"Music Downtown Eastside explores if popular music practices can enhance human rights and capabilities of the poorest of the poor, such as homeless and street-involved people, who feel that music is a thing that can never be taken away of them. This book draws on two decades of research in one of Canada's poorest urban neighborhoods, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. It focuses on popular music jams and therapy sessions offered by churches, as well as community and health centers, analyzing which kinds of capabilities are ...
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"Music Downtown Eastside explores if popular music practices can enhance human rights and capabilities of the poorest of the poor, such as homeless and street-involved people, who feel that music is a thing that can never be taken away of them. This book draws on two decades of research in one of Canada's poorest urban neighborhoods, Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. It focuses on popular music jams and therapy sessions offered by churches, as well as community and health centers, analyzing which kinds of capabilities are developed by music-making and if human rights are respected, promoted, threatened or violated in musical moments. The facilitators of these formally organized sessions adapt, to musical moments, harm reduction, a way of managing addiction; non-interference, a strategy of social work facilitation; and ideas from public health. Ethnographic vignettes and song lyrics by urban poor themselves ground the discussion of this Downtown Eastside's popular music scene. Music Downtown Eastside offers new and detailed insights on the relationship between music and poverty, which means deprivations of human rights and capabilities. Human rights examined in this book include the right to health, women's rights and the right to self-determination. In single musical moments, different human rights may conflict and co-exist. During the course of recent years, gentrification, a type of urban redevelopment, which ultimately displaces urban poor, has contributed to shutting down music initiatives for them in Downtown Eastside. It also correlates with increases in grant funding for capability development through the arts. Therewith, it has generated new opportunities for professional performing arts, such as the Downtown Eastside's popular music theatre productions, which adapt popular song practices of urban poor to the stage"--
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