Academic interests
Lucy is a researcher, linguist and community artist, working primarily in music and sound. She is interested in creative collaboration, and how the act of making things together can foster solidarity and mutual care. Her research tries to understand how the radical openness that shared creativity requires can turn in-between spaces - between people, languages, cultures, academic disciplines or art forms - into common ground.
Her PhD from the University of Glasgow was called Echolocations: exploring integration and the ethics of participation through collaborative songwriting. This practice-based, interdisciplinary research project involved working with people affected by the criminal justice system or the asylum system in Scotland, and was carried out with the support of several community organisations. She was part of the research team of the Distant Voices project, a 5-year research partnership between arts organisation Vox Liminis and the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and the West of Scotland, which used songwriting to better understand what it's like to come home after prison. Lucy devised and produced the project's podcast, The Art of Bridging, which features over 60 voices from the project, through songs, poetry and conversations.
She recently joined the University of Oslo to take up a postdoctoral fellowship on a project called Prisons of Note: Mapping music and nuances in penal exceptionalism from the periphery, led by Dr Áine Mangaoang and funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Through creative collaboration in Norway, Iceland and the Republic of Ireland, the project will examine prison soundscapes, to learn about how music is used - and is useful - in prisons, and to explore new ways of using sound to imagine alternatives to incarceration.
Teaching experience
- BA in Community Development, University of Dundee
- Music and Cultural Studies, University of Oslo
- Sound Studies in Theory and Practice, University of Lund
Background
Lucy has a professional background in community development and socially-engaged arts, primarily in Scotland but also in London, Stockholm and Malmö. Over time, her involvement in music and sound projects, mostly alongside non-professional musicians with all sorts of life experiences, led her back towards academia in order to be able to reflect more deeply on the role and potential of shared sonic creativity in social change.
Since completing her PhD, she has been awarded a fellowship to work in partnership with the Scottish Government and the Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, designing resources for people working in criminal justice policy and practice based on her doctoral research. The resulting resources - a narrative toolkit with accompanying podcast series - will be published in early 2024.
She has also worked at Malmö University on a project bringing together authors, musicians, sound artists and academics to create new work on the themes of Conviviality and Contamination. This project resulted in a special issue of PARSE Journal (Platform for Artistic Research in Sweden), published in May 2023.
Her undergraduate degree from the University of Edinburgh was in Modern European Languages. As a resident of Malmö, Scandinavia's most linguistically diverse city, she is interested in ways of nurturing multilingual urban soundscapes, a research interest which she continues to explore as a guest researcher with Malmö University's Medea Lab - a transdisciplinary research lab for collaborative media, design and public engagement.
She is also a parent of three children, and as she writes this text she is helping a poorly 7-year old to decorate an old Pringles tube.
Awards, fellowships and funding granted
- Scottish Justice Fellowship, 2021-22
- Scottish Graduate School for Social Sciences Impact Awards, 2020, Highly Commended
- Creative Multilingualism Award, 2019, University of Oxford
- Creative Scotland Open Fund Award, 2017
- University of Glasgow, College of Social Science, PhD scholarship, 2017