The GLR 2024 Local Planning Committee is excited to announce our keynote speaker—Hakeem Leonard, PhD, MT-BC!
A Defining Moment: Context and Capacity to Shape Our Practice and Work
How might the lived experience of the therapy session be more deeply defined by holding space for lived contexts? In recent years, GLR has considered ideas such as how cultural humility and Disability justice impact clinical practice. What do these and other contexts mean for the way we define music therapy and work with participants across various contexts? Dr. Leonard’s keynote will connect these previous foundations, along with his own work, to a culturally situated view of empowerment, relatedness, and music.
This keynote will invite attendees to reflect deeply about the basis for their beliefs about growth and change and to consider a shift in our collective clarity of focus as educators, researchers, clinicians, and students. Participants will have the opportunity to continue to deepen reflexive practice and build capacities for applying cultural contexts and resource-oriented approaches to their various clinical contexts.
Hakeem Leonard, PhD, MT-BC (he/him) is Associate Professor of Music Therapy and Assistant Provost for Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia. He holds a BM from Morehouse College and a master’s and a Ph.D. from Florida State University. In over a decade of experience owning a private practice in Florida, Dr. Leonard worked with various client communities and settings, including school-based programs, acute detox and mental health, older adults, early childhood, and juvenile justice systems. He has conducted research and scholarship in areas such as orthopedic rehab, pain management, eldercare health, and adolescent mental health, and with subjects including music therapy aesthetics, music technology, Hip-Hop culture, global MT issues, lifespan development, inclusive teaching, culturally responsive approaches, and anti-colonial practices.
His core values are imagining and cultivating radical empathy, transformative listening and dialogue, transparency, embodied wholeness, and justice and he is committed to institutional change, self-determination and self-advocacy, asset-based learning, community building, and cultural humility within and outside of music therapy.
