11/14/2021
(VISUAL DESCRIPTION: A graphic with a rainbow coloured background with the words: Anti-Oppressive Music Therapy? Clients are perceived as being specialists of their own lives (Baines, 2013). In order to practice AOP music therapy, a music therapist must, “seek to change the system and other societal oppressive structures that negatively affect universal developmental potential,” (Baines, 2013, p. 4). There is a cartoon of four people holding each other looking at a firework in the bottom left of the graphic.)
Anti-oppressive practice (AOP) describes a theoretical orientation found in the helping professions which believes that the core of clients’ issues is related to systems that perpetrate inequal power dynamics (Baines, 2007).
AOP grew out of the work of Black and Indigenous feminist psychotherapists, counsellors and social workers who found that feminist therapeutic paradigms were predominantly Eurocentric and did not acknowledge the intersections between marginalized identities (Timothy & Garcia, 2020). AOP assumes that the different systems of oppression like racism, ableism, colonization, colourism, misogyny, transphobia and heteronormativity are important to the therapeutic work itself (Scrine & Stanger, 2019). It understands that the therapy room does not inherently dissolve these power dynamics and that therapists must work to create level ground in session by addressing the systems at play (Baines, 2007). It believes that there are no objective contexts within which therapy operates and that every therapist must think about how our actions in therapy uphold or challenge unjust systems (Brown, 2019).