‘How are you going, river?’ Moving through times of change together

Abstract

I was delighted to join the Approaches team in January 2023, and the last three years have flown by. Working alongside Andeline, Giorgos and Lucy and being in contact with different authors, reviewers and readers has been a huge privilege. Thinking together about how to expand, shape and develop the journal further has been one of the most enjoyable aspects of this role. I have learned from each member of the editorial team and loved the open attitude and exploratory invitations to play together.

When I was invited to apply for the role of associate editor, I took each of the letters of the word APPROACHES and used these as tiny catalysts for statements about how I might see myself working with the team and what I thought I could bring. Looking back at this, my words – Arts-based inquiry; Possibilities; Plus; Resonances; Open (access); Attitude; Creativity; Humour; Ethos; Supporting scholarship – still offer a generative introduction to the role of Approaches in the field of music therapy and beyond, and more broadly offer points for reflection around what I think a journal can do.

As well as using this editorial to offer thanks to everyone I have worked with, my intention was to reflect a little on my time with Approaches and the role of being an associate editor. Through this process, I found myself revisiting ideas around our previous editorial (dos Santos et al., 2025) and thinking about questions well beyond my own role as associate editor with the journal.

KNOWING FLOW

In our arts-based exploration of thoughts and experiences of gatekeeping (dos Santos et al., 2025), the Approaches editors engaged in individual arts-based reflexive process. Collectively, these explorations led to threads which warrant further expansion. Re-reading Andeline dos Santos’ reflections on her early sense of being a new researcher separated from a more experienced researcher by a flowing river struck me as particularly vivid. Understanding different levels of experience as points of pause whilst looking across an expanse of knowing flow seemed, to me, to capture my own sense of knowing as an ever-emerging expansive process. Perhaps we do not just move between knowing and not knowing, jumping across the river as we come to know more, but move through knowing.

In their recent article, Lewsley et al., (2025) articulate a feminist ethics of care through their co-creative storying of the health of a section of the Dyarubbin river in Western Australia. Through narrative inquiry they draw on their felt interactions with this river to trouble at experiences of “paternalistic, extractivist, and anthropocentric” (p. 525) ways of knowing that privilege normative temporalities and follow expected linearities in academic knowledge production. Engaging with the river in this way allowed them an embodied dialogue which moved beyond just a human knowledging and the river rivering. The authors’ communing with the river could be summed up by Donna Haraway’s (2015) idea of sympoeisis, or making-with.

KNOWING THROUGH FLOWING

Lewsley et al.’s (2025) point of departure was the question: ‘How are you going, river?’ I enjoyed this question and used it to catalyse an arts-based reflexive exploration of my own role as an associate editor over the last three years. I audio recorded a 6–7-minute solo improvisation using my violin and then drew freely while listening to the recording I had just made. Following this, I made some brief written reflections. I have referred to this elsewhere as thinking through improvisation (Haire, 2022). The drawing that emerged seemed to capture an expansive surge of watery energy. I have included a brief excerpt below along with the hand-drawn image.

Repetition and bubbling-ness. Images of water flowing over rocks. Rapids, and changes in speed came to me... There was a lot of movement in my playing... less of a slow deep river feel.... I think I was caught in a stream. [See pdf for image.]

The riverness of a river, to me, offers a generative notion of how knowing emerges and changes as time flows.

THE FLOW OF A JOURNAL

A dialogic ethos is something that drew me to apply for the role of an associate editor. The emphasis on critical reflexivity and dialogue is a strong aspect of my own work, and I know that many new authors, alongside more established researchers and practitioners submit their work to Approaches precisely due to the strong support for knowing as an emergent and ongoing process. Along with this, being a diamond open access journal supports a non-exclusive stance and helps foster non-linear nature of knowing.

How are you going, journal?

It is not just the work of the editors to find a way to cross a river, or construct points of rest on the bank. At their most alive, journals exist through authorship and readership, positioned somewhere between, offering a throughway for the exchange of knowing. This position is necessarily responsive to context and weather, so to speak, perhaps somewhat like Haraway’s (2015) idea of response-ability. In academic scholarship – such as that undertaken through Approaches – one could say that as a journal we are respons-able for taking care of a knowing flow.

FLOWING ON

Approaches is entering a period of transition as we move to a rolling publication model alongside changes in our editorial team as some colleagues move on and some colleagues join. This movement, whilst requiring considerable administrative organisation, also allows for a re-appraisal of how Approaches works and thinking around its ongoing development.

Being a part of the editorial team at Approaches has offered me many things regarding scholarship and inquiry. The catalysts I used to generate a statement of intent when applying for the role of associate editor would be the same if I applied for the role tomorrow.

I am sorry to leave, but also looking forward to re-establishing the flow of music therapy practice in my week. I feel excited about the reverberations of Approaches Plus and finding ways into the inbetween and ‘behind-the-scenes’ aspects of scholarship that we have been working to find a home for. There are so many hidden experiences as part of inquiry and research that are often left out of the distilled version of events. The stories untold feel, to me, as interesting and important as the ‘clean’ version of events that usually remain and offers one way to know with an author through dialogue about their process.

Approaches continues to support the growth of a culture of inquiry and scholarship through its current sponsorship of the research talks at Queen Margaret University (QMU). Most recently, we welcomed Kat McFerran to QMU for a fascinating presentation about musical pleasure and treating anhedonia in music therapy. We are also very excited about our upcoming roundtable as a journal at the 18th World Congress of Music Therapy in Bologna: Bridges of recognition and epistemic justice: A dialogue with an open-access journal. I hope to see you there!

REFERENCES

dos Santos, A., Haire, N., Bolger, L., & Tsiris, G. (2024). Images of “gatekeeping”. Approaches: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Music Therapy, 16(2), 158-163. https://doi.org/10.56883/aijmt.2024.569

Haire, N. (2022). “How can you have music therapy without humour?!”: A phenomenologically informed arts-based reflexive study exploring humour in music therapy with persons living with dementia. [Doctoral thesis, University of Edinburgh]. https://hdl.handle.net/1842/38803

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Lewsley, H., Vermeulen, B., Dollin, J., & Ryan, M. (2025). Storying the river: Toward a feminist ethics of care. Environmental Humanities, 17(2), 525-535. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-11713430