Posthumanist new materialist pathways for reimagining music education research: What matters? What can this offer music educators?

ABSTRACT

Much of historical and contemporary music education research is influenced by a Cartesian ontology of opposition. This reinforces the classic function of music and music education: the exercise of possession, ownership and control. To confront these ideas, our article reimagines music education research through posthumanism and new materialism. In doing so, the focus shifts to making with nonhuman matter, posthuman bodies and the materialisation of music. Examples of cartographic research are discussed to show how the experience of musical environments is constantly reconfigured by human and nonhuman elements. This abandons the notion that music education takes place only in the mind and explores what a posthumanist approach to materiality can offer instead. As a result, normative academic conventions are disrupted by the recognition of in-the-making embodied musical learning, the intra-action of human and nonhuman sound materialising, and the materiality of the body in its experience of music as a play space, arguing that staying with the trouble of doing something new, or swimming against the tide, matters for music educators.

KEYWORDS:

• posthumanism
• new materialism
• diffractive analysis
• music education research and practice

Introduction

For many music education researchers and music educators, what matters is practice-based knowledge (techne) and theoretical and research-based knowledge (episteme), and the endpoints or fixed outcomes that make the understanding of a multiplicity of musics (like sciences: Cajete 2006; Stengers 2018¹) possible. This is the case whatever the music tradition, genre, context, environment, site or people, including First Nations, across the Americas, Africa, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. But we also know that materials matter. Bodies matter. Multi-species coexistence matters. Critical and creative alliances between the arts and sciences also matter (especially in Deleuze and Guattari's thinking). Because these ideas have shaped the music traditions related to these cosmologies, the reimagining of music education research with posthumanism and new materialism is new only in the context of Eurocentric thinking, where an ontology of binary categorisation prevails (Fox and Alldred 2022; Rosiek, Snyder, and Pratt 2020).

When we examine closely the complex entanglements of research and theory (episteme) and practical knowledge (techne), both in literature and in real-world contexts, we see the need to escape from binaries into processes of becoming. Coleman and Ringrose (2013, 1) explore how Deleuze's geophilosophy might be put to work methodologically. They feature the connections made between human and nonhuman things, the productive force that forms relations, and the need for social science methodologies which are:

capable of attending to the social and cultural world as mobile … , messy … , creative … , changing and open-ended … , sensory and affective … , and that account for the performativity of method; social science methodologies not only describe the worlds they observe but (at least in part) are involved in the invention or creation of the world … . (1)

Whether fieldwork begins in an urban setting, a concert hall or opera house, a classroom or community, whether researching the proliferation of a ‘thousand ecologies’ from the early years (Huhtinen-Hilden and Pitt 2018; Osgood 2019; Pitt 2020; Young 2023) through to studies of senior citizens’ music participation (Fung and Lehmberg 2016), bodies of both objects (nonhuman such as instruments and technologies) and beings (both human and more-than-human²) reside within them. That sound materialises. Music materialises as the materiality of bodies (and bodily relations between humans, nonhumans and more-than-humans) of listeners and performers, particularly the latter with their instruments and voice, is transformed (Wilson 2021).

The situatedness of matter and sound, and what constitutes the posthuman body – the product of human and nonhuman intra-action (Barad 2007) – is experienced as sound materialising. So, what does this mean for music education research?

We address this question through a theoretical consideration of musical materialisms, the role of posthuman bodies and musical spaces in music education research. We explore the potential for alternative encounters with Deleuze and Guattari's (1988) concepts of ‘cartography’, Bennett’s (2010) concept of ‘thing-power’, Barad's (2007) concepts of ‘making with’ and the focus on the material world, which includes human and nonhuman bodies, but unlike conventional, humanist systems of thought that assume that matter is inherently inert and passive. In doing so, this article contributes to this growing field of interest in the concepts, practices and implications of posthumanist new materialism by considering how music materialises. We then offer a tangible reimagining of music education research by presenting research on children's engagement with musicking and sound-making in museum spaces as an example of posthuman assemblages and cartographic pathways. Based on this, the article concludes with four possible points of departure for posthumanist new materialist music education research.

