Composing Care: Music therapy and clinical aesthetics

My first book project, Composing Care, explores what clinical care is and what clinical care is becoming. This ethnography argues that clinical care is an aesthetic concern, shaped not only by biomedical knowledge but also by affect, feelings, sensations, and perceptions that delineate what makes sense and does not make sense as care in the clinic.

Hospital music therapy—paradoxically grounded in biomedicine yet regularly perceived as mere entertainment—troubles the imagined boundaries of clinical and non-clinical care. By following music therapists across hospitals in Canada and the United States as they make everyday life in the clinic more liveable and death more bearable, I show how the composition of clinical care is improvisational and relational, always enacted with others. Composing Care demonstrates how the social and sensory worlds of biomedicine are being remade through everyday practice.

Composing Care is based on my SSHRC-funded ethnographic PhD research on the clinical care practices of music therapists. In 2019-2020 I conducted over 18 months of multi-sited clinical ethnography including participant observation at 4 hospitals, 70 interviews with music therapists, hospital staff, and patients; archival research; and auto-ethnography. My PhD in social anthropology was awarded the York University Prize for the best dissertation defended across the university in 2021.