The end is where we start from communicating the impact of a family music project to wider audiences

Abstract

There has been increasing pressure for anthropologists to communicate their ideas and thinking to new publics and so actively engage in national and international debates relating to their field. However, this is not an unproblematic practice and the politics of representation requires anthropologists to consider the sometimes conflicting dimensions of the moral, ethical, political, social, personal and academic. My fieldwork with families linked to In Harmony Liverpool, a children’s music project in England, involved inviting participants variously to take part in interviews, draw maps of musical sites in their homes, construct playlists of favourite songs and take photographs of sites in their homes where music ‘happens’. As my aim is to produce a visual and audio display to communicate with wider audiences, I consider the issues of representation, authenticity, potential damage and ‘othering’ in the planning of the research and how this shaped data collection and the plans for dissemination.