Session introduction: Live Weider Ellefsen: Social theory as research field, a discursive practice and a game (session introduction, video)

This opening session introduces participants to the central themes of the course by situating music education within broader social and theoretical contexts. It provides a foundation for understanding music and music education as complex, dynamic, and contingent social practices, and establishes a shared conceptual foundation for the course, connecting the theoretical richness of social theory with the lived realities of music education.

Together, and based on course material (video lectures, research articles and other digital resources) we will be exploring how music education manifests, what’s at stake, and the tensions that shape it. A main aim is to delve into questions about the relevance of social theory in understanding how music education can both reflect and shape broader social dynamics, arguing also for the relevance of a music educational research approach in understanding social dynamics in general. We give particular attention to the dual nature of music education as both a site for cultivating equity and harmony and a potential mechanism for perpetuating inequalities and cultural exclusion. To frame these discussions, we will introduce and examine some of the key topics of social theory, such as the relation between human agency and social structure, language, discourse and materiality, power, activism and social change, dialogue and conflict, and symbolic and material economies.

In examining these recurring topics of interest, we are also mapping out the history and current landscape of social theorising. This landscape includes the work of Theodor Adorno, Pierre Bourdieu, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and other foundational thinkers in social theory as well as contributions from contemporary scholars in the fields of music education (broadly speaking) such as Joseph M. Abramo, Randall Everett Allsup, Vincent C. Bates, Cathy Benedict, Anna Bull, Simon Frith, Elizabeth Gould, Lucy Green, Juliet Hess, Alexis Anja Kallio, Alexandra Kertz-Welzel, Nasim Niknafs, Sean R. Powell and Patrick Schmidt, to mention a just a few. Notably, the landscape also include Nordic research perspectives, as exemplified by scholars like Cecilia Ferm Almqvist, Petter Dyndahl, Sidsel Karlsen and Heidi Westerlund.