Public scholarship in music education: Rethinking academic freedom by unthinking method

Abstract

Beyond the political interference of authoritarian regimes, the neoliberalisation of the academy has emerged as one of the key threats to academic freedom in the twenty-first century. The demand to produce research outputs of sufficient quantity, quality, and impact for scholars to justify their taxpayer-funded appointments reconceptualises the responsibility of the public scholar from one who challenges the status quo and inequitable power relations, to one who provides a worthwhile return on investment. Accordingly, questions have been raised as to whether academia is a feasible realm in which to further ideals of equity and justice in music education. In this article, I examine the tension between critical imperative and methodological conformity, considering how the policing of method reinforces individualized frames of knowledge-production that fix and limit notions of what knowledge is and what it does. I argue that music education scholars may be well placed to deviate from procedural method in realizing a more creative and relational public scholarship, in working toward a more ethical conceptualisation of academic freedom through the inquiry process itself.

The ideal of academic freedom is essential to both teaching and research and is one that the university is not only beholden to, but dependent on. Particularly as higher music education is called upon to demonstrate its social relevance in addressing the “wicked problems” of the climate crisis, intensifying sociocultural division, political instability, and social unrest in many parts of the world (e.g., Kallio, 2021; Kertz-Welzel, 2022; Westerlund & Gaunt, 2021), the Humboldtian ideals of Lehfreiheit and Lernfreiheit (the freedom to teach and learn) seem more central to academic work than ever. Furthermore, as critical theory and the post-philosophies (post-modernism and post-structuralism in particular) have unsettled notions of distanced neutrality, academic freedom has also been seen to encompass the political freedoms necessary for scholars to engage as both “critic and conscience of society” (Olssen, 2022, p. 126). Higher music education is thus situated as a public good, with scholars responsible for and answerable to communities and social groups far beyond the university. Indeed, John Dewey (1936) and others have argued that academic freedom is inextricable from the formation of a democratic society, with the university positioned “at the heart of democratic life, not outside it” (Murphy, 2011, p. 514).

Perhaps in relation to such calls for public scholarship, threats to academic freedom have often been considered as overt political interference in the conceptualisation of societal problems, or the censorship of scholars’ and communities’ voices when dissent arises as to how such problems might be solved or what these problems are in the first place. More recently, the massification and neoliberalization of higher education have too been recognized as threats to academic freedom, through constraining and coercing academic activity in service of global competitiveness rather than a commitment to social betterment. The reduction of teaching and research to a marketable product can be seen through international university rankings based on staff–student ratios, degrees awarded, institutional and research income, research outputs, citation impact metrics, internationalisation, reputation among peers, and engagement with “industry” (e.g., Times Higher Education, 2023); rankings that affect student and staff recruitment as further opportunities to produce.

Following recent calls for a more reflexive and nuanced discussion of censorship (Kallio, 2015), neoliberalism (e.g., Varkøy, 2021), and other designated threats to academic freedom in music education, in this article I examine how our own doings of inquiry might discipline researchers according to neoliberal, positivist, and extractivist logics despite our critical ideals, and suggest how we might realize the academic freedom essential for public scholarship through methodology. In doing so, I adopt the Buddhist concepts of the far and near enemies, in reflecting upon the more subtle ways in which we ourselves may be implicated in our own control and confinement. In the Visuddhimagga ¹ , Buddhaghosa (2011, pp. 98–101) outlines four divine abidings: loving kindness, compassion, gladness, and equanimity. The far enemy of each of these abidings is its antithesis. For example, the far enemy of loving kindness is ill will, and the far enemy of compassion is cruelty. In contrast, the near enemy of each abiding masquerades as its companion while undermining the ideals and values underpinning it. For example, the near enemy of kindness is greed, as both kindness and greed “share in seeing virtues” (p. 312). The near enemy of compassion is pity, “as both share in seeing failure” (p. 313). While academic freedom’s far enemies of overt political interference or censorship may be more conspicuous, in this article I attend to the more subtle near enemies: the research practices that feel like progress but keep us stuck in the status quo.

