‘Carrying Each Other’s Hearts with our Ears’
Welcome to my new research project, funded by a Hallsworth Research Fellowship in Geography at the University of Manchester (2025-2028).
'Carrying Each Others' Hearts with Our Ears' is a three-year community research project that explores how musical and sonic practices relate to health within a healing justice framework.
The project grew from community interest in continuing a space I held earlier in 2025 for Muslims and people of Muslim heritage to make music and sound together, and explores how culture, heritage and spirituality affects not only our relationships to music, sound and health but also our definitions and understandings of these words and their meanings. It also draws on healing justice as a strategy that engages with political and spiritual aspects of health, inviting us to listen care-fully to ways of sounding together, and asking how we can carry each other's hearts with our ears.
The project title comes from a community member who I worked with earlier this year, who said that group improvisation felt like ‘carrying each other’s hearts with our ears’ (the illustration opposite comes from the zine that we co-created at the end of the pilot).
What I’m currently working on…
1. Community consultations: Focus groups in London, Greater Manchester, and online.
2. Participatory sound mapping Workshops for us to create sound maps - finding ways to explore and express some of our geographies of sound and health and re-imagining together what a map could be and do.
3. Music and sound-making groups: Regular sessions co-created with participants in community spaces, combining conversation, improvised music-making, and reflection. These will also include developing a community music training toolkit offering support to community facilitators to be able to run and set up their own music groups beyond this project’s lifetime.
4. A Podcast to share experiences, conversations and perspectives on creative health, music-making, health inequalities, and project updates.
If you are interested in getting involved as a participant, collaborating as a community organisation or simply to learn more, please fill in the form below to send me a message or be added to the mailing list!