Challenging the empire in empir(e)ical research: the question of speaking in music education

ABSTRACT

As an enterprise, academic research is in the business of knowledge production—a practice through which researchers continually engage in speaking for or about others. This paper explores the colonial potential of research and ethnography in particular. I draw on Alcoff’s framework (Alcoff, L. M. 1991. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique 20 (Winter, 1991–1992): 5–32) to consider issues inherent in speaking for Others and mobilise Critical Race Theory (CRT) and anti-colonialism as tools and lenses to examine research activities with the goal of moving toward more ethical and productive outcomes. The next portion of this paper puts forward ways to guard against coloniality in research. I rethink Alcoff’s caveats through these critical lenses alongside considering possible anti-colonial methodologies. I then consider the way these dynamics operate in my own research and conclude with a number of implications for music education researchers to help us shift our research toward a more ethical, reciprocal, anti-colonial research praxis.

KEYWORDS:

• Music education research
• methodology
• anti-colonialism
• coloniality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Juliet Hess is an assistant professor of music education at Michigan State University, where she teaches secondary general methods in music education, principles in music education, and philosophy and sociology of music education. Juliet received her Ph. D. in Sociology of Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. She previously taught elementary and middle school vocal, instrumental, and “world” music at a public school in the Greater Toronto Area. Her research interests include anti-oppression education, activism in music and music education, music education for social justice, and the question of ethics in world music study.

Notes

1 Other academics raise similar concerns (see, for example, Mohanty 2003; Razack 1998).