In what follows, we thus discuss the importance of shifting the focus to musical materialisms, posthuman bodies, musical spaces and posthuman assemblages and cartographic pathways for music education research.

Musical materialisms

Music has an important and some argue unique function in establishing what we understand by materiality.³ Music materialises. Music education research foregrounds the objects which engage, face or extend the body. It also embeds a discussion of what musical materials tell us about compositional, improvisational, performative and listening actualisations of spatiality and temporality in music and the historical-material conditions in which materials are encountered with/in music. Materials matter. How material objects and bodies are situated within specific spaces where humans, nonhumans and more-than-humans are entangled⁴ matters.

Braidotti (2019) describes posthuman subjectivities as involving ‘a materialist process ontology based on immanence and becoming’ (53–54). Thinking of ontology as processual has significant implications for how we understand what research is (see Figure 1). Reimagining social enquiry as a relational assemblage asks what ‘capacities for action, feeling and desire [are] produced in bodies or groups of bodies by affective flows’ (Fox and Alldred 2017, 145). Within such a ‘flat’ ontology, human elements (such as the researcher) are not superior to nonhuman elements (such as for example pen and paper). This shifts the focus away from solely human capacities to produce knowledge. Within posthumanist and new materialist inquiry, the complex dynamics of relational assemblages are mapped from within rather than reduced to easily digestible chunks of information from the outside. Furthermore, the researcheris part of this assemblage, which leads to the production of knowledge from within. Thus, research findings are not the product of the researcher, who is in control of their theory, methodology and data, but are creative products of entangled human and nonhuman elements (Fox and Alldred 2017). For music education research, this means paying attention to the messiness of the learner's experiences with music in order to find what ‘glows’ in the data rather than commonalities (Sakr 2020).

Figure 1. Re-seeing enquiry as a relational assemblage where natures, cultures, subjects and objects do not pre-exist their intertwined and entangled relations.

New materialisms assign agency to the human and nonhuman, the animate and inanimate, and shift the focus away from the human as central to social inquiry. What matters? Instead of assigning the human a foundational role in experience and meaning, matter is also seen as fundamental. This involves a shift from identifying with bounded images of self, to cut across dualisms, away from constructionist approaches to research and a Cartesian ontology of oppositions (St. Pierre 2021) to instead embrace the chaotic quality of education (Sakr 2020). But what is our understanding of ‘a Cartesian ontology of opposition’? And how does this work in music? A Cartesian ontology of opposition is mind–body separation/dualism, right, which splits mind (spirit or soul) and matter. The Cartesian way of thinking accepts dualisms such as oppositional pairs of concepts like mind/body, good/evil, and nature/culture – rather than a more integrated or fluid way of understanding the world. This manifests in music education research with a strong emphasis on the separation of ‘techne and episteme’. Often we see ‘techne’ translated as knowledge of craft or art and ‘episteme’ as scientific knowledge. Therefore, the techne or practical skill involved in music uses the technical/technological know-how to create or perform music. Episteme focuses on understanding things which already exist so here we refer to a kind of musical knowledge which tries to make sense of what music is. The separation of these forms of knowledge is played out in the normalised separation of theory and practice in music. For example, techne-focused knowledge in music is seen in instrumental graded-examinations which feature training in the performance of scales, repertoire and aural skills. Episteme is learned through theory. Westerlund and Vakeva (2011) examine the complex relationships between theory and practice in music education, and more recently in a seminal book called ‘Trauma and Resilience in Music Education’ by American music education researcher, Juliet Hess (2021), both of whom argue for avoiding simplistic either/or positioning in providing a transformative foundation for thinking about and doing music education.

To see techne and episteme as interrelated rather than separate, however, requires recognition of the capacities of posthuman bodies.

Posthuman bodies

Rosi Braidotti (2013) suggests that to become posthuman is to transform ‘one's sensorial and perceptual co-ordinates, in order to acknowledge the collective nature and outward-bound direction of what we still call the self’ (193). She emphasises an ‘assemblage within a common life-space that the subject never masters nor possesses but merely inhabits, crosses, always in a community, a pack, a group, or a cluster’ (193). Braidotti urges us to move beyond the dialect of possession, ownership and control in order to overcome ‘the classical function of music as the incarnation of the most sublime transcendent ideals of the humanist European subject’ (2011, 107).

