ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a history of the Empowering Song approach from its earliest embryonic thoughts and explorations in a Massachusetts prison to more recent developments. The brutal prison context motivated the music leaders to reconsider authoritarian and conventional forms of music-making. The reconsideration was powerfully influenced by the aspirations of incarcerated men and women that were synthesized with the seminal work in Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The authors then discuss the application of the Empowering Song approach in the harsh context of refugee shelters on the Mexican side of the Mexico−US border. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the ways in which the approach has been used in the classroom context.
