Music and Mind for Human Rights: Voices from Jamaica's Music Community, Neuroscience, and Political Economy Intersect

• In Event: ICA Plenary Interactive Paper/Poster Session and Reception
  In Interactive Paper Session: Ethnicity and Race in Communication Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

I investigate how global citizens might more effectively employ music and emerging findings from the science of music, as tools to claim their human rights and further shape the evolving human rights agenda. Sixty-five years have passed since the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Right. However, political and economic systems still deny billions of people their political, civil, economic, social and cultural rights promulgated in the Declaration and its covenants. I probe music's potential to affect this challenge through a methods process of multiple triangulation. Specifically, I research the livid experience within Jamaica's music community through critical ethnography; develop a "Taxonomy on the Neuroscience of Music and Morality"; and analyze the global music sector through the political economy of human rights lens. Integrating the findings, I conclude that music is not only a tool for realizing human rights, but also that music capability itself is a human right to the extent that it develops cognitive and emotive capacities, serves agency and voice, and supports sociability, participation, and community. Further, I conclude that the music community is uniquely poised and with capacity to play a leadership and facilitate role in the moral, scientific and political discourse that clarifies not only collectively established human rights goals, and but as well the structures of the music sector and the overarching political economy necessary to reach the goals. The descriptions and analyses provided in the study contribute tools that the diverse agents and stakeholders can collectively employ to negotiate our respective responsibilities and rights in this process.

Author

• Vernita Pearl Fort, U of Illinois