Situating Inquiry


Book Description

This volume of Advances in Music Education Research with the idea of research as “situated inquiry.” We intend this metaphor to stand for a general description of the contextualized processes music education researchers use to frame, generate, augment and refine knowledge. The works in this volume illustrate the many ways in which knowledge has been constructed out of multiple approaches to studying an idea or exploring questions. All seek to expand our knowledge of music education in some form. How we go about engaging in knowledge construction, and what we learn from the different processes involved, is a function of the activities, contexts, and cultures in which our work is “situated.” Both knowledge and action is “located,” that is, research is placed, positioned or embedded (Lave & Wenger, 1990). Each study illustrates these ideas: All are informed by different theoretical frameworks, use different pathways to explore problems of interest and concern, and have something important to say to different constituencies or stakeholders. All, however, are the result of perceived phenomena or human interpretations of a context. Situated inquiry is neither a quantitative nor qualitative approach to research, nor is it a “mixed-methods” approach. Rather, situated inquiry is a function of the beliefs and behaviors of the individuals involved in it. It is also a function (and outcome) of the individuals who seek to join a community of practitioners who practice and engage in research. Although the authors in this volume identify with or have self-selected to employ specific kinds of approaches, they exemplify their communities of practices by the very discourses and structures of their reports. Active perception, however, remains central to their inquiry and to the way they frame, generate, augment and refine knowledge.




Situating


Book Description

This collection explores the strengths and weaknesses of postmodern social theory in the struggle against racism. Recognizing diversity as a conduit for resilience, endurance, and strength, the editors have tried to encourage coalition building by bringing together historians, sociologists, cultural theorists, and literary scholars in dialogue with artists and activists. Topics considered include nation formation, racialized states, cultural racism, multiculturalism, hyphenated and mixed-race identities, media and representation, and shifting identities.




Good Victims


Book Description

In Good Victims, Roxani Krystalli investigates the politics of victimhood as a feminist question. Based on in-depth engagement in Colombia over the course of a decade, Krystalli shows how victimhood becomes a pillar of reimagining the state in the wake of war, and of bringing a vision of that state into being through bureaucratic encounters. The book also sheds light on the ethical and methodological dilemmas that arise when contemplating the legacies of transitional justice mechanisms.




The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism


Book Description

A groundbreaking collection of contemporary essays from leading international scholars that provides a balanced and expert account of the resurgent debate about substance dualism and its physicalist alternatives. Substance dualism has for some time been dismissed as an archaic and defeated position in philosophy of mind, but in recent years, the topic has experienced a resurgence of scholarly interest and has been restored to contemporary prominence by a growing minority of philosophers prepared to interrogate the core principles upon which past objections and misunderstandings rest. As the first book of its kind to bring together a collection of contemporary writing from top proponents and critics in a pro-contra format, The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism captures this ongoing dialogue and sets the stage for rigorous and lively discourse around dualist and physicalist accounts of human persons in philosophy. Chapters explore emergent, Thomistic, Cartesian, and other forms of substance dualism—broadly conceived—in dialogue with leading varieties of physicalism, including animalism, non-reductive physicalism, and constitution theory. Loose, Menuge, and Moreland pair essays from dualist advocates with astute criticism from physicalist opponents and vice versa, highlighting points of contrast for readers in thematic sections while showcasing today’s leading minds engaged in direct debate. Taken together, essays provide nuanced paths of introduction for students, and capture the imagination of professional philosophers looking to expand their understanding of the subject. Skillfully curated and in touch with contemporary science as well as analytic theology, The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism strikes a measured balanced between advocacy and criticism, and is a first-rate resource for researchers, scholars, and students of philosophy, theology, and neuroscience.




Making Time for Making Music


Book Description

Are you a former music-maker who yearns to return to music, but aren't sure where to begin? Or are you a person who never played music as a child but you are now curious about trying? You're not alone. Many adults who used to play an instrument haven't touched it in years because either they can't find the time to practice, are afraid their skills are too rusty, or are unsure of what kind of group they could join. Others are afraid to sing or start playing an instrument because they received negative feedback from childhood experiences. Performing, practicing, and composing music may seem like unattainable goals with insurmountable obstacles for busy adults with non-musical careers. Making Time for Making Music can help adults find ways to make music part of their lives. The first book of its kind, it is filled with real-life success stories from more than 350 adults who manage to fit music-making into their jam-packed schedules. They polished rusty skills, found musical groups to join, and are having a great time. Their testimonies prove that you are never too old to learn to make music, and that there are numerous musical paths to explore. Featuring advice from dozens of music educators, health care professionals, and music researchers who point out that making music can even be good for your health as well as an extensive resource list of websites, organizations, and summer programs, this book offers inspiration and tried-and-true strategies for anyone who wishes to return to music-making or begin as an adult.