In terms of music education research, this means that the phenomena we choose to focus on in our research are relational; their existence is always dependent on connection. Even when we focus on human experiences of music, they are entangled with a variety of (human and) nonhuman elements. To assume that the human experience of music is a predominantly cognitive process would be to adopt a Cartesian ontology that enforces possession, ownership and control. Thus, exploring acoustic worlds with posthumanist and new materialist approaches recognises entanglement as the basis for thinking about musical experience, in human and nonhuman bodies (Braidotti 2011).

This marks a turn towards dissonance, chaos and what Braidotti calls ‘becoming-insect in rhizo-musicology’ (2011, 108). Humans ‘inhabit uncoded, posthuman acoustic environments all the time’ (Braidotti 2011, 108) even if they ignore them. Just as the non-verbal communication of birds and insects creates acoustic worlds full of instruments, vocals and rhythms, making music is not reserved for humans. Therefore, ignorance should not be mistaken for superiority. Posthumanist music education research acknowledges this co-becoming of music with nonhuman environments. This creates configurations of acoustic worlds where sounds and movements are mapped rather than coded. Thereby, a posthumanist understanding of nonhuman agents and environments as active and agential is fundamental.

This all helps to clarify the central claim made in this article: that changing notions and contested practices of materiality are one central but as yet underemphasised concern manifested and explored in the critical play orientations of music education research. Music education research does not just reflect the material conditions of its production but actively enables critical play and reorientations vis-à-vis what we believe posthuman bodies and materiality mean to/in and for our field.

Reimagining music education research requires us to re-think narratives of ‘power over’ materials, context and processes, especially where digital and technological applications reduce complexities between humans, materials and environments. We need to challenge the separation of knowledge, tools and bodies in ‘disciplinary bounded’, ‘copyrighted’ and ‘patented’ spaces such as music. We need to co-author sustainable relationships whereby the future of music education is not given but ‘in-the-making’ (Haraway 2016). We sound bodies. Sound is the central experience of music. However, little attention is given to what sounds ‘do’ in educational spaces, and how sound works as a form of sensorial entangling or making with others (human and more-than-human), as with the material habits of power and control evidence in our playing of instruments. This point is increasingly being made clear in posthuman studies involving rethinking young children's musical enactments and play (Barrett and Welch 2023) professionals (Palmer, Burnard, and Burke 2024); and pre-service music teachers (Cooke 2021). The body is extended through performance practices. Instruments and technologies augment bodies (Wilson 2021, 21). Sometimes bodies are embedded within electronic and digital networks, in keeping with our posthumanist age. The body is placed in relation to objects or as another object and located among sounding matters within the context of a wider environment. In posthumanist terms, the boundaries of bodies are constantly renegotiated in processes of intra-action (Barad 2007; Braidotti 2002). ‘Embodied subjects’ become with human and nonhuman environments and music-making practices (re)configure the boundaries of posthuman bodies. Therefore, reimagining music education research, a distinct discipline which is often siloed and separated in education, requires us to foreground the materiality of the body.

Musical spaces

Music tells us what the body is. Music marks materials and bodies in a state of flux. What does this mean for reimagining music education research? It means that we must consider the musical spaces of learners, such as young children, in their full material capacity. Research around the experiences of young children shows that they responsively experiment with what bodies are or might soon come to be in spaces, but also explore the interconnectedness of aspects of musical material and materiality.

The norm of the linear maturation process sees young children as ‘fairly musical’, and yet the music activities that are offered to children are generally not child-led and rarely leave children opportunities to explore instruments on their own. Research in collaboration with children supports the cultivation of children's own research interests and creative methods of inquiry (Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles 2023, 54). Yet, one of the key challenges at the interface of childhood theory and practice in music education research is that knowing (knowledges), doing (actions) and being (‘truths’) cannot be taken for granted (Lenz Taguchi 2010). Attending to children as active participants requires a materialised re-configuration of early childhood music-making spaces (Osgood 2019; Young 2023). In recent years feminist new materialism has (re-)shaped educational practices and educational research so that greater attention is paid to bodies, musical material and materiality, a framework for inquiry that has found increasing expression in early years music education research (Hackett et al. 2018).