The master’s tools

Audre Lorde’s (1984) caution that the “master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” has resonated with many twenty-first-century scholars across institutions and disciplines, raising questions as to whether the university is “beyond reform” (Grande, 2018, p. 49). Understanding the academic industrial complex as an ideological apparatus of the state, it has been largely accepted that to undertake transformative scholarship scholars have to work “within, against, and beyond the university-as-such” (Grande, 2018, p. 51). In music education, the challenges that neoliberalism and censorship pose to academic and creative freedoms have mostly been examined in school (e.g., Angel-Alvarado et al., 2021; Aróstegui, 2020; Bates, 2021), teacher education (e.g., Karlsen, 2019; Sadler, 2021), or other institutional settings (e.g., Kanellopoulos & Barahanou, 2020). Somewhat less attention has been paid to the ways in which music education research itself might be implicated in perpetuating inequities and injustices. As noted by a number of recent review essays of the theoretically rich and critical Routledge Handbook to Sociology of Music Education (Wright et al., 2021), the gatekeepers of music education scholarship (assuming positions as editors, reviewers, etc.) are often White, Western, male, and represent “economically privileged backgrounds” (Bates, 2023; Kenny, 2023; see also Mantie, 2022). More than this, these gatekeepers almost exclusively represent hegemonic scholarly perspectives aligning with Western ontologies and epistemologies that delimit what knowledge is, how it is generated, and what (or who) it is for. Music education researchers may thus be seen to engage in “trafficking in diversity” discourses to accrue the necessary capital to be of relevance as public scholars, while (inadvertently) upholding “neoliberalism and contribut[ing] to state violence and antidemocratic ends” (Gould, 2021, p. 152). We might then ask: despite our work so often challenging the neoliberal, Eurocentric, heteronormative, colonial, classist, ableist, racialised, and gendered frames of teaching and learning music in many institutional and community settings, are we merely peppering our work with just enough critical theory to be “de rigeur” (Schmidt, 2021, p. 235) in a field where “diversity has become ‘all the rage’” (Gould, 2021, p. 151)?

This impetus for the field to take a long hard look in the mirror can be seen in several critical papers reflecting upon the ethics of researchers’ own practice in relation to First Nations communities (e.g., Fienberg, 2023), dis/ability (e.g., Laes, 2017), gender (Nichols, 2016), and other qualities of difference, making visible their own insecurities, anguish, awkwardness, and struggles. It was in this same spirit that I submitted a manuscript to Research Studies in Music Education (see Kallio, 2020) reflecting upon the shortcomings of work that I had done together with a Sámi musician, Hildá Länsman (see Kallio & Länsman, 2018). As we had continued to examine the ways in which we conducted research together, I gained new perspectives on my own limitations in, and responsibilities for, relational work. One of the manuscript reviewers posed critical questions not only for the work I had submitted but also the genre of researcher self-critique more broadly:

Why write this? What is to be achieved? Is this to be an act of consciousness raising? On whose authority do you feel it okay to do so? Are you not then guilty of speaking on behalf of others? Or is the motivation more understandably crass: to get published

The hard reality is, if you truly believe in the issues you write about, perhaps you shouldn’t be attempting to have them published in a peer-reviewed academic journal! [. . .] The writing is elegant and the intentions are noble, but I have strong reservations about the publication of the manuscript . . . which I don’t think serves your long-term interests or the interests of the profession (let alone the Sami, about which I am in no position to judge).

Was the submission of this article to a leading peer-reviewed academic journal in the field an attempt to dismantle the master’s house by using the master’s tools? Were my doings of inquiry in this reflective paper merely performative, “trying to think [myself] into a new subject position” without attending to the “systems that enable [. . .] privileges” (Smith, 2013, p. 264; see also Gould, 2021; Mantie, 2022)? While published self-critique may chart processes of transformation as it lays bare “a fundamental reconstitution of ourselves” (Smith, 2013, p. 264), it may not do much more. Thus, in failing to effect broader sociopolitical change (or social impact), such work might actually reinforce our own confinement within the extractive, colonial, and neoliberal logics our work purports to counter.

The thingification of public scholars(hip)

Qualitative methodologist Aaron Kuntz (2018) considers these cycles of social structuring as governing processes of thingification that involve “absenting bodies and places in the rush to produce abstracted things that are governable” (p. 105). Things, for Kuntz, are understood as both material entities and discursive elements: not objects that we as researchers come into relation with, but rather “reified social relations [. . .] emptied of any animating quality” (p. 106) that circulate as static meanings to which “individuals can only adapt [. . .] they cannot change them” (p. 107). Insisting upon normalizing relations, “educational inquiry [. . .] [loses its] critical potential, colluding in the manufacturing of practices and logic formations that endure within the very processes they portend to interrogate” (p. 105). The ways in which research impact is construed and measured can be seen as one call to order that keeps us stuck in elegant prose and noble intentions, a near enemy of public scholarship that abstracts critical and ethical inquiry to calculable and governable relations.

