Whose social impact is it anyway? Directionality and the potential of affect in community music

Social impact is an increasingly common factor in judging the “success” of arts projects within communities, yet its applications can work to entrench marginalizations. This article notes the risks of looking only unidirectionally and dyadically, for the effects projects have on those participating. What would happen if we focused instead on how socially-engaged projects support participants to make their own impacts through the performing arts? The article combines interdisciplinary theoretical discussions with perspectives from the sex worker-led community musical theatre project, Sex Worker’s Opera. Having problematized certain approaches to social impact, the author flags the potential of the concept of affect for community music practitioners and researchers. She suggests affect – as it is more commonly used in the adjacent field of applied theatre – offers a helpful counter to limiting understandings of effect, and should be integrated into social impact discussions by socially-engaged arts funders, organizers, practitioners and researchers.