There is a considerable body of research on the experiences of children and families in community and museum spaces (Elwick et al. 2020), understanding the learning experience of those involved from an educator's perspective. There is, however, a dearth of research around activities involving the material, cultural and affective dimensions of making sounds with very young children. As such, young children, their experience, the uniqueness of the environment itself and other related spatial concerns, and the role of communication, particularly between adults and children, remain under-explored. A recent publication by Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles (2023), Posthuman Research Playspaces, offers a journey into a different relationship between children and their environment. The researchers take their cues from children, where the materiality of nature is a teacher.

There are only a handful of studies which explore children's sound-sensing and making-with-sound activities within museums which directly incorporate music into exhibitions for all visitors. In music education there remains some resistance to asking questions about how very young children navigate making-with music (particularly in the context of museum norms), and how their experiencing body ‘dwell[s] with the improvisatory and serendipitous’ (Hackett et al. 2018, 482) in sound and music-making encounters of matter, place and space within the museum. Debates are framed in ways that marginalise the social construction of childhood and fail to ask what makes children act the way they do (Cooke, Colucci-Gray, and Burnard 2023). What are the possibilities for new ways of knowing, being affected, and encounters which focus on resonances between children's rights discourse, the intra-action of bodies, and the materiality of sound-making in diverse sites and settings such as museums to offer sounding spaces in childhood?

Of course, it is acknowledged that museums are politicised spaces and postcolonial theorising actively disrupts ways of thinking about cultural institutions such as these, where the rules for children come from adult cultural practices. As a result, have we lost touch with the real-world potentials and possibilities of building, and being allowed to build, common-world relationships with/in museums? To what extent does being in touch with the world(s) represented in museums prevent what Taylor calls building ‘real common world relationships’ (2016, 62). Currently, there is a mix of hope and frustration attached to young children's encounters with music and sound in museum spaces (Elwick et al. 2020).

Much of the most recent research which has been rethinking young children's musical play lives (Barrett and Welch 2023) concerns what young children need in their early years (until seven at least), namely, to play freely, making-with sound. These views seek to challenge the biological essentialism that often structures psychological accounts. The reductionist arguments that focus on dichotomous and decontextualised accounts of young children's music-making and musical creativity as a stand-alone category are written unentwined with material objects, bodies, locations and posthuman performativity.

We use the term affective force to refer to a much wider and flatter understanding of inter- and intra-actions, bodily expressions and experiences to contextualise affective forces that occur due to colliding agencies among human and nonhuman phenomena. Barad’s (2003, 2007) posthuman framework challenges the presumed permanence of borders, disciplines, hierarchies, dualism and separateness, especially the idea that discursive practices and the material world are separate.

The musical play of young children illustrates Barad's point that ‘language has been granted too much power’ (2003, 801). For it is crucial for children's learning and development that they experiment with music making rather than learning how to neatly code and hierarchise acoustic information (Braidotti 2011). Furthermore, we argue that the academic language of adult conversation has been granted too much power in early childhood music education. The concept of play has become relegated to the realm of children, even though it is at the core of human creativity. And creativity means nothing less than creating – new worlds, new ways of living in them and making sense of them – which is what children and academic research do alike (Braidotti 2019). Therefore, posthumanist and new materialist reimaginings of early music education, away from the manifestations of Cartesian thinking, need to be recognised in order to better nourish children's learning and development.

Posthuman assemblages and cartographic pathways

The use of the term ‘assemblage’ invites us to think with new ontologies of the decentred subject in ways that rupture normative research practices. We theorise these practices as ‘becomings’ emerging in social-material-historical assemblages by drawing on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's oeuvre.