As governments increasingly scrutinise the value derived from public spending on research, universities and government funding bodies around the world have sought to evaluate the work of scholars according to the extent to which they meet public needs. Although the reliance upon research metrics such as h-indices and impact factors have long been questioned (e.g., Waltman & Van Eck, 2012), the demand to produce things to demonstrate or measure the (often ill-defined and nonlinear) pathways between research and social impact still abounds, reflecting broader “audit principles of having evidence of social outcomes” (Lauronen, 2022, p. 2). In other words, while the rationalisation of research activity and spending has shifted from mechanistic impact measurements to encompass activities such as research translation, popularized publications, higher education practices, and collaborative workshops, the politicization and governance of research through rendering such work into impact things continues. Explicit examples of this may be seen in the Australian Research Council’s requirement of grant applicants to write National Interest Test Statements (NITS) to articulate how the proposed research is of value to the nation, or the Academy of Finland’s rationalization of research in terms of its alignment with thematized public policy goals (Lauronen, 2022), or the European Commission’s (2021) directive for research to address “hard-to-solve, high impact social problems.” ² The task of public scholars is then to respond to already-conceptualised challenges and adapt their approaches to inquiry in ways that can demonstrate (or even quantify) their accountability to funders, stakeholders, policymakers, and communities.

These framings of social impact, while broadening beyond metrics, still risk assuming a form of knowledge governance that may place researchers engaged in equity or justice-related research in particularly vulnerable positions. For instance, in 2022, the then Australian education minister vetoed six national-level grant proposals on the bases of their National Impact Test Statements, determining that despite already being supported by expert evaluators and the Academic Council, these research projects were not in the Australian public’s interest to fund. This political interference generated significant public outrage, contributing toward a review of the national funding body and the pause of national research and impact assessment processes. The entanglement of research value with its utility in relation to predetermined government policy agendas, particularly in the arts and humanities (within which all of the six vetoed grant proposals were situated), was seen to undermine the critical potentials of public scholarship, as social impact was thingified in ways that academics can only adapt to, not change.

The thingification of the public scholar

This is not to suggest, however, that this governance is only imposed from outside of ourselves and our work. As Foucault (1977) argues, power does not only work in negative terms, excluding, repressing, censoring, or abstracting . . . “power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth” (p. 194). We too have roles to play in this governance of realities, identities, and inquiry practices, and these thingification processes and products can also exist as part of who we are, what we do, and how we feel about it. As illustration, despite my suspicion of traditional metrics as a qualitative researcher, I needed impact things to demonstrate (or legitimize) my research track record when compiling a recent grant application of my own. According to the publisher webpage, the open access book The Politics of Diversity (2021) that I co-edited together with Heidi Westerlund, Sidsel Karlsen, Kathryn Marsh, and Eva Saether had, when I checked, been accessed over 35,000 times since its publication in 2021. The reach of this book was made possible through an author-pays open access agreement secured by generous funding from two large-scale projects based at University of the Arts Helsinki, projects that were both committed to address access barriers to academic work and also adhered to similar ethical commitments to public scholarship by the project funder. That we achieved our aim to broaden the reach of academic work to such an extent feels extremely rewarding. However, if we consider that the grant scheme that I was applying for sets a criterion for researchers to qualify their work in terms of impact thing evidence, yet, that this evidence was procured through paid open access, such things might drive academic imperialism rather than legitimise or further the ideals of public scholarship. Furthermore, that such impact things feel good not only in terms of a measure of individual or project “successes,” but as a tangible manifestation of enhancing accessibility to research (however flawed that metric might be), suggests that the seduction of these affectations implicates researchers ourselves within processes of commodification and neoliberal governance. By abstracting the relations between researcher and researched that critical inquiry is dependent upon, these processes of thingification create new relations by which we are not represented by impact things or have such things computed for us (such as h-indices) but that we become impact things ourselves (see Kuntz, 2018) through the ways in which we incorporate the calculation of impact things as part of research design, dissemination, and our academic identities as public scholars. Academic freedom and responsibility-in-relation are thus replaced by an individualised scholar who is accountable to utilitarian ends by organizations and institutions and guided by our own sense of impact value. In this way, we risk curtailing the ethical and critical horizons of inquiry through reinforcing “two limiting assumptions—the humanist subject and the mythos of representationalism” (Kuntz, 2018, p. 110) in governing not only impact things but ourselves as researcher things as well.

