Music Education Research

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Frontiers of difference: a duo-ethnographic study

of social justice in music education

Judy Lewis & Catharina Christophersen

To cite this article: Judy Lewis & Catharina Christophersen (2021) Frontiers of difference: a
duo-ethnographic study of social justice in music education, Music Education Research, 23:1,
90-104, DOI: 10.1080/14613808.2021.1887114

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14613808.2021.1887114

Published online: 17 Feb 2021.

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MUSIC EDUCATION RESEARCH
2021, VOL. 23, NO. 1, 90–104
https://doi.org/10.1080/14613808.2021.1887114

Frontiers of difference: a duo-ethnographic study of social justice

in music education
Judy Lewisa and Catharina Christophersenb
a
Department of Music Education, Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam, New York, NY, USA; bArts Education
Department, Faculty of Education, Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

There has been a growing realisation in social justice literature that there Received 16 June 2020
are barriers to music teaching and learning, privileging certain musics and Accepted 4 February 2021
certain people. Recent writings suggest that practice-near perspectives
KEYWORDS
may provide valuable insights into the particularities and complexities Autoethnography;
of social (in)justice within music education. Despite that, the use of duoethnography; social
action research and autoethnography in the field of music education justice; music teacher
has been slow to catch on. In this duoethnographic study, the authors education; practitioners
explore the contextual and situated expressions of social justice in stories
music education through their own practitioners’ stories. The authors
suggest that listening to life stories of self and others can offer new
textures of understanding regarding social justice and ourselves as its
agents. As such, this study moves beyond a focus on what social justice
look like and how it might be achieved to highlighting the experiences
of social-justice practitioners as an essential way of knowing.

Introduction: backdrop
Catharina and I (Judy) first met in April of, 2015 at the RIME conference in Exeter, UK. During the conference
we found ourselves listening to each other’s paper presentations and striking up spontaneous conversations
peppered with questions about each other’s scholarly work and professional circumstances. We talked
about life in the US (Judy) and in Norway (Catharina) and the sometimes shockingly different circumstances
within which we were working and living. Despite those differences, we soon realised that not only did we
share common research interests - social justice, popular culture, and representation and inclusion in
music education – but also a passion for working practically to transform our classrooms into spaces of diver-
sity, democracy, and agency. We both have histories of being simultaneously music education scholars and
practitioners. Each of us, on her own path, gravitated toward the topic of social justice in music education
and subsequently positioned it as a central focus in both our practice and our scholarly research. We were
each engaging with the burgeoning dialogue on social justice taking place in our discourse and working to
interrogate our own spaces of praxis from first-hand experience. And so, when on the last afternoon of the
conference, Catharina invited me to hang out with her and some of her colleagues, I readily agreed. And,
as the afternoon of socializing went on, we found ourselves more and more in a private conversation
about our individual work, the striking intersections and a budding idea of working together on a mutual
project

The scene recounted above was the catalyst for this article. Writing together about these issues
seemed only natural. Yet, despite our common academic and pedagogical interests, pinning
down an entry point for collaboration would turn out to be more challenging than we had ever
imagined.

CONTACT Judy Lewis lewiju@potsdam.edu Department of Music Education, Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam,
New York, NY, USA
© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 MUSIC EDUCATION RESEARCH 91

Judy is a music teacher educator in New York. At the time of this research, she resided in
New York City where she taught music to urban, minority elementary students in an underserved
neighbourhood in the city. Her demographic was primarily African American and Latino children.
A majority of her students in this setting came from low-income households to the extent that they
received free meals at school every day. Catharina is a music teacher-educator in Bergen, Norway.
She was formerly a music teacher in Norwegian public schools, and at the time of this research was
working as a music teacher educator and researcher in a general teacher education institution in
Norway. While more diverse than a few decades ago, Norway still has a relatively small and hom-
ogenous population, which is reflected in her demographic, consisting of mostly white, lower
middle-class pre-service teachers.
For months, following the conference, we went back and forth trying to pinpoint our ‘way in’ to this conversa-
tion. And, while we found many shared theoretical groundings to our collaboration, we struggled to find a way
to talk about our experiences. Our unique contexts were not only disparate in the ages and ethnicities of our
students but were offering us radically different ontologies and experiences in regard to socially just practices.
Coming from such different circumstances and backgrounds, we soon found it hard to discuss social justice at
all, let alone write anything substantial about it.

This research is focused on the very impediment that we experienced over those many months. It
is an interrogation of the situated expressions of social justice in our work as local practitioners. It is
motivated by two core questions: Can our voices, as practitioners, add a richer perspective to the
discourse of social justice in music education? Can ‘understanding through difference’ enlighten
our own practices?
This qualitative research project explores the contextual and situated expressions of social justice
in music education. Through it, we wished to examine our own pedagogical contexts and processes
in relation to disciplinary conceptualisations of social justice in music education. We seek to explore
the power of practitioners’ stories to enrich and impact scholarly thought. And, we hope to create
new discourse surrounding the complex and multi-vocal nature of context as it informs the enact-
ment of social justice in disparate locales and to uncover themes and questions that might serve as
the starting point for a broader conversation about social justice – both conceptually and in practice.

