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 improvisational, relational, 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 doctoral research and eighteen months of multi-sited clinical ethnography, including participant observation, interviews with therapists, clinicians, and patients, and archival research. My PhD received the York University Prize for the best dissertation defended across the university in 2021.
The pursuit of clinical recognition
My Medical Anthropology Quarterly article, “The pursuit of clinical recognition: aesthetics, care, and music therapy in North American hospitals” (2023), shows how processes of recognition shape the making of clinicians and clinical care. In this article, I argue that care practices are made into clinical care through everyday processes of clinical recognition—being seen and acknowledged as valuable to and within medical systems and models of care.
Music therapy on inpatient psychiatry during COVID-19
At the Canadian Association of Music Therapists Conference 2021, I organized a roundtable with certified music therapists Priya Shah, Chrissy Pearson, Dany Bouchard, and Tom Curry, about the challenges of providing music therapy on inpatient psychiatry units in hospitals across Canada during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. We published this work as “Providing music therapy on inpatient mental health units in Canada: reflections on practice during the COVID-19 pandemic,” in the Canadian Journal of Music Therapy (2022).
Related publications
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"Music Therapy as Clinical Care: An Anthropological Lens." 2025. Guest on Beyond the Studio: The Canadian Music Therapy Podcast,
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Evans, Meredith. 2023. "The pursuit of clinical recognition: Aesthetics, care, and music therapy in North American hospitals.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly. 1–15.
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Evans, Meredith, Priya Shah, Chrissy Pearson, Dany Bouchard, & Tom Curry. 2022. “Providing Music Therapy on Inpatient Mental Health Units in Canada: Reflections on Practice During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Canadian J of Music Therapy. 28(1):44-56.
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Evans, Meredith, and Andrés Romero. 2021. “KİRAİÑİA (Long Flutes).” Visual and New Media Review, SCA Fieldsights.
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Romero, Andrés, and Meredith Evans. 2021 “Rehavi (Timekeepers).” Visual and New Media Review, SCA Fieldsights.
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Van Dyk, Janita, Meredith Evans, Andrés Romero, Juliana Friend, and Melissa Lefkowitz. 2021. “The Writing Group: In a Room Alone, Working Together.” Members Voices, SCA Fieldsights.
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Evans, Meredith. 2020. “Becoming Sensor in the Planthroposcene: An Interview with Natasha Myers.” Visual and New Media Review, SCA Fieldsights.
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Evans, Meredith, and Janita Van Dyk. 2020. “Drawing Care with Jean Hunleth.” Supplementals, SCA Fieldsights.
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Evans, Meredith. 2019. “Refusal and Resurgence: A Review of Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa.” Visual and New Media Review, SCA Fieldsights.
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Evans, Meredith, and Nadine Ryan. 2019. “(De)compositions: A Review of Anthropocene.” Visual and New Media Review, SCA Fieldsights.