ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses community musicians and an academic, focuses on the musical activities of Scattered People, a gathering of asylum seekers, refugees, community development practitioners, academics and kindred-spirited local musicians who use music as a vehicle for community building and fostering resilience. It outlines Scattered People community music facilitators' perspectives on shifts in gender norms and interactions over time, and highlights some key principles, which will be useful to practitioners in diverse settings. It explores unique insights into gender considerations in cross-cultural community development work that may have been inadvertently minimised to date. The thematic analysis of documented narratives identified three relevant topics: musicians' consciousness of gender prescribed behaviours, cross-cultural understandings and visible expressions of change. The poetic language describing how the headscarves had "flown away" once they were outside of detention suggests that this change was not a source of struggle for the women.