Theoretical framework
Over the past decade or more an attention to issues of social justice has grown in music education
scholarship. There has been a growing realisation that there are barriers to music learning, that
dominant music education practices are regulating access to music education, thus privileging cer-
tain musics, people and practices. According to Jorgensen (2007), music education will always be
about more than just music, since music and music education is deeply intertwined with human
life and culture as well as more general educational issues. Thus, Jorgensen contends that, ‘regard-
ing music as independent from other things is unrealistic in neglecting the long traditions of music
making and taking in which quite the opposite is the case’ (Jorgensen 2007, 173).
The recognition of justice as an imperative (Jorgensen 2015) for music education has inspired
significant transformations in how music educators think about their actions in educational prac-
tices, and within programmes and institutions. For example, scholars looking at the processes of
informal learning have not only spurred inclusion of new musical styles but have forced us to ree-
valuate basic concepts like musicianship and musical literacy in a more inclusive fashion (Green
2001; Jaffurs 2004). This, in turn, has promoted ways that informal learning strategies may impact
normative music educational settings as well (Allsup 2003; Westerlund 2006; Karlsen and Väkevä
2012)
Social justice scholars in music education have expanded their gaze to include issues of race,
class, ethnicity, gender, and disability among others (Vaugeois 2007; Allsup 2012; Bradley 2012;
Woodford 2012; Wright 2013; Abramo 2015; Bergonzi 2015; Niknafs 2017). Further, scholars
92 J. LEWIS AND C. CHRISTOPHERSEN

have begun to explore the power of new technologies to afford more socially just and equitable
music learning spaces (Louth 2015; Savage 2015), and have called for students’ voices to enter
this important conversation (Cooke 2015; Spruce 2015).
As the field of social justice within music education has grown, scholars have questioned the
ways social justice is conceptualised, theorised and represented (Bowman 2007; Reimer 2007;
Woodford 2012; Jorgensen 2015; Niknafs 2017; Hess 2018). Social justice is a relational concept
that is inseparable from concepts like democracy (Gould 2007), equity and fairness (Sands 2007),
thus naturally linking the concept of justice to injustice (Vaugeois 2007; Wright 2015). Conse-
quently, the concept of social justice has a ‘plethora of uses and broadly-defined applications’
(Sands 2007, 44). Jorgensen (2015), for instance, identifies a wide range of visions of justice1:
While they all concern human rights, they could also be overlapping and conflicting, thus pointing
to ambiguity and particularity. In other words, social justice as a theoretical concept is fluid, con-
textual and relative. As Bowman contends, social justice ‘resists generalisation; it doesn’t necessarily
“travel” well. One person’s or interest group’s social justice may easily become another’s injustice’
(Bowman 2007, 4). Similarly, several scholars (Hess 2018, 2017) contend that naming is essential in
social justice enterprise, since concepts like ‘justice’ and ‘diversity’ are euphemisms that may cover
up the real issues at stake. Hence, the mere concept of social justice may camouflage the complexity,
diversity, and fluid nature of social justice (Gould 2007; Schmidt 2015).
The call for social justice in music education rests upon an imperative to recognise and acknowl-
edge injustice (Jorgensen 2007), an imperative to care, that is to ‘perceive and act, and not look
away’ (Allsup and Shieh 2012, 48). However well-intended, un-reflected urges to correct injustice
and to ‘do something’ may very well end up as charity, tokenism or exoticism disguised as acts of
social justice (Bradley 2007). Further, scholars and educators need to critically reflect on their own
positionality and how they might be implicated in unjust practices (Vaugeois 2007, 163). Such cri-
ticality and reflexivity are vital both in order to recognise possible and actual manifestations of
‘othering’ as well as providing spaces in which silenced voices could be heard.
Consequently, representing social justice within scholarly texts is notoriously challenging.
Recent writings suggest that practice-near perspectives may provide valuable insight into the par-
ticularity and complexity of social (in)justice within music education (see, for example, De Quadros
2015; Higgins 2015; Savage 2015; Soto 2015; Woodward 2015) Despite that, use of action research
and autoethnography in the field of music education has been slow to catch on.
Younker and Hickey (2007) conducted an exploration of multiple music learning contexts that
they were each working in as performers, teachers and researchers. Through a dialogical frame-
work, they explore how issues of fairness and responsibility are reflected in each other’s stories
and seek to locate expressions of social justice (and the obstacles to social justice) in their music
education settings. The authors conclude with a consensus of ‘ways forward’ for the profession,
and most specifically for music teacher education and suggest that ‘telling our stories [brings]
the students to the center of our examination’ (226).
Adding to this robust conversation in the literature, we set out to conduct this study with the
purpose of bringing ourselves, as practitioners, ‘to the center of our examination’.

Methodology: duoethnography
As we confronted the radically different ontologies and experiences afforded by our unique contexts, we began
to entertain the idea of ‘sharing our stories’ with each other in writing. The first purpose of this ‘storytelling’
was for each of us to take a moment to identify key and critical moments that (1) epitomize our social justice
work and (2) constitute unique moments of clarity in our personal reflective practices. The second was to
invite the Other to engage with and interrogate those stories through her own lens; to ‘bring new insights
into old stories’ (Breault 2016, 779). In other words, this led us to duoethnography as a research methodology.

