Revolution rock: a study of a public pedagogy of protest music

Abstract

My theorisation of a public pedagogy of protest music is initially located in the persistent and pervasive mythology associating protest music—especially that produced as popular music in the 1960s—with social change. This thesis works to uncover understandings of the public pedagogical dimensions of protest music, as it takes place and is facilitated by protest musicians, as a radical practice and critical form of contemporary mass culture. In order to do this, I identify and explore critical and radical relationships between protest music, adult learning and education, and social change, as interactions between these contexts occur in global mass-(multi)media spaces. Research is carried out in a two-stage methodological approach of domain analysis and case study on the protest music band Midnight Oil. Based on this, my thesis provides a theorisation of public pedagogy as it encapsulates protest music, and those I conceptualise as the critical and radical public pedagogues who produce this mass cultural form. Additionally, my thesis: - conceptualises protest music as a form of popular music and in terms of its relationship with the global mass-(multi)media; - establishes and theorises the relationship between protest music, critical pedagogy and radical adult education; and - discusses how Midnight Oil, as purveyors of protest music, understand and can be understood in terms of the relationship between popular music and social change.