To think with assemblages is to let go of predetermined boundaries that separate entities – a difficult task in a boundary world. Humans make sense of themselves and their surroundings through boundaries. What would it mean to lose this security? The notion of assemblages offers a compromise between the human need for (or habit of) boundaries thinking and an orientation towards openness and chaos. Assemblages are machines that link together elements which produce something (Deleuze and Guattari 1988). This is an agency in posthumanism and new materialism. Thus, when music education research is conducted, it is not the researcher doing something, but the research assemblage (Fox and Alldred 2017). It is an activity that produces knowledge rather than an innate cognitive essence. What becomes the focus of interest in thinking with assemblages is thus not the essence of human and nonhuman matter, but rather the traces of activity that have led to specific boundaries. Consequently, research designs and methods are created from the bottom up, which requires an engagement with complexity rather than an attempt to control it. Similarly, data collection is a series of encounters with other elements of the assemblage, multiplying complexity rather than condensing it. Thus, boundaries are created through intra-actions in assemblages. In music education, therefore, we need to ask how these boundaries are produced by human and nonhuman agents in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of how acoustic worlds are experienced. Findings are offered as cartographies mapping the movements of multiplicities, drawing attention to difference instead of patterned thinking.

The term ‘cartography’ is often used in relation to mapping lines of articulation and lines of flight that make visible new and creative ways for opening up the research play space to arts and experimental forms of writing.

Researchers are beginning to explore a range of cartographic research assemblages in terms of ways of documenting, organising and coproducing research/we-search differently. We will offer some novel material-discursive processes which signal a shift from language as the focal point to analyses in a conversation involving deliberative collaborations within and between humans, more-than-humans and nonhumans, and professions, professionals and educational domain creativities.

These assemblages capture new connections between theory and practice and invite you to do and see research (and practice) differently. We will experiment with analytic methods for (re-)reading images as surfaces of experience rather than representations.

David Rousell (2021, 1) asks: ‘What does it mean to create a map that you can walk into?’ Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) rhizomatic concept of mapping, we have unearthed, assembled, co-authored and experimented with assemblages in a number of projects including Randles and Burnard (2023).

Our concern is to shift the lens from focusing on how music-making framed by anthropocentric intentionality shapes children's experiences to considering ‘what else’ (Manning 2006) emerges through children's engagements with musicking and sound-making in museum spaces. This is important for early childhood practice as it sets the foundations for adults to learn from children and their explorative entanglements with the material-discursive semiotics that shape musicking encounters. The question of how objects and subjects of inquiry are entangled, emergent and contingent is considered in terms of the ‘spacetimemattering’ (Barad 2007) contours of museums. We make the case for reconceptualising the child and music, by reconfiguring what children's engagements with music, sound and matter can become. This is particularly evident in the Musiceum Project. ‘Musiceum’ was a university funded scoping project conducted in 2017–2018 to identify what characterises museums as spaces for early childhood music-making. ‘Musiceum’ set out as a mapping and scoping exercise, involving: literature and policy analysis; interviews and observations within two case study museums; and a one-day SUMMIT which brought national stakeholders’ with diverse perspectives together to map and critically analyse current research, programmes, practices, policies and debates on inclusive community engagement, early years, music and museum education (for a detailed report with a full explanation of the field see Burnard et al. 2018).

The child-sized sculptures by artist Nicola Ravenscroft (shown in Figure 2) that featured in the one-day SUMMIT invite material discursive accounts of childhood from across planet Earth. However, it was the penguin (Ambassador of Antarctica) replete with spiky hair and played like a mbira (African thumb piano) that hailed attention. A huddle of bronze statues is usually grouped together in exhibitions, as ambassadors of each continent. Yet, within this museum context, they were intentionally scattered around the room, facing different directions. The penguin is central to the bronze installation and an iconic reminder of our duty of care to planet Earth, and its future. We want to attend to the ways in which statues become space to generate effects, produce new ways to encounter sound and bodies, and offer world-making possibilities (Figure 2).

Figure 2. An assemblage: a child–penguin (human-nonhuman) entanglement.

The penguin provokes a series of questions that can open up ideas about museum artefacts, music and child spacetimematterings. Pursuing what else the penguin might make possible in our museum and musicking practices with children offers some interesting surprises. In ‘the wild’ penguins deploy vocal and visual ‘displays’ to communicate nesting territories, mating information, partner and chick recognition, and as a form of defence against intruders. Displays matter to penguins; displays are central to museum practice. But we attend to what might become possible when displays become inter- and intra-active.

