Self-disclosure beyond 'vulnerability' : young people, musical biographies, technology and music-making

I sit across the table in a café, ready to begin my final interview with Julia, a young musician living with bipolar disorder who participated in this research. With a short-sleeved shirt on, her self-harm scars are obvious from the outset. As the interview continues, I begin to understand exactly how these scars are central to her music-making practice, one that involved disclosing personal stories of family mental illness. Often mediated through technology, music-making is used by Julia, as well as other young musicians, as a constructive means of engaging with personal vulnerability. Doing so enables processes of self-disclosure, which assist in the young person enacting a resilient identity. This thesis analyses the ways in which young musicians with experiences of vulnerability utilise both personal and musical biographies as part of a music-making practice that affords opportunities to manipulate, tailor and take charge of personal experience. The academic youth arts discourse assumes that young people with experiences of vulnerability are in deficit. As popularised by youth music-making initiatives, such an approach assumes that, through participating in an adult-run music-making program, the young person can move from vulnerability (deficit) to resilience (strength). Such programs elide the critical role music, as a cultural form, often plays in the lives and identities of vulnerable young people. Instead, programs position music merely as a youth engagement tool to govern and ultimately transform young people. This transformation narrative is in stark contrast with popular music discourse which romanticises stories of the tortured artist, celebrating musicians’ ongoing and continuous engagement with personal vulnerability as part of practice. This work entails a two-stage ethnographic methodology. Stage One consists of interviews with 13 young musicians with experiences of vulnerability and two youth arts professionals. Stage Two involves a series of three follow up case-study interviews with five of the young musicians who participated in Stage One. When speaking with young musicians, I utilised a ‘version of friendship as method’, an adaptation of Tillman-Healy’s ‘friendship as method’. Doing so generated experiences that could be situated in dialogue with existing youth arts discourse. This methodology also afforded new opportunities for understanding young musicians’ life worlds. Through an analysis of my empirical material, this thesis argues that young musicians with experiences of vulnerability use music-making as a means of self-disclosure; a practice that involves a continuous interplay of vulnerability and resilience as mediated through technology, personal experience and musical biography. To make this argument, I analyse the experiences of the young musicians with whom I worked through a dialogue with a range of literature, including youth arts, vulnerability and resilience studies, technology studies, and fandom and subcultures research. In particular, I build on Frith’s call for a focus within cultural studies on individual cultural practices, and I draw on Hesmondhalgh’s contention that music involves both individual and collective practices - often at the same time - to suggest that the neo-liberal focus on individualisation is deeply embedded in the lives of young musicians, especially those with lived experiences of vulnerability. However, as I demonstrate, these individual practices are embedded in strong social and collective networks. Within these contexts, young musicians with experiences of vulnerability engage in music-making practices, which afford opportunities for self-disclosure. These practices, in return, facilitate a fluid and non-linear engagement with vulnerability, which allow participants to enact a resilient self. Calling young musicians’ experiences into dialogue with the existing dominant discourse surrounding vulnerability and resilience, this thesis argues against the transformation narrative that characterises much youth arts practice. Such an approach also has implications for methodology, suggesting that specific and contextualised approaches need to complement the broad categorical approaches to understanding youth practice. In this way, this thesis complements and extends the existing youth arts discourse