Breault (2016) describes duo-ethnography as ‘intersecting autoethnographies’ (778). Autoethno-

graphy is research from the bottom up. That is, it emphasises the power of personal narrative as a
 MUSIC EDUCATION RESEARCH 93

way of knowing. However, the robust demands of autoethnography charge the researcher to criti-
cally observe and interrogate her experiences and thoughts ‘while living them’ (Chang 2016) and to
continually reflect on the personal in relation to the cultural (Reed-Danahay 1997; Dyson 2007;
Starr 2010). The autoethnographic researcher is charged with situating her story within and against
current scholarship. As such, the autoethnographer is uniquely situated to illuminate problematic
aspects of, and underrepresented ideas in, mainstream discourse.
Building on an autoethnographic method, we employed a duoethnographic model (Norris and
Sawyer 2004) that was uniquely suited to our research goals. Breault (2016) notes a key distinction
between auto- and duo-ethnography: In autoethnography the researching ‘self’ is the topic of
research. Duoethnography affords the additional tool of better understanding the intrapersonal
phenomenon being investigated. In the duo-ethnographic model, we found a forum in which to
begin a conversation that we initially found elusive. Central to the rigour of the duoethnographic
method is a demand to enter, through dialogue, into the epistemological and ontological spaces of
the Other and to invite the Other into one’s own spaces. If such an invitation eluded us in conversa-
tions, we hoped to find more open spaces through the sharing of our stories with each other.
Finally, duoethnography is rooted in the idea of collaborative co-construction of knowledge (Saw-
yer and Norris 2013). As such, it charges researchers, to move beyond subjective experiences, to share
stories with each other and, through dialogue, to ‘explore, expose, reconceptualise [and] re-story’
(Sawyer and Norris 2013, 290) personal narratives. As a polyvocal text, it challenges us to transform
the subjective ‘I’ into a collective ‘We’ in search of deeper understanding (Pratt 1991). Miller (2011)
suggests that duoethnography is ‘an interrogation of contingent spaces as text’ that seeks not only to
interrogate meaning within those spaces but to ‘evoke, interrupt, and create new, uncertain spaces’.

Data collection and analysis

Our lived experiences and our reflections on those experiences constituted data in this study. In the
first stage of data collection and analysis we sought to mine our experiences with social justice. We
each wrote narrative vignettes2 from the field, sharing personal encounters with issues of social jus-
tice in our distinct contexts. In those vignettes, we sought to highlight the intersection of the per-
sonal and cultural and explore the ways in which our reflective practice brought issues of social
justice to the fore.
Next, we emailed our stories to each other. We read each other’s stories, then scheduled a num-
ber of video chats to discuss the stories and search out themes.
As in our initial conversations about writing together, we again hit an impasse in the ‘coding’ phase. We had
compiled a list of overarching themes from the stories that included: issues of power, policy, advocacy and the
tension between normative expertise and student cultures. For months we went back and forth, discussing,
reflecting on and attempting to write about the data as we had coded it. Yet, no matter how long we mulled
over these ‘findings’, we remained deeply dissatisfied. Did these ‘coded themes’ actually speak to the insights
we believed grew out of this experience? Did they add anything to the literature? We became reticent to
embrace them as the outcome of this process.

Breault (2016) argues that when researchers enter a duoethnography within a shared ideological
narrative they may actually find it more difficult to unearth new and transformative insights. In
such a case, the ultimate conversation can get steered toward the search for another ‘master narra-
tive’. We began to recognise this as a core element of our struggles.
We returned to each other’s stories using a grounded theory approach: What new situated understandings
about these two social justice practitioners grew out of these stories? How did our unique lived experiences
talk with, and back to, the narratives of social justice in current music education discourse? What set us
apart and what was learned from collaboratively interrogating those differences?

What follows is a sample vignette from each author and the answers to these questions offered by
her colleague.
94 J. LEWIS AND C. CHRISTOPHERSEN

‘What you mean when you say … ’

The following story relates an incident that happened in Judy’s 4th grade music class at the school
discussed in the introduction to this article. For several weeks, the children had been bringing in
their favourite songs for the class to listen to and discuss together:
It is the sixth week of class. The children have brought in eight popular songs so far for us to listen to, watch
together and talk about. For the last two weeks we’ve been exploring how popular songs ‘get stuck in your
head’ (as the kids put it). Along the way we touched on issues like song hooks and censorship. Today, I decide
to play a game with the kids. I’ll sing/drum a melodic/rhythmic hook from one of the songs we’ve already
heard in class and they will try to guess which song it is. Before the first 2 notes of the first song are out of
my mouth, the children are clamoring to respond, yelling out answers. I’m stunned. I try other songs and
they guess each one in less than a few seconds.

‘How did you know so fast?!’ I ask in amazement. Rhaelyn responds with great confidence and pride: ‘Because
the beat. I always will remember the beat.’ My first instinct is to gently correct her: ‘But this wasn’t the beat,
was it? It had notes, actual notes’. As I finish my sentence, I realise my mistake. Rather than ask her to explain
what she clearly views as a legitimate answer, I bring my thirty years of teaching experience down on her.
Needless to say, Rhaelyn does not respond. Beyond that, the next two girls who answer make sure to use
‘official musical terms’ like notes and tempo. I was haunted by this misstep throughout the following week
leading up to the next class and so, the next week I began class: ‘Ok, I had a question for everybody …
cause all through the lesson last week everybody kept using the word beat or beats and I got home and I
thought … someone who is a musician thinks about beat one way and someone who’s a music listener
might think about beat a different way … and someone who loves hip hop might think about beat one
way and someone who listens to Beethoven might think about beat a different way … so … what do you
mean when you say “beat”?’