The intentional positioning of a penguin as part of a child-centred, interactive ‘display’ produced unanticipated ruptures from which we can learn a great deal.⁵ A child–penguin encounter unfolds within the music-making session. Through processes of sound sensing, the affective charges permeate the currents of the session, linger on in video footage, and continue to work upon us to inform our grapplings with what else museums might become for children. Through this encounter the penguin and child are acting upon each other to produce something more, insisting that we recognise the liveliness of matter, and attend to what gets produced through sound and touch. When children are given opportunities to freely explore and experiment with an artefact (in this case the penguin), world-making opportunities are presented. A child–penguin entanglement directly addresses some of the hierarchies that are inherent within museum education and music education.

The bronze statue of a penguin stands tall and proud, the child is drawn to the penguin and her attention moves away from the central singing activity of the group. Standing level with the penguin, the child becomes transfixed by the eyes and face. This curious creature found only in the Southern Hemisphere, was made to appear part bird, part mammal, by the sculptor in bronze form is hailing the attention of this toddler within a prestigious cultural institution. For now, the aim is to bring artefact, music and children together. The child is invited to join in sound-making with the penguin's hair in time with the singing. In this moment, the penguin and the child's body encounter each other (differently). The relationship and interplay between their bodies is non-hierarchical, unlike the strong hierarchies that characterise museums and music education cultures (Elwick et al. 2020). The penguin seems to offer possibilities and a distinctive invitation to engage with sound sensing and sound making in other ways. The cold bronze invites curiosity and wonder; the waves and flows of the penguin's body magnetically draw the child to touch. As if experiencing some form of electric shock, she immediately and intuitively recoils, and stands back to appraise the penguin afresh. The penguin's skin is cold, not smooth; in fact it is edgy, at times rough, at times spiky in texture, cold yet resonating to the touch. Despite the recoil, the pull of the penguin's cold, spiky surfaces invites the child to reconnect and continue this brave exploration. During these interactions between child and penguin, the penguin's hair is plucked to demonstrate its musical qualities, and so encounter the penguin in a particular way. As the penguin vibrates other possibilities are presented. The child appraises the other possibilities that the penguin might offer; intently studying the cold, dark ‘eyes’ of the penguin offers a diffractive pause. The assemblage of a child body, bronze child-sized penguin, vibrations, sensations and affect produce unanticipated musical possibilities, possibilities that rely on space and opportunities being made available for exploration and unmediated musical encounters.

The child's sustained engagement with the penguin has much to tell us about childhood and chance encounters to seriously play with sensing sound. Through processes of provocation, evocation and affectivity the child encounters the penguin in multiple ways over a relatively sustained time. Lowering her head to the floor she encounters the penguin's feet. This involves carefully balancing her weight to satisfy the intrigue offered by this nonhuman actor. Stroking the feet produces another sound sensing (vibration) that materialises and is performed relationally, a pulse, which when followed arrives at the chest of the penguin (the sound made by plucking the penguin's hair which becomes a musical heartbeat that connects the child and sculpture). These sound-sensing processes (touch, feel, sensation, sound) are fleetingly materialised from human, nonhuman and more-than-human entanglements. Here, the bronze penguin and child become co-constitutive within the museum music-making assemblage; we are forced to attend to the ways that bodies constantly adjust to the textures, sensations, vibrations, and the unanticipated effects that are generated. Both penguin and child express agency and intentionality, both actively produce something unanticipated, troubling and joyful. They transform what emerges in the ‘in-between’ spaces, which resonates with Ellsworth’s (2005) description of ‘affective pedagogy’ as that which ‘involves us in experiences of the corporeality of the body's time and space. Bodies have affective somatic responses as they inhabit a pedagogy's time and space’ (4).

A posthumanist and new materialist reading of this installation illustrates the complex ways in which human and nonhuman bodies are entangled in pedagogical settings and how this affects our understanding of childhood (Barad 2007). By making space for encounters rather than presupposing what encounters should produce, the boundaries and capacities of bodies are constantly renegotiated. These boundary-making practices are ‘particular material (re)configuring of the world with shifting boundaries and properties that stabilise and destabilise along with specific material changes’ (Barad 2003, 818). Thus, every touch of the penguin's skin, the sound of tugging at its hair, the smell of the floor as one closely examines its feet, and the way it appears in the specific light, space and time of the museum space are elements that (re)configure the child as an embodied subject. Within a posthumanist and new materialist conception of musical childhood education, the relevance of these processes of re-configuration with nonhuman matter in defining childhood cannot be ignored.

