Re-integration and song: Distant voices: coming home. Issues around songwriting as research in justice and re/integration

Distant Voices: Coming Home is a three year ESRC/AHRC funded interdisciplinary practice-based collaborative action research project that aims to explore and practice re/integration after punishment through creative collaborations. The research is run through partnership between third sector organisation Vox Liminis, the Scottish Centre for Criminal Justice Research, a number of prominent Scottish popular musicians, and researchers in popular music, criminology, public dialogue and visual sociology. Blurring boundaries between creative practices, research, knowledge exchange and public engagement, the project uses collaborative songwriting to support a range of differently situated people with experience of the criminal justice system, to explore questions of justice and reintegration together through the broad theme of ‘Coming Home’.

This paper begins to explore some of the initial findings and challenges presented in the first year of this research. How can and should songs be treated when they become ‘data’ within a research project? The combination of sociological approaches to ‘coding’ with musicological analyses of resultant material throws up crucial ontological and epistemological questions. There are also important aspects of dialogue present both at the heart of the creative process (in collaboration between expert songwriters and experts-in-experience) and in the resultant application of the songs in discursive settings (e.g. performances involving prison governors, police officers, prison officers, criminologists, social workers, public policy makers, receiving communities etc.). What can such dialogue across disciplines and settings reveal about the process of collaborative research using popular song and its results?