Posthumanist new materialist pathways for reimagining music education research: What matters? What can this offer music educators?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Much of historical and contemporary music education research is influenced by a Cartesian ontology of opposition. This reinforces the classic function of music and music education: the exercise of possession, ownership and control. To confront these ideas, our article reimagines music education research through posthumanism and new materialism. In doing so, the focus shifts to making with nonhuman matter, posthuman bodies and the materialisation of music. Examples of cartographic research are discussed to show how the experience of musical environments is constantly reconfigured by human and nonhuman elements. This abandons the notion that music education takes place only in the mind and explores what a posthumanist approach to materiality can offer instead. As a result, normative academic conventions are disrupted by the recognition of in-the-making embodied musical learning, the intra-action of human and nonhuman sound materialising, and the materiality of the body in its experience of music as a play space, arguing that staying with the trouble of doing something new, or swimming against the tide, matters for music educators.