What matters?

This article has outlined some of the contours and approaches of posthumanist new materialism when applied to music education research. There are many points of departure for diffractive doings offered in this article. One thing is key. Music education researchers and practitioner-researchers should heed Donna Haraway’s (2016, 12) advice:

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.

It matters that children and young people inhabit physical ‘spaces’ where ‘time’ and ‘matter’ are intra-actively produced so that they break away from adult expectations and dominant conventional schooling. It matters that we directly challenge the conventional, normative ‘academic’ research practices. It matters that we invite children-becoming-[being]-researchers and writing curricula with young people (Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles 2023, 81) that ‘actively disrupt the normative conventions of academic practice and the standardisation of learning and knowledge’ (83). It matters that making with sound (and musicking practices) involves an ongoing dynamic entanglements of bodies, minds, matters and environments where ‘making with’ ‘things/objects’, ‘bodies’ and ‘beings’ enters into a complexity of ongoing and ‘dependency relations’ between humans, nonhumans and more-than-humans.

Inspired by Rousell and Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles (2023, 167), who said ‘rather than concluding with a closing, we linger with an opening’, we offer possible points of departure for posthumanist music education and music education research:

1. Where there could be a greater acknowledgement of the manifestation of embodied learning, where ‘things’ matter and ‘matter’ matters, we need to find ways of being attentive to creating spaces to trouble existing methodologically ‘fixed’ forms and come to see the actualisation of practice as a meeting point of multiplicities in research. We need to recognise that music education (learning in/through/with music) does not occur solely in the mind, but rather re-configures things through the notion of diffraction as a movement of interference creating patterns which produce new forms of motion, blurring boundaries between practice and research with complex entanglements of bodies and beings, matter and the material body.

2. Some of the language in posthumanism can, at first reading, seem impenetrable. When conveying these terms to teachers, we need to pay ‘slow attention’ (Stewart 2017) to examples that are contextualised and localised to places, cultures and contexts, recognising that musics, like sciences, is about different people in different places. These differences enable socio-political action and transformation through intercultural and transnational collaborations and solidarities (Gandolfi 2023) We could also combine posthumanist perspectives with other concepts/ideas that teachers may be more familiar with to help them perceive a smaller gap between these posthumanist perspectives and current practice. For example, coupling posthumanist theories with more common sociological concepts, such as Bourdieu's notions of capital, field and habitus, can provide researchers with ‘new touchstones for asking ‘what if’, ‘what else’, ‘who else’, and ‘how to’ capture the mess and mire of the present moment’ (Burnard and Stahl 2024, 57) while giving them something familiar to hold onto.

3. For music educators and music education researchers, doing something new, or swimming against the tide, may well feel disruptive, unsettling and uncomfortable. But in order to confront the historical and contemporary uses of music education research, ideas, practices and structures, we need to build new approaches to music education that foster new knowledge systems (epistemologies) and ways of being (ontologies). While there may be some people who feel sceptical about posthumanism and new materialism, we need to ask: What does a diffractive reading do in changing relations and removing hierarchies between different musics, music practices and musical creativities? How do we learn to attune to unlearning, getting lost, being decentred and relinquishing control? How do we learn to pay ‘slow attention’ to nonhuman and more-than-human actors (Stewart 2017)?

4. We need to take up the posthumanist new materialist concepts of diffraction and diffractive analysis as a way of enquiring into the ontologies of difference and relationality that underscore the interconnectedness of practice and research, particularly when the body and materiality of sounding music are central. Both music education practice and research are generative sites that require critical and creative thinking, negotiating the paradoxical ‘co-existence of the actual and the virtual; the status quo and the possible alternatives; what is ending and what is about to come into being’ (Braidotti 2019, 66) in a materially embedded and embodied world.

