence, and then, so what? So they then decide to join a music group that they didn’t have the confidence to join before. So what? Their health and wellbeing increases more community cohesion, and the art sector gets more resilient to sign ups and participation. And you can see that as you go along that chain, it becomes less and less of your influence, but it becomes more and more the language of policy and government, and it can be a really useful tool for taking your really small seeds of difference that you might make through your project and linking them into the big, big world at this out there.

AH: That’s so interesting. Thank you for that Caz. It seems so simple, but actually it’s so powerful, isn’t it? Erin, did you have another one?

EJW: My main thing is about voice, voices that get to be heard in the research projects. And one way I always talk about this to my students when I’m lecturing is when you go to the library and you look at the shelves of books, you’re often intimidated by those power structures to think, oh my goodness, I need to hear about those voices written by those authors, about those composers. That’s great, but there’s a lot of voices that don’t make it into that library in terms of the music research, and so I say to them, every time you read a book, think about who’s not in the book. And every time you hear a piece of music, think about what piece of music you are also unable to hear now because you’re hearing the piece of music you’re hearing, and where you can kind of flip things on the head. And sort of think about the silences and bringing out the silences and different types of sounds and different types of research stories that maybe haven’t traditionally made it into, you know, mainstream music research publishing, or mainstream concerts or recordings or whatever it’s sort of has traditionally been.

AH: Thank you, also really fascinating. Thank you both so much. All power to you. I hope it goes really, really well. And just to encourage anybody listening to get in touch to I think you’ve got any, yeah, you have got an email that people can sign up to hear all about the forthcoming events and just remains for me to say, thank you so much and good luck.