Policing the epistemological unconscious

Thingification holds potential to do more than cast academics as “mere bit-parts or walk-ons to the drama of which they are (at least listed as) major protagonists” (Watermeyer, 2019, p. 1): it also has implications for our methodological decision-making as we seek to conduct transformative, impactful work. Outside of funding boards or universities, one arena in which the quality and value of research is determined is through publication. According to reviewer guidelines of major academic publishers, the purpose of peer review is to “uphold the integrity of the journal by identifying invalid research, and helping to maintain the quality of the journal.” ³ With the very concept of validity inextricable from positivist orientations to research, reviewer assessments of qualitative work might function not as a “peer-based system of evaluation and advancement” based on the “values of professionalism” (Kuntz, 2016, p. 36) but a disciplining of method according to normative and extractive logics. This, Elizabeth St Pierre (2016) argues, reveals an epistemological unconscious, reverting back to positivist ideals that shape and delimit our understandings of what counts as knowledge, how it is generated, and what it can do. As reviewers apply value to methods of triangulation equipping researchers to “hone in on the truth,” conducting member checks to “correct discrepancies in [our] interpretations,” or undertaking reflexive work to make clear our bias (p. 26; see also Kallio, 2021), St Pierre suggests that we undermine our own critical potentials by setting the researcher apart from the researched, but also apart from the inquiry process and context, reinforcing a Cartesian dualism by locating analysis and interpretation in the mind of the researcher rather than in relation to data and context.

Reflecting once again on the review that I received (see Kallio, 2020), the questions posed toward my motivations, my authority, and my publication record remind us of the tendency for the review process to extract the researcher from context through such demands to articulate a singular researcher voice (Kuntz, 2016). This reification of the liberal humanist subject risks valuing the researcher according to their ability to produce not only textual outputs but also their own subjecthood, fixed in time and by already-known identity labels; methodologically thingifying not only research relations into “data” but also the researcher in making them knowable and thus accountable to academia and society. While—as in the review I received—this accountability often appears as critical concern underpinned by the ideals of public scholarship, such structurings of subjecthood also, as music education scholar Sidsel Karlsen (2021) describes, intertwine with the rules and resources that we are in relation with and hold the potential to limit opportunities to imagine otherwise. Thus, as reviewers we may work as our own near enemies, feeding the neoliberal processes of hyper-individuation where our contributions are measured by our “instrumental rationality” (Giroux, 2020). As Erin Manning exclaimed in 2016, method is “an apparatus of capture” (p. 32) to which I would add that the policing of method is an apparatus of confinement.

Finding a way

Rather than abandon method altogether, I am rather more interested in exploring its failures in realizing forms of public scholarship in music education, aporias of inquiry that Foucault (1998) defines as a “difficulty” that “stops us in our tracks” (p. xxiii). As he notes,

My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to a hyper- and pessimistic activism. I think that the ethico-political choice we have to make every day is to determine which is the main danger. (Foucault, 1983, p. 231)

This “hyper- and pessimistic activism” thus frames inquiry as an inherently political act. However, this is not one in which the public scholar serves as guide with “recourse to truths or subjectivities that [are] independent of historically constituted discourses” (Brass, 2012, p. 161); but rather one in which the public scholar both enacts a “belief in how relations of power can be struggled against, and an experiment in gauging the potential for transformation” (Butin, 2001, pp. 173–174). This experimental disposition, in resisting the normative rationalities of method and the thingification of scholarship, aligns with Patti Lather’s (2001) “praxis of stuck places” which she describes as “a praxis of not being so sure, in excess of binary or dialectical logic that disrupts the horizon of an already prescribed intelligibility” (pp. 246–247). If we consider the confines in which we work, upon an academic landscape characterized by measurable research metrics, social impact narratives, and a modernist, consumptive approach to knowledge, evidence, and subject production, embracing an approach of not knowing is an act of critical insubordination. Refusing conceptualizations of scholarly authority based on the wielding of methods to produce and reproduce positivist structurings of the world, Liora Bresler (e.g., 2019) and Eva Sæther (2021) have both described navigating spaces of unknowing in their work, and the unexpected affordances of music in finding a way that exists beyond or in excess of the things of public scholarship.