Janet is the first to answer. ‘So, I think what you mean when you say beat … ’ I quickly interrupted her, ‘No,
what do you mean?’ The conversation that followed lasted for another two weekly meetings. The children
taught me how they understand the term beat given the fact that they are growing up in a social environment
saturated with hip hop music and its unique musical and vernacular terminology. They taught me what makes,
in their minds, a ‘good beat’, what elements of the musical score contribute the most to the beat, and what it
means that ‘the beat drops’. They invited me into an entirely foreign landscape of musical meaning - their
landscape - in which they were the experts. Through this encounter I became acutely aware of how discourse
– the language that I use and encourage students to use in my class – affects the critical and transformative
nature of my students’ musical engagements, and hence learning.

Catharina’s response
When I started to read and reflect upon Judy’s story, I found myself problematising the experiential
dimension of (in)justice that we emphasised in the beginning of this article. What could it mean to
perceive social justice as experience, and not just as an ethos (Gould 2007), and how could this be
used as a guiding principle for reading and interpreting a practitioner’s story? Gould highlights the
shift from ‘moral law [and] to the event’, that is, from principles to happenings, and to the embo-
died, asymmetrical relationships to others (2007, 236). My interpretation of and reflections on
Judy’s story will start from Gould’s statement, especially the notions of experience, happening
and asymmetrical relationships.
The happening or event described in the story is an interaction within a music classroom in an
urban community where students and a music teacher regularly meet to listen to and discuss pop-
ular music brought to class by the students themselves. Within the story there is what one might
consider a ‘critical happening’, represented by the incident where the communication between
Judy and the children breaks down as a consequence of Judy’s comment to Rhaelyn’s perception
of beat. Such ‘critical happenings’ in education are, according to Woods (2012) highly charged
moments that impact on a teacher’s personal development. Such moments could spur self-reflec-
tion and profound change (Mertova and Webster 2012); ‘[t]hey are flash-points that illuminate
in an electrifying instant some key problematic aspect or aspects of the teacher’s role and which
contain, in the same instant, the solution’ (Woods 2012, 1). The flash-point in this case is Judy’s
 MUSIC EDUCATION RESEARCH 95

stark realisations that, despite her own desire and efforts to make the classroom a socially just space,
her actions and language may in fact repress children’s voices and agencies. Through this encoun-
ter, Judy became acutely aware of how discourse – the language she used and encouraged students
to use in her class – affected the critical and transformative nature of the students’ musical engage-
ments and hence learning. Consequently, she works on establishing a more open starting point for
musical dialogue by asking the question: ‘What do you mean?’, thereby setting the scene for a more
active participation from the students.
The story brings the concept of ‘radical musicking’ (Hess 2014) to mind. The characteristics of
‘radical musicking’ are: (a) a centreing of the student, in which the teacher creates a safe and trusting
environment where students are validated and thereby builds relationships with the students; (b) a
diversity of materials and methods of musicking, thus allowing for multiple musical epistemologies;
(c) a contextualisation, in which music is connected to students’ knowledge and their daily lives; (d)
a challenging of privileges and hegemonic paradigms, thereby making political dimensions of
musicking visible (Hess 2014, 239–240).
Radical musicking aims at instigating social change through music teaching, which is exactly
what Judy seems to be doing in her story. The idea of starting with and from students’ ‘own’
music is frequently mentioned as a basic tenet within popular music education (Green 2001; Chris-
tophersen and Gullberg 2017), still, the notion of ‘own’ music is often understood as guitar-based
garage band music from a few decades back (Snell and Söderman 2014). In Judy’s story, however,
children’s ‘own’ music is exactly that – the music that the children listen to and value in their daily
lives within their communities. While this is indeed a simple and straightforward version of ‘own
music’, the idea of making children co-constructors of curriculum is more radical. Also, by inviting
the students to offer a socioculturally significant connection, to ‘name’, in their own words, their
musical experience, Judy opened ‘a space for alternative epistemologies’ (hooks 1994). When the
teacher steps back, the students are allowed to enter the space traditionally controlled by the tea-
cher, thus blurring the boundaries between teacher and learner. Judy and her students thus became
‘border crossers’ (Giroux 2005), crossing ‘cultural borders historically constructed and socially
organised within rules and regulations that limit and enable particular identities, individual
capacities and social forms’ (22).
The shift from ethos to experience must include a focus on embodied, asymmetrical relations
(Gould 2007), and Judy’s story is full of these relationships: Teacher and students, adult and chil-
dren, the formalised realm of schooling and everyday life, as well as issues of race, class, culture and
privilege: The white middle-class person teaching in an urban, underprivileged area. In this case, the
relationships are constructed in terms of dualisms, or as binary oppositions, with Judy representing
the dominant and superior side of the relationships. As such, dualisms ‘constitute domination when
few opportunities exist for resisting or escaping the relation’ (Gould 2007, 232), and when ‘infer-
iorization resulting from dualisms is believed to be innocent and inevitable’ (Gould 2007). Judy,
bringing all of her ‘thirty years of teaching experience down’ on Rhaelyn, is an example of such
domination and inferiorisation.
In this particular story, however, Judy’s statement and Rhaelyn’s reaction did not pass as inno-
cent and inevitable. Instead, it led Judy to recognise students’ expertise, to help them name, define
and own their own expertise, thereby allowing the students to teach her. This ‘border crossing’ (Gir-
oux 2005), the ‘multiple epistemologies’ (Hess 2014) and ‘multiple configurations of teaching and
learning’ (Gould 2007, 234) constitutes a form of power play in the classroom. Power is inscribed in
the very concept of schooling and the mandate that is given to educational institutions by society.
Eradicating power relations in the classroom is impossible, however, asymmetrical relationships are
not necessarily only about domination and oppression. The power invested in teachers could also
be used to play with power, or as Gould (2007, 234) puts it: ‘experimenting with power relations’.
This statement seems to draw upon a notion of power as productive, where power is seen to shape,
create and transform social relations (Cooper 1994). Power could therefore function constructively
to ‘create spaces – geographical, electronic, imaginary, or otherwise – where the silenced can speak
96 J. LEWIS AND C. CHRISTOPHERSEN

