2027 Research Conference: Collaborative Pathways through Music Therapy Research and Practice

The Music Therapy Charity is planning the fourth bi-annual research conference to be held on 17th April 2027. We are very pleased to announce that this will take place in collaboration with the MA Music Therapy Programme team at the University of South Wales, Prifysgol De Cymru, Newport, UK, (USW). This event is a celebration of the research funded by the Music Therapy Charity and we are writing to you as one of the recent grant holders to invite you to participate and to submit an abstract about the work you have been doing that has been supported by the Charity. The overall theme of the conference will be ‘Collaborative Pathways through Music Therapy Research and Practice’ to reflect recent bids received and projects funded by the Music Therapy Charity, together with the research priorities of our host organisation, the Music Therapy Programme team at USW. We are delighted to announce that Professor Hilary Moss has agreed to give the Keynote Address as the next holder of the 2027 Tony Wigram Travelling Fellowship. This will be a public event as in previous years, with a range of stakeholders being invited. In recent years project design in music therapy research has evolved reflecting wider trends in health humanities where a far deeper level of consultation and involvement is sought from participants and those responsible or connected to them These trends can be identified in many of the grant applications received by the MTC since the previous research conference in 2025. It is clear that researchers value the lived experiences and knowledge of all those involved, directly and indirectly in the music therapy process. Some projects explicitly adopt a co-production approach to design, for example drawing upon methods of active research. Other projects have absorbed some of these principles through focus groups or piloting questionnaires. We are planning a welcoming space to unpack these ideas together and to ask questions to support co-produced research and practice in music therapy into the future.