Sociological Thinking in Music Education

Abstract Sociological Thinking in Music Education: International Intersections presents sociological thinking about music teaching and learning as important social, political, economic, ecological, and cultural ways of being. At the book’s heart is the intersection between theory and practice where readers gain glimpses of intriguing social phenomena as lived through music learning and teaching. The vital roles played by music and music education from various societies around the world are illustrated through pivotal intersections between music education and sociology: community, schooling, and issues of decolonization. In this book, emerging as well as established authors mobilize the links between applied sociology, music, education, and music education in ways that intersect the scholarly and the personal. These interdisciplinary vantage points fulfill the book’s overarching aim to move beyond mere descriptions of what is by analyzing how social inequalities and inequities, conflict and control, and power can be understood in and through music teaching and learning at both individual and collective levels. The result is not only encountering new things regarding the social construction of music education practices in specific places but also seeing and hearing familiar things in fresh ways. Digital assets enable readers to meet the authors and the points of their inquiry via various audiovisual media including videos, a documentary music film, and multilingual video précis for each chapter in English and in each author’s language of origin.