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Notes on contributors

Pamela Burnard

Pamela Burnard is a Professor of Arts, Creativities and Educations, the University of Cambridge (www.educ.cam.ac.uk/people/staff/Burnard/). She has published widely with 25 books and over 120 articles which advance the theory and practice of multiple creativities across education sectors including early years, primary, secondary, further and higher education, through to creative and cultural industries. She is co-editor of the journal Thinking Skills and Creativity. Her most recent co-edited books include ‘Why Sciences and Arts Creativities Matter’ (Brill-i-Sense, 2020), ‘Doing Rebellious Research in and Beyond the Academy’’ (Brill-i-Sense, 2022), ‘Unlocking Research: Sculpting New Creativities in Primary Education (Routledge, 2022) and ‘The Routledge Companion to Creativities’ (Routledge, 2023). Her most recent co-authored journal article is ‘Sensing bodies: Transdisciplinary enactments for educational future making’ which was recently published in Digital Culture and Education Journal (2023). Current funded projects include ‘Choices, Chances and Transitions around Creative Further and Higher Education’ (The Nuffield Trust), ‘Contemporary Urban Musics Inclusion Network’ (Arts and Humanities Research Council), and ‘Creative Learning in Higher Education Teaching of BioEconomics’ (CL4Bio) (Erasmus). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), Chartered College of Teaching, UK and of the International Society for the Study of Creativity and Innovation (ISSCI).

Nathalie Ann Köbli

Nathalie Ann Köbli is a PhD student and junior researcher at the Department of Education at the University of Vienna. She is part of the research project ‘Entangled Publications’, funded by the Austrian Science Fund, which explores the entanglement of publication processes, analysis, and research designs from a posthumanist and new materialist perspective. Her most recent coauthored journal article is ‘The Game of Academic Publishing: A Review of Gamified Publication Practices in the Social Sciences’. In her dissertation, she uses posthumanist and new materialist theory to explore habitus(con)figurations of students with non-academic backgrounds in higher education. Her diffractive analysis of Bourdieu’s theory of habitus will be published as a book chapter in ‘Theory and Method in Higher Education Research’ at the end of 2024. She deepened her theoretical and methodological training in the field of Posthumanism and New Materialism as a participant in Rosi Braidotti’s Summer School at the University of Utrecht.

Notes

1 Stengers originally trained as a chemist and has been a key thinker in the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies. Her approach to reimagining the philosophy of science is significant in its empirical fieldwork as a philosophical technique, an approach that builds on the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari. Her ecology of practices shares an unbifurcated understanding of nature with many Indigenous, First Nations and non-Western cosmologies.

2 While nonhuman things refer to entities that are not human, such as animals, plants, or objects, the term more-than-human emphasises the agency these entities have in producing and transforming our worlds and experiences, thus challenging the idea of human exceptionalism and becoming more-than-human (Braidotti 2019).

3 Materiality within a Western, Cartesian ontology has been defined as a passive background to the higher order of human interaction (St. Pierre 2021). This is because, as Jane Bennett argues, the becoming of nonhuman matter often ‘proceeds at a speed or a level below the threshold of human discernment’ (2010, 58). Instead, she argues that matter is vibrant in the sense that it co-configures human subjectivity. In doing so, matter is always part of assemblages which, in new materialist theory, are the nexus for agency. Accordingly, ‘when an I acts, it does not exercise exclusively human powers, but includes those of its food, micro-organisms, minerals, artefacts, sounds, bio- and other technologies, and so on’ (Bennett 2018, 448). Thus, in this article, we employ a new materialist notion of materiality that acknowledges the active role that nonhuman matter plays in shaping and understanding our multiple worlds.

4 Being entangled is to have no innate, independent existence. Instead, in new materialist theory, subjectivity arises through and as part of intra-actions (as opposed to interactions). There is no distinction between ‘creation and renewal, beginning and returning, continuity and discontinuity, here and there, past and future’ (Barad 2007, ix). In this way, the properties of human and nonhuman bodies depend on their entanglement with each other.

5 See Burnard et al. (2018) for a detailed account of the pedagogical intentions underpinning the arrangement of the statues, and the more general choreography of the spacetimematter.