A radical (and musical) methodological cartography

Bresler (2019) has described the complexity of research as akin to the “layered nature of knowing in music—verbal and auditory, concrete and abstract, explicit and implicit” (p. 81), emphasizing the integration of the theoretical with the experiential. Adopting a Buddhist perspective, she describes the academic commitment as “a life of consuming and creating knowledge” (p. 86), as risking an “attachment to knowledge” (p. 87) that leaves little room for discovery. Returning to the Buddhist notions of the far and near enemy, it is noteworthy that these concepts have found significant application in research on relationships, where the far enemy of connection has been described as disconnection and the near enemy of connection as control (e.g., Brown, 2021). Understanding research as relationship, the far enemy of knowledge may then be ignorance or naiveté, and the near enemy an overreliance on procedural method. Articulating this, Bresler (2019) cites Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön (2013),

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark. (p. 1, cited in Bresler, 2019, p. 92)

Thus, in working the limits of knowing, Bresler (2019) argues for a “letting go of knowledge” (p. 86) in ways reminiscent of the exploratory leaps of creation in the arts. While guided by an external compass of method, she also advocates for attending to an inner compass to guide us through the unknowing, a compass that is “often embodied and sensed rather than recognized and verbalized” (p. 92). However, acknowledging “the tension between a discipline experienced versus a discipline studied” (p. 82) and “how very hard it is to escape our training” (St Pierre, 2021, p. 4), the calibration of these compasses upon the landscape of a neoliberal, colonial, consumptive, and extractive academia may render them untrustworthy. They may confine us to well-worn paths that cannot know or be otherwise.

Recalibrating both compasses away from the thingification of the public scholar, inquiry, and impact “is no small task” (Bresler, 2019, p. 86). In making visible our own reliances upon positivist, neoliberal systems of confinement and fixity, it may be necessary to reconfigure our own scholarly expertise and authority from what we know to our experiences and identifications of failures and limitations. This, Kuntz (2018) explains, is a process of radical cartography, one of revealing “the mapped in order to make possible those spaces where such mappings productively fail; spaces for becoming more than how one currently is” (p. 81). By exploring the boundaries, breakdowns, and excesses of method in this way, we might refuse governance as neoliberal subjects and insist upon the inherent unsettledness of relational approaches to inquiry. Sæther (2021) describes this unsettledness as a “halting place” (p. 18) in which researchers might get productively lost. She argues that this demands the engagement with a “plurality of knowledge forms” (p. 19) and a relational reconceptualization of the researcher/researched, joining with others “in the middle, being both/and rather than either/or” (p. 20). Refusing “typifications which hierarchize or demean human relations” (p. 20) demands discomfort, failure, and feeling lost—a being- and becoming-with that cannot determine which way to go based on external or internal compasses that reinstate the liberal subject of the researcher, but upon relational and situational ethics–as well as making mistakes. Such an experience of relational work is familiar to many musicians, as music creation, performance, listening, and so on can never exist in isolation from others, from history, from context, or meaning. Yet neither are these dimensions of musicality fixed as understandings only to . Rather, artistic sensitivies may afford more complex engagements with the unfolding constellations of relationships and meanings; new research possibilities to activate the “whole self, linking [one’s] [. . .] inner and outer worlds and connecting to [others]” (Bresler, 2015, p. 3). These affordances depend on polyphony, even cacophony, and “the not knowing, the not being sure” (Lather, 2001, p. 117). As Lather (2001) argues, it “is in this ‘undecidability’ that the potential for change lies” (p. 117).

Such a musically informed approach to public scholarship demands taking risks and embracing vulnerability (in ourselves and also in our research) to imagine an academic freedom from the disciplinary control of method, to seek new and complex connections (Karlsen, 2019). If we hope to resist the neoliberalisation of the academy, the thingification of impact, and the reduction of inquiry to procedural method, we have an ethical obligation to think the unthinkable (St Pierre, 2019) and to explore and experiment beyond the limits to animate the conditions for a yet-to-be-determined public scholarship (or perhaps a scholarship for new publics). This cannot be a charted route but rather an improvised working of the limits of our knowings in both music and research, toward a sensuous (Sæther, 2021) process of getting lost, through nonsense, failure, and connection. As Foucault (1981/1991) advised,

if I don’t ever say what must be done, it isn’t because I believe that there’s nothing to be done; on the contrary, it is because I think that there are a thousand things to do, to invent, to forge. (p. 174)