The Oxford Handbook of Social Psychology and Social Justice


Book Description

The twentieth century witnessed not only the devastation of war, conflict, and injustice on a massive scale, but it also saw the emergence of social psychology as a discipline committed to addressing these and other social problems. In the 21st century, however, the promise of social psychology remains incomplete. We have witnessed the reprise of authoritarianism and the endurance of institutionalized forms of oppression such as sexism, racism, and heterosexism across the globe. Edited by Phillip L. Hammack, The Oxford Handbook of Social Psychology and Social Justice reorients social psychology toward the study of social injustice in real-world settings. The volume's contributing authors effectively span the borders between cultures and disciplines to better highlight new and emerging critical paradigms that interrogate the very real consequences of social injustice. United in their belief in the possibility of liberation from oppression, with this Handbook, Hammack and his contributors offer a stirring blueprint for a new, important kind of social psychology today.




Sociological Thinking in Music Education


Book Description

Sociological Thinking in Music Education presents new ideas 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 in 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 scholars mobilize the links between applied sociology, music, education, and music education in ways that intersect the scholarly and the personal. These interdisciplinary vantage points fulfil 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 ideas regarding the social construction of music education practices in specific places, but also seeing and hearing familiar ones 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 multi-lingual video précis for each chapter in English as well as in each author's language of origin.




COVID-19 and the Classroom


Book Description

COVID-19 and the Classroom: How Schools Navigated the Great Disruption presents social science research that explores how schools navigated the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020 through the 2020-21 school year. This book also serves as a history book, documenting what this period was like for those involved in the enterprise of educating children. The book is divided into three sections, allowing for an in-depth exploration of the pandemic’s impact. The first section examines how teachers, parents, and school leaders experienced the pandemic, including what this looked like when schools first closed for in-person instruction. Part two explores how schools reopened, both in the United States and abroad, and discusses the trade-offs associated with these decisions. This section also explored how private schools fared and the rise of “pandemic pods”. The book concludes with a look at how a range of teacher preparation programs continued their work in uncertain times. This volume represents one of the first to share scholarship on how schools negotiated the COVID-19 crisis.




Situating Opera


Book Description

Setting opera within a variety of contexts - social, aesthetic, historical - Lindenberger illuminates a form that has persisted in recognizable shape for over four centuries. The study examines the social entanglements of opera, for example the relation of Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio and Verdi's Il trovatore to its initial and later audiences. It shows how modernist opera rethought the nature of theatricality and often challenged its viewers by means of both musical and theatrical shock effects. Using recent experiments in neuroscience, the book demonstrates how different operatic forms developed at different periods to create new ways of exciting a public. Lindenberger considers selected moments of operatic history from Monteverdi's Orfeo to the present to study how the form has communicated with its diverse audiences. Of interest to scholars and operagoers alike, this book advocates and exemplifies opera studies as an active, emerging area of interdisciplinary study.




Mestizos Come Home!


Book Description

Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano has described U.S. and Latin American culture as continually hobbled by amnesia—unable, or unwilling, to remember the influence of mestizos and indigenous populations. In Mestizos Come Home! author Robert Con Davis-Undiano documents the great awakening of Mexican American and Latino culture since the 1960s that has challenged this omission in collective memory. He maps a new awareness of the United States as intrinsically connected to the broader context of the Americas. At once native and new to the American Southwest, Mexican Americans have “come home” in a profound sense: they have reasserted their right to claim that land and U.S. culture as their own. Mestizos Come Home! explores key areas of change that Mexican Americans have brought to the United States. These areas include the recognition of mestizo identity, especially its historical development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the re-emergence of indigenous relationships to land; and the promotion of Mesoamerican conceptions of the human body. Clarifying and bridging critical gaps in cultural history, Davis-Undiano considers important artifacts from the past and present, connecting the casta (caste) paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico to modern-day artists including John Valadez, Alma López, and Luis A. Jiménez Jr. He also examines such community celebrations as Day of the Dead, Cinco de Mayo, and lowrider car culture as examples of mestizo influence on mainstream American culture. Woven throughout is the search for meaning and understanding of mestizo identity. A large-scale landmark account of Mexican American culture, Mestizos Come Home! shows that mestizos are essential to U.S. national culture. As an argument for social justice and a renewal of America’s democratic ideals, this book marks a historic cultural homecoming.