Ep 56 Wendy Magee

Music Therapy Conversations

Wendy Magee has a background in practice and scholarship concerning music interventions for brain injury rehabilitation. She moved to Philadelphia in 2011, a city with the fourth largest African American population and the highest rate of deep poverty in the US. Navigating the evident inequities for marginalized people in her new home city has offered her opportunities to learn about social justice, albeit from a position of privilege. She describes herself as being at the start of a long journey of learning how to challenge the existing systems that maintain dominant narratives and ensure social inequities, of how to practice allyship, and of learning how to put well-meaning thoughts into action, saying that there is much to learn.

In this episode, Wendy follows on from her seminal keynote lecture at the most recent BAMT conference, highlighting issues of race, equality and privilege with Davina. She talks about personal and painful experiences which highlighted for her, how privilege can be present in everyday life and do its damage without being necessarily aware. She starts to explore issues of white supremacy to unpack that emotive term and think about how it is applied to music therapy.