their reality and, in turn, produce a critical language that can be deployed to generate a more just
world’ (North 2006, 525).
Given this perception of power, Judy’s story might be read as a story of emancipation. However,
to shed a critical light upon my interpretation (that is, the interpretation done by another white,
middle-aged middle-class female), I will draw upon Biesta’s Rancierian critique of ‘emancipation’.
From this critical perspective, emancipation is brought about from the outside, thereby making the
students object to emancipation. This creates a contradictory emancipatory logic: While oriented
towards equality, independence and freedom, it installs dependency and is therefore based on a fun-
damental inequality (Biesta 2010a). Or to return to Gould’s (2007) concept of asymmetrical
relationships: Attempts to dissolve the asymmetric relationships reported in the story will be
difficult as long as those attempts are enabled by the same asymmetry.
My interpretation of Judy’s story as a productive power experiment constructs the teacher as a
driving force in the story, where the teacher (Judy) frees the students from her own oppressive prac-
tices. From a Rancierian perspective, however, this is bringing about emancipation from the out-
side, objecting the students to emancipation. From this perspective, Judy’s students cannot be
free as long as Judy takes (or is given) the role as their emancipator. Emancipation, according to
Rancière, is ‘escaping from a minority’ (1995, 48), but not in order to enter a majority. Rather,
the point is to create ‘rupture in the order of things’ (Rancière 2003, 219). Rupture is about differ-
ence, not sameness or identification; it interrupts and adds to the existing order, thus redefining the
perceptions of it (Biesta 2010a). Is this what Judy and her students were doing: Border crossing,
inscribing difference, interrupting, intervening and reconfiguring? They might have been, or not.
Labelling events and their consequences as ‘just’ or ‘unjust’, ‘emancipation or coercion’, ‘rupture’
or ‘dependence’ are matters of representation: It depends on who tells the story and how, which
brings me back to how we started out this article: The very concept of ‘social justice’ is fluid and
contextual, and justice to one person may be another person’s injustice (Bowman 2007).

‘These people’
Catharina’s story revolves around an issue in a department meeting more than 20 years ago. The
incident in question took place a long time ago, but the memory of it still evokes both an emotional
and physical response:
‘“T h e s e p e o p l e ???” For heaven’s sake, can you hear yourself?’. My loud outburst cut everybody off and
the room went dead silent. I felt my cheeks burn and the blood pound as I stared hard on the red linoleum on
the floor of what we called the ‘large music room’. This was where I usually worked with preservice music
teachers. For two hours on this Monday afternoon, the grooves, the voices, the riffs, the clapping of hands,
the drum beats, the dance moves, the lively discussions about working in the primary music classroom
were replaced by a department meeting about student recruitment and admission routines. Tic – toc – tic
– toc – tic - toc – tic. The ticking of the big clock gradually overpowered the sound of throbbing veins in
my head. Somebody cleared her throat, some other made a soft vocal sound, and the awkward silence was
broken. The meeting continued as if nothing had happened.

I had just yelled at one of my colleagues: An older, distinguished musician with very long teaching experience
in the music teacher education programme. I was at that time a 29-year old primary school teacher who had
just started subbing in the music teacher education programme. Not only had I cut off one of my colleagues, I
had done it in a quite aggressive manner. We had discussed recruitment measures. The application deadline
was coming up and several of my colleagues had expressed concern with regards to the musical qualities of the
students. Things were allegedly not as they used to be, or even should be, in the music department anymore.
And during that discussion, the infamous words fell, loaded with such contempt: ‘These people don’t even
know how to read music’.

‘These people’, the others, them, they. The persons who, from a certain perspective obviously should not have
been accepted into music teacher education, who were apparently not considered worthy of teaching music to
others: The popular musicians, the ones that had not received much institutionalised training in music, those
who could handle an amp but had never heard about Mahler, those who could play advanced polyrhythms but
 MUSIC EDUCATION RESEARCH 97

who had no formal concept of what they were doing, those who mastered the art of belting like pros, but who
could not read a note if their life depended upon it. Those people, my favorite students. And I realised that I,
by extension, was now a part of an ‘us’: The educators, the educated, the music readers. The gatekeepers.

