The following interview is a continuation of four journal posts, which are a transcription of a conversation between Trade Winds Ensemble Artistic Director and Founder Midori Samson and Seungmi Cho, PhD candidate in social work at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Part 1: Art vs. Science, Managing Pain, and Antiracism as Personal Liberation
Midori Samson: You said social justice, and I want to know what that means…
Seungmi Cho: When I was a young 20-year-old on this campus, I first began learning about social justice as a conversation about access, not just about diversity. So, in the topic of international adoption, a social justice conversation is not just about increasing awareness of the adopted child’s racial difference; a social justice conversation is looking at the structural root causes that lead families to surrender their children to adoption. This might be economic and gender violence. For example, the targeting of unmarried women of color with children in a developing country. Social work on the topic of transracial international adoption has largely been limited in scope to the individually adopted child’s racial difference. I’m wanting to engage social work by thinking about international transracial adoption as a social justice issue, therefore expanding the conversation to being about a vulnerable family, not just vulnerable adopted children. If there is a conversation happening about social justice and the topic of access does not come up, I often feel suspicious. How do you think about social justice?
M: I don’t know if I’ve ever said it out loud. When I think of social justice in the context of music, which is the only way I know how to approach this question, I think about it as providing access to a space for an individual to be the whole truth of that individual. I’m thinking specifically of a music classroom, but when I think about an ideal, socially just music classroom I think of a place where someone’s creative voice is upheld no matter what.
S: Within a critical lens, I often try to problematize the neo-liberal notion of individual rights being human rights. I think it obscures the importance of a commitment to a collective as also being a form of self-determination that is consistent with social justice. This is a conversation I think social work grapples with. For example, our code of ethics is largely focused on supporting the dignity and worth of individuals, and something like the Indian Child Welfare Act—which protects tribal sovereignty rights, group level rights—is somewhat outside a code of ethics focused on individuals.
M: So, maybe I’ll add that the reason to prioritize someone’s voice is so that they can be part of a community and help support the community that they’re in?
S: The question I will give you moving forward is: How do we contend with a critical notion that the sum of individuals does not equal a group level voice? A group can have a voice in itself.
M: Do you know the answer?
S: No! But I often find myself bringing that to the conversation with social workers. When economists run a regression and say it’s about the Black community, I don’t think that’s true. I think they’re reporting on the sum of individual Black people on average. So, it’s something that needs attention and it’s something we’ll both die not knowing the answer to—and it’s something that is still worth interrogating. What else?
M: I feel like I’m leaving with more questions than answers. But that’s the point of these conversations, right?
S: Ok, I’ll spitball something… so I heard there’s a debate between Bach and Yamaha trumpets. Yamaha, for example—factory made—will create the same sound every time because it’s factory made. But with Bach trumpets—because they’re handcrafted and every trumpet in itself has its own unique voice—the musician can produce more layered sounds because the relational process between the handmade trumpet and the musician will emerge. I was thinking about that coming into this conversation and how those are situated within this irreconcilable difference between the empirical paradigm, post-positivism paradigm, and the critical paradigm (critical emphasizing a relational process, empirical and post-positivistic emphasizing the objective). Does that conversation happen?
M: This is totally real! We talk all the time about “sound concept” and how one develops sound, which is something so subjective and imaginary. Sound is also different in my head than in yours. For example, how you hear your speaking voice in your own head differently than someone across the room, or in the case of music, than someone across a concert hall. I think there’s no way that you would sound exactly the same, even if the instrument is factory made. There’s no way!
S: And that is the feminist intersectional critique of empirical research! That you’re not outside of white supremacy for example. So here, there’s no way this is a pure sound.
M: There’s no way! Also based on my experience, I can hand someone my instrument and same set up, and they will still sound like them. Similarly, I can make any instrument sound like me. I’m making sound in my face, it resonates in my mouth and cheeks and the back of the skull. I’ll still produce the sound I hear in my head.
S: What I like about this conversation is: I hear that there are so many dynamics to contend with. In some ways it’s a missed opportunity to just dig in and purport that, actually, there is one sound and people have to get there instead of thinking about these environmental conditions and the relational process. Empirical researchers purport that the facts speak for themselves. But with music and artistic production, it’s a relational process. The emphasis is not only on production. Perception itself is a critical process. With empirical research, the researcher discovers knowledge which doesn’t exist until the researcher engages in that process. So the receptive skills are somewhat subordinated over the productive skills. What you brought to our theory class was destabilizing all the emphasis going on production. I thought you held us accountable for thinking about listening, concept, and all the factors that go into engaging with “sound”.
M: In class I always said, “this makes no sense,” or “what’s the point of this research if I can’t consume it and make change?”
S: You never said, “I don’t understand.” You said, “this doesn’t make sense,” which is different!
M: I so desperately wanted that knowledge to be known. How are we supposed to have an antiracist world when people can’t consume the research being done about antiracism, right?
S: Yes, and autoethnography emphasizes that who reads our work is a very important question.
M: Similarly, I have a friend who says that if, for example, I’m the performer and you’re the audience member, art is what is happening here in the space between us. It’s not happening here on stage or there in the house, it’s happening right here. It’s the same thing. Musicians can sometimes forget that we are playing for people.
S: That is such a paradigm shift. That’s amazing. I know very little, but it does seem like a paradigm shift from, “the notes are the notes,” and “there’s right and wrong,” and “if you get the notes right, then the art is right.”
M: I think some people believe those things.
S: Probably people who get paid more than us, right?
M: There’s also a false binary that exists between technique and fundamentals vs. art and musicality. Like, if you have one, you might be sacrificing the other.
S: Oh, I hate that shit because I get frustrated with the notion that, for example, a paper on social justice can’t be rigorous. Critical theory can help us bring rigor to research which foregrounds social justice. That’s why I think critical theory is helpful to social workers. I think critical theory can help us bring focus to our intuition.
Interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
