How Are We Gonna Turn This Into Music? We’re Not. We Are Here To Explore; Making Meaning And a Music of the Oppressed

• In Event: Revolutionizing Education, Revitalized: The Rise of Creative Resistance in Youth Participatory Action Research

Abstract

This chapter centers the artistic and analytic practices of The Circle Keepers, an intergenerational youth research collective based in New York City, to explore how music can serve as a powerful modality for collective data analysis and knowledge production. Situated within the 2024 Whose Voice? Our Voice! Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project—an investigation of youth experiences of peace, justice, safety, and belonging in schools—this chapter examines how music creation and improvisation became the vehicle through which young researchers interpreted data and co-produced meaning.
The primary objective of this work is to reimagine participatory data analysis through the lens of “musicking” (Small, 1987)—understood not as a product but as a dynamic, communal process. By engaging music not only as a form of expression but as an epistemological practice, the project challenges dominant textual and numeric methods of analysis and advances a sonic, embodied alternative rooted in youth cultural production.
The theoretical framework is grounded in Freirean critical pedagogy (Freire, 1980), with particular attention to Mariana Souto-Manning’s (2010) development of Culture Circles as dialogic, collective sites of inquiry. We extend this tradition by musicalizing aspects of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, while integrating Butch Morris’ conduction techniques, a radical practice of real-time musical improvisation. This interdisciplinary approach reflects a commitment to decolonizing research methodologies, recognizing the affective and relational dimensions of knowledge-making.
Methodologically, eight middle and high school-aged youth researcher-musicians participated in six collaborative sessions that integrated critical reflection, musical experimentation, and collective composition. These sessions began with the analysis of visual and textual data from surveys, interviews, and fieldnotes collected during the Whose Voice? Our Voice! project. Participants were encouraged to translate this data—through guided improvisation and conduction—into melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic musical expressions. In parallel, participants composed graphic scores, a visual notation technique, to map relationships between themes and sonic elements.
The data sources for this chapter include:
YPAR data sets (youth surveys, field notes, interview transcripts);


Musical compositions, improvisations, and recordings created during the sessions;


Participant journals and reflections;


Visual graphic scores and lyric sheets produced in-session.


These multimodal artifacts served as both sites of inquiry and outputs of collaborative analysis.
Findings from this process reveal that music enabled participants to engage with complex emotional and social dimensions of their data—particularly around school-based harm, justice, and healing—that traditional analytic forms often fail to capture. Youth researchers drew on their lived experiences, cultural identities, and musical fluencies to re-sound data with new insight and urgency. This sonic translation process surfaced feelings and connections often obscured in charts or transcripts, allowing for deeper attunement to collective knowledge.
The scholarly significance of this work lies in its contribution to emerging fields of sonic ethnography, arts-based YPAR, and decolonial research practice. It offers an innovative framework—what we term a “music of the oppressed”—for participatory data analysis that resists linearity and opens space for emotional, intuitive, and embodied forms of knowing. By repositioning music as a legitimate analytic practice, this chapter expands the methodological repertoire of YPAR and affirms youth artistry as a mode of scholarly intervention.

Authors

• Martin Urbach, Graduate Center - CUNY

• Madeline Fox, Brooklyn College