Judy’s response
Catharina’s encounter with social justice (or injustice, in this case) was quite different than mine.
She was not navigating the learning spaces of herself and her students, but rather, the institutional
spaces that she and her colleagues inhabit. She is not face to face with her students but rather with
her colleagues and the ideologies perpetuated by a discipline at large. Allsup and Shieh (2012) write,
‘Having the courage to call injustice by name can be the first step toward changing the situation.
Music teachers are in a special position to stand up for others’ (47). It is this ‘naming’ – given
voice by Catharina’s outburst – that is at the heart of her story. Yet, as I read and reread this vign-
ette, I came to recognise that there are multiple layers at play for understanding this story as an
expression of social justice in action and the reality that this social justice educator must navigate.
The most obvious, and the one that first caught my attention, is on the level of ideologies of
‘official knowledge’, reflective of colonial perspectives still pervasive in music education discourse
(Bradley 2007). As such, the story serves as a prism through which to view some of the largest issues
confronting the social justice educator in music education and the ways in which, as distinct from
my own story, Catharina is working against not her own biases and routine expertise but against a
systemic adversary in the form of ingrained ideologies and struggles for power given voice by both
her ‘distinguished colleague’ and the silence of the others present.
The topic of colonial perspectives in music education is far from new (Gould 2008; Koza 2008;
Hess 2018). Music education scholars have addressed the presumed superiority inherent in the
dominance of the Western Classical canon in the field and how it is used to disqualify those
who are either interested in other musics or trained within other traditions (Bradley 2007; Gould
2008; Niknafs 2017). Bradley (2011) refers to this as ‘musical colonialism’ and goes so far as to
label it a ‘curriculum of white supremacy’ (89). In Catharina’s story, this colonialism is hinted at
in the insistence that students accepted into a teacher-education programme must have proficiency
in the Western classical tradition. This is exemplified by the ability to read traditional notation,
overlooking alternative musical proficiencies that Catharina’s students bring to the table (proficien-
cies that Catharina’s colleagues may themselves lack).
The continued colonial perspectives in music education are rooted in educational discourses of
‘official knowledge’ dating back to the mid-1970s. In his seminal book, Ideology and Curriculum,
Michael Apple (2019) writes, ‘The decision to define some groups’ knowledge as worthwhile to
pass on to future generations while other groups’ culture and history hardly see the light of day
says something extremely important about who has power in society’ (xi). It is within the gap
between ideologies of ‘whose knowledge is of most worth?’ and the lived realities of her students
that Catharina recognises what her students bring to a music teacher-education programme. It is
that gap that she struggles to illuminate for her colleagues.
The essence of the ‘ideological adversary’ in Catharina’s story finds embodiment in two words –
these people. And so, another layer that begs exploration is how language serves as a tool for other-
ing and the ways in which articulation gives outward expression to the powerful ideologies that lie
hidden beneath its surface (Lewis 2019).
The interrogation of language – other’s and our own – is a powerful imperative in social justice
work. As Foucault (1978) writes, ‘Power’s hold … is maintained through language, or rather
through the act of discourse that creates, from the very fact that it is articulated, a rule of law’
(83). Language gives expression to the hidden underbelly of systemic injustice. In Catharina’s
story it gives expression to a particular and partial vision of music and music education – grounded
in Western classical superiority – that defines who might be considered a musician and music edu-
cator – not these people.
98 J. LEWIS AND C. CHRISTOPHERSEN

Biesta (2010b) proposes that, ‘It matters how we refer to those who are the subject of education’.
Though his exploration of language regards the distinction between the terms, learner, student, and
speaker, his premise is that terms convey not only ‘underlying assumptions, but pathways to [sub-
sequent] meaning and association’ (540). Like Biesta, Catharina’s story shows how it is possible to
‘other’ our students through the language with which we describe them – these people who are not
‘us’. Such language, according to Benedict (2006) ‘allows us to define ourselves [in opposition] and
to abdicate responsibility for actions that perpetuate a system of dominance and social injustice’ (5).
Catharina refuses this othering and quite loudly at that.
Yet, the words of Catharina’s ‘distinguished colleague’ not only give voice to an ideological world
that excludes her students but to a true passion for the musical reality that it is promoting. One
might suggest that it is this personal passion for a specific type of music and music education
that obscures for her colleague the partiality of their musical worldview. And so, I read Catharina’s
story also as a story of the polarisation of discourse in music education; a reality that is perhaps
reflective of an ‘oversimplified polarisation that tends to dominate debate within educational’ dis-
course (Barrett 2007, 292). This reading of the story may seem counterintuitive in a field such as
social justice in music education. Catharina’s colleague is surely doing an injustice to her ‘favourite
students’. Yet, at the core of our conceptions of socially just practices is the imperative to listen, to
hear students’ unique sociocultural voices and offer them expression in our spaces. This begs the
question: How might we approach those colleagues on the opposite end of the discursive spectrum
with the same opportunity for dialogue? This question recognises the nuanced space between ‘Mah-
ler’ and ‘hand[ling] an amp’, between ‘the art of belting’ and ‘read[ing] a note’, the landscape of all
that music education has to offer our students. Any answers may potentially further the efforts of
social justice by creating a less polarised landscape, by opening space for all to have a voice.
This leads to a third layer to this story: identity and agency; that is, the positionality of Catharina
in this narrative, a position which I will refer to as in-betweenness. The notion of ‘betweenness’ in
ethnographic research became relevant through feminist scholarship beginning in the mid-1990s. It
has been used to understand the researcher/researched relationship and the ways in which distance
and difference destabilise research processes (Katz 1994; Nast 1994). More recently, the notion has
been used to understand the unique positionality of societal members not of the dominant group
(e.g. immigrants, minorities), that is, the experience of ‘life in and between two cultures’ (Diversi
and Moreira 2009). Fentress and Semmel (2015) extend the concept of ‘betweenness’ to understand
layers of individual identities specifically as relates to diverse students in classrooms.
At the heart of the notion of ‘in-betweenness’ is a recognition that we are all comprised of mul-
tiple, often conflicting, identities, which makes any dichotomous view of ‘insider-outsider’ an ‘over-
simplification of a complex reality’ (Addai-Munukum 2018, 42). Consequently, a reading of
Catharina’s story as social-justice proponent versus ideological antagonist is overly simplistic,
something Catharina herself recognises when she writes: ‘I realised that I, by extension, was now
a part of an “us”: the educators, the educated, the music readers. The gatekeepers.’
Catharina’s story speaks to the ‘in-between’ reality of a music educator dedicated to socially just
practices. Granted, we all live constantly ‘in between’ the multiple aspects of identity (Fentress and
Semmel 2015). However, the in-betweenness at play in Catharina’s story is unique. As I read this
story, I had a visceral experience of this in-betweenness. I felt myself both sitting among her ‘dis-
tinguished colleagues’ in a meeting to decide the ‘worthiness of applicants’ and at the very same
time being present in her afternoon class with her popular music students – hearing the joyful
music, witnessing the electric exuberance of her students. I was struck by her literary juxtaposition,
on the one hand, of a joyful classroom where ‘grooves, voices, riffs, clapping, hands, drum, beats,
and dancing’ put forth students’ voices engaged in meaningful musicking practices and, on the
other hand, the ‘department meeting about student recruitment and admission routines’, portrayed
in the story as a reified space of discomfort (re: the ticking clock imagery) fraught with judgement,
occupied by the ‘distinguished’ experts in the field, filled with an ‘awkward silence’ when the two
dimensions hit up against each other as a result of Catharina’s outburst.
 MUSIC EDUCATION RESEARCH 99

