Listening to Distant Voices

Abstract

Distant Voices is a project created through collaboration between the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research and Vox Liminis, a third sector organisation that works to bring creative practice to criminal justice and its reform. Its second phase, culminated in the Distant Voices Festival: a set of public events which among other things, had the purpose of facilitating art-mediated dialogue about punishment and reintegration between audience participants, artists, criminologists, people with convictions, their families and criminal justice practitioners. In an attempt to explore and contribute to that part of criminology that tries to go beyond the academia and into the public sphere, an ethnographic research was conducted with the purpose of exploring how people experienced engaging in the Distant Voices festival. More specifically, relying on a participant observation study of the festival and on a series of follow up conversations this dissertation will explore how, if at all, participants' personal experience of engaging in Distant Voices festival music events encouraged them either to reform or to strengthen their dispositions towards former/prisoners. Though encouraging participants to reconsider such dispositions was not a directly nor instrumentally intended aim of the festival, the results suggest, that those who reformed their dispositions-- during/through music-mediated dialogue, and under a particular atmosphere -- firstly discovered an aspect of former prisoners' human side that was previously unknown to them, and secondly increased their level of empathy towards former prisoners.