Struggling with good intentions: Music education research in a “post” world

By Roger Mantie

Like many other disciplines — or at least those in the Westernized Global North with which I am familiar — my discipline of music education has been grappling of late with the question of what it means to ethically conduct research in the 21st century. The grappling has actually been going on for some time — decades, in fact. But in the past 5-10 or so years, concerns with equity-related issues in music education have gone from being the province of a handful of feminist and anti-racism scholars to reaching critical mass: equity-related concerns are now a central concern in music studies and music education.

It is not the only animating force, but interest in “decolonizing and indigenizing” seems to have galvanized equity-seeking momentum. Arguably inspired by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang’s 2012 article, “Decolonizing is Not a Metaphor” and implicit or explicit recognition of our global age of superdiversity, music academics and music education practitioners have been calling on their colleagues to decolonize the academy and decolonize the music room. There are academic articles, practitioner articles, blog posts with resources on how to decolonize and indigenize, and special research interest groups (e.g., the International Society for Music Education’s “Decolonising and Indigenising Music Education”).

For those like myself who, for many years, have always considered themselves sympathetic to, if not also an active participant in social justice research in music education, the current zeitgeist seems like an opportunity to celebrate. But in our “post” world (e.g., post-modernism, post-structuralism, post-humanism, post-colonialism, post-internet, post-race, post-gay, post-truth, post-pandemic, and so on), previous assumptions about the world have been thrown into question. As a straight, White male in a settler-colonial country, good intentions —the altruistic “will to do good” — are no longer enough (not that they ever were). My goal in writing “Struggling with Good Intentions: Music Education Research in a ‘Post’ World” was to say in print what I suspected many of my privileged colleagues were feeling (as I knew I couldn’t be the only one): how does one conduct ethical research when every act of publishing has the potential to be an act of symbolic violence and self-serving material gain. 

Music studies and music education in the Global North are notoriously White (and heteronormative), and, in the case of music education, the lion’s share of scholarship is conducted in English by people in countries with a colonial history. This presents a dilemma: should people of privileged positionalities conduct research on equity-seeking issues? As I discuss in my article, there is an inherent paradox when White scholars publish on equity-seeking matters: regardless of the good intentions, publishing advances one’s career. It can be viewed, in a way, as a form of appropriation (which Sherene Razack, building off Susan Sontag, described in a different context as “Stealing the pain of others”). As Ta-Nehisi Coates explains (“on words that don't belong to everyone”), the unquestioned assumption by White people that everything in the world is fair game is part and parcel of the entitlement problem. At the same time, however, there is a numbers issue to consider. Even if one makes the unfair assumption that all non-White scholars should restrict their interests to equity-seeking research (thus depriving them of any other interests), there aren’t enough non-White scholars in music education to reach the tipping point where equity-seeking concerns become normative.

I offer several arguments in support of my thesis. First, I argue how calls for “relevance” in music education research can be viewed as a rhetorical move that reinforces Whiteness. In an overwhelmingly White discipline, it is easy to dismiss equity-related research as irrelevant to the day-to-day concerns of the field. Next, I demonstrate how seemingly innocent algorithms and ranking exercises in academia serve to reinforce the hegemony of a hard science paradigm, thereby devaluing and disincentivizing equity-related research. In a perhaps unexpected move, I then point out how calls for epistemological pluralism, a long-standing claim in many conflict theories (e.g., feminism, postcolonialism, Critical Race Theory), empowers those who seek to undermine the value of truth, thus undermining research and the potential for resistance and change. I conclude with some introspective thoughts on the challenges of being a faculty member who is not just expected to conduct research, but enjoys it — despite its many challenges in our “post” world.

Article Details
Struggling with good intentions: Music education research in a “post” world
Roger Mantie
First Published December 8, 2021
DOI: 10.1177/1321103X211056466
Research Studies in Music Education

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