It is perhaps tempting to read Catharina’s story as one of ‘insider-outsider’. Catharina appears to

perceive herself (and is perhaps perceived by others) as an outsider to her colleagues’ ideological
worldview. As with the notion of language, such a reading does not recognise the more nuanced
expressions of ‘in-betweenness’ that she perpetually experiences. It does not give full recognition
to the ‘contingent spaces’ (Sawyer and Norris 2013, 290) that she inhabits or to the ‘both/and’ reality
(Marsh et al. 2017) that she lives in those spaces. Reflecting on this non-dichotomous reality, we are
left instead with the imperative to ask: How could Catharina reconcile the hierarchy of which she is
a willing partner with her desire to give her ‘favourite students’ a voice as co-constructors of musical
practices? How might she navigate her membership in the circle of power and retain her commit-
ment to creating learning spaces that are contextually relevant to the musical cultures of her stu-
dents? And perhaps even: How might a meeting on ‘recruitment and admissions’ become a
forum in which ‘in-betweenness’ is recognised and given voice in the service of our students?

Learning about self through frontiers of difference

As a radical standpoint, perspective, position, ‘the politics of location’ necessarily calls those of us who would
participate in the formation of counter-hegemonic cultural practice to identify the spaces where we begin the
process of revision. [It] is that place which enables and promotes varied and ever-changing perspectives, a
place where one discovers new ways of seeing reality, frontiers of difference. (Said 1985)

We set out to explore the impact of context on experiences of social justice in two distinct settings: a
New York public school and a Norwegian institute of higher education. Despite our shared com-
mitment to social justice and social justice research, we hit obstacles at every turn as we have docu-
mented throughout this article. Breault (2016) suggests that transformation is a central outcome of
duoethnography and proposes that researchers must entertain the possibility that their frames may
be inadequate; that ‘changes in both the stories and the duo-ethnographers should occur through-
out the research’ and that such changes are made transparent so that ‘the reader can almost see a
visible transformation of the way in which the initial question or issue was framed’ (782)
We came to reconsider the initial framing of this study and the questions that grew out of that
framing. Our initial focus had been to locate expressions of social (in)justice in disparate contexts
and to answer the question: What does social justice (or injustice) look like in these contexts? What
we came to see, through the obstacles we encountered was that the true focus of this research was, in
fact, ourselves. Along the way, we allowed each other to question the deeper meanings of our stories
and, as a result, were forced to question our own recollections and assumptions. We came to recog-
nise that that ‘the frames [we] hold are inadequate and the Other can assist in a reconceptualization
of [our]self’ (Norris, Sawyer, and Lund 2012, 25).
We suggest that this study has important implications for the broader, global conversation sur-
rounding social justice in music education. Intentionally adding the situated voices of practitioners
to that of academic scholars adds a rich layer of ‘lived experiences’ to a conversation that continues
to reside primarily in the realm of the theoretical.
Master narratives in music education social justice discourse highlight issues of power, policy,
advocacy and the oft recognised tension between normative teacher expertise and the musical cul-
tures of our students. In our initial ‘coding’ of this research we found all of these themes. However,
this study offers a nuance to current social justice discourse highlighted in the situated experiences
of social-justice practitioners.
Through this study, we, as researchers, were encouraged to look beyond cultural assumptions
and universal narratives of social justice (Ellis, Adams, and Bochner 2011) and to search for new
understandings specifically in our differences. It was in those moments that we recognised ourselves
and our experiences as context-specific way of knowing that unexpected illuminations began to peek
out. We uncovered essential themes of the social justice experience that are missed or under-
explored in the broader literature of social justice in music education. We recognised the power
that language wields in pedagogical interactions with students and colleagues. We were forced to
100 J. LEWIS AND C. CHRISTOPHERSEN

