Composing Care: Music therapy and clinical aesthetics

Composing Care: Music Therapy and Clinical Aesthetics (monograph in preparation) examines clinical care as an aesthetic and relational practice—shaped not only by biomedical knowledge, but by the politics of affect, sensation, and perception that structure how care is valued in the clinic. By focusing on hospital music therapy, a clinical care practice paradoxically embedded in biomedicine yet often dismissed as non-clinical or mere entertainment, the book unsettles conventional boundaries between clinical and non-clinical care.

Drawing on ethnographic research in hospitals in Canada and the United States, Composing Care traces how music therapists work to make everyday life in the clinic more liveable, and death more bearable. By illuminating how clinical care is composed through relational, affective, and sensory practices, this book explores how the social and affective worlds of biomedicine are being remade in practice.

Composing Care is based on SSHRC-funded multi-sited clinical ethnography, including participant observation, interviews with therapists, clinicians, and patients, and archival research throughout 2019 and 2020. My PhD received the York University Prize for the best dissertation defended across the university in 2021.