The Queer and Now: Knowing Others Through Humour in Music Therapy

Join Dr Nicky Haire as she reflect on doctoral research that explored how humour in music therapy could enable contact with persons living with dementia, in addition to music therapists’ experiences and perceptions of humour more broadly.

In the research, Nicky was interested in embracing a method of inquiry that used the surprise of improvisation to surface something about embodied experiences of humour. Informed by reflexive phenomenological methodology, she wanted to find knowing spaces in-between arts-based self-reflexivity (‘thinking through improvisation’) and collaborative reflexivity. 
The embodied experience of understanding improvisation as a methodological stance continues to disrupt and motivate Nicky's thinking about humour in music therapy, and in this presentation, she plans to rethink key findings and experiences from the study through a queer lens to critically explore how we might know humour through bodies and how humour might enable us to know each other as persons.

For example, Nicky found that intentional and spontaneous embodied instances of humour seemed to create their own time between persons, which she termed relational time. While this emerged in resonance with Pia Kontos’ (2004) ideas of embodied selfhood, her subsequent interest in Jane Gallop’s (2019) work, specifically Gallop's notion of ‘queer time’ alongside Alison Kafer’s (2013) ‘crip time’ motivates a push against normative understandings of time and specifically a linear progression through the life course as we age.

Nicky's study culminated in a group improvisation in response to thematic material. This experience allowed her to play out findings from the study and wonder aloud how gestures of humour in music therapy with persons living with dementia can lead to shared experiences, bodily excitements, pleasure and agency. Might it be useful to conceive of humour as a queer gesture in music therapy with persons living with dementia?

Whilst inviting a seriously playful way to disturb prescriptive ideas of body-mind decline and futurity in this presentation, Nicky will also use the notion of humour as a queer gesture in music therapy to draw attention to music therapists’ bodies as sites of trouble and vulnerability in terms of professional status. What does it feel like, for example, to be 'professional at playing with people' (Haire, 2022)?

Part of the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research (CIMTR) Public Lecture series

About our speaker

Dr Nicky Haire is a lecturer with the music therapy programme team at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. Her research interests revolve around improvisation and reflexivity in music therapy, and she has a broad interest in arts-based inquiry and embodied practice. She is a dynamic performer and has enjoyed a varied music therapy practice with persons across the lifespan. Read more at https://www.nickyhaire.com/