acknowledge the multiple and often contradictory positionalities that the social justice educator
occupies.
Shifting our focus away from the ethos of justice sensitised us to the fluid in-between and always
situated experiential dimensions of our educational practices, added texture and nuance to our
understandings (plural) of social justice. Our futile attempts to weave our understandings of social
justice into a unified narrative have taught us that difference and context matter, and that exploring
differences through dialogue can be a powerful analytical tool.
We therefore suggest that our discipline is in need of more collaborative research that highlights
the situated stories of practitioners as they navigate their unique settings toward socially just prac-
tices; research that connects scholars who devise theory with the teachers who live the practice of
those theories in their work on a daily basis. Macro-discussions of social justice, that seek out com-
mon themes, may provide a framework or theory of action. However, the stories of practitioners
can contribute unexplored perspectives based on immersion in unique contexts (McLaren and
Kincheloe 2007; Ballantyne and Mills 2015).

Limitations of the study

Traditional criteria such as reliability and validity are not referential in duo-ethnographic research.
As Sawyer and Norris (2013) note, duo-ethnography ‘portrays knowledge in transition’. Reliability
is recognised in the degree of reflexivity represented in the analysis of the stories related. Validity is
determined by the reader and her recognition that the stories told are authentically told (Ellis and
Bochner 2000). Through this joint research, we have ‘explored, exposed, reconceptualised [and] re-
storied’ (Sawyer and Norris 2013, 290) our personal pedagogical experiences through each other’s
eyes in a continually reiterative process of reflection. Validity will ultimately be determined by
whether these stories and their analysis resonate with those who read this.
In its extreme subjectivity, duoethnography can pose problems of generalisability and hence the
ability to theorise more broadly. However, we propose that the dialogic nature of this study coun-
ters the potential for self-indulgent presentation or highly subjective understanding. The focused
dialogue between the two researchers provides, if you will, ‘a form of checks and balances’ against
such an outcome (Kinnear and Ruggunan 2019, 4).
We would be remiss not to address a problematic issue that accompanies auto - and duo-ethno-
graphy (and one might claim, all qualitative research) – that is, the issue of representation. The aim
of this article was never to examine experiences other than our own – as practitioners, teachers,
educators. Still, in doing so, other people have been represented in and through our stories. Accord-
ing to Denzin (2009), representation is always self-representation, or in the case of practitioners’
stories, the other way around: ‘the Other’s presence is directly connected to the writer’s self-pres-
ence in the text’ (92). The telling of our stories reflects a privileged standpoint which produces a
representational dilemma: The stories are written accounts of our experiences in which we take
it upon ourselves to describe and define the experiences. In other words, two middle-aged,
middle-class, white academics are telling these stories. And as postcolonial literature tells us, aca-
demic practices could actively be producing and reproducing subalternity through the act of rep-
resentation (Spivak 1988; Beverley 1999). And so, we acknowledge that our telling and our
understanding is always, and can only be, a partial one.

Epilogue
We began this journey wondering how we might write about social justice together given our shared
belief that expressions of social justice are context-specific. What we ultimately discovered is that we
are just two ‘locals’ watching each other from a distance. Bates (2014) argues that ‘cosmopolitanism’
cannot be an ideal for music education or social justice in music education. People live their lives
locally. It has perhaps become fashionable to ‘look across’ in educational research; to search out
 MUSIC EDUCATION RESEARCH 101

clear solutions to common issues. That is what we assumed we were doing as international research
colleagues. What we came to recognize is that the sharing of our unique stories has helped us to
more clearly understand our personal, local experiences of social justice. We became more attuned
to our own stories and this has offered us, as a research duo, a different kind of connectedness - a
‘shared ontology’, if you will - that our distance obscures; that is, an imperative to listen between the
lines of our life stories and those of others. It is there that the deepest understandings of social jus-
tice, and us as its agents, are found.

Notes
1. For example, distributive justice, commutative justice, contributive justice, retributive justice, restorative jus-
tice, poetic justice, legal justice, and more (Jorgensen 2015, 12–17).
2. We recognise that in writing about events that took place in our professional lives we are also writing about
others who were involved in those events. In our handling of third-party information, we have made every
attempt to protect the anonymity of those persons in our writing. Our handling of third-party information
has been reported to and approved by data protection officials/IRB in our respective institutions.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors
Judy Lewis is Assistant Professor Music Teaching & Learning at the Thornton School of Music, University of
Southern California. She holds an EdD in Music & Music Education from Teachers College, Columbia University
and has been a postdoctoral research affiliate of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education at Columbia Uni-
versity. Her research explores the intersection of urban minority music education, popular music, and social justice.
She has presented widely at international conferences and her scholarly writings have appeared in Music Educators’
Journal, The International Journal of Community Music, Philosophy of Music Education Review, School Music
News, and Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain
Catharina Christophersen (PhD) is professor of music education at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences
in Bergen, Norway. She holds a PhD in music education from the Norwegian Academy of Music, has presented fre-
quently in international conferences, as well as published in international journals. Her research is qualitative and
critical, often addressing issues of power, democracy and citizenship in music education. Research interests include
policy issues, popular music education, artist-teacher collaboration, music in schools, and teacher education.

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