Abstract:
In this presentation, given at the Association for Popular Music Education conference at Edinburgh Napier University (July 2024), I consider ways in which music educators can begin to envisage and enact counter-hegemonic critical pedagogies in popular music education. I begin by mounting a critique of many of the normative practices that have come to define and or shape our understandings of what popular music education means and the ways in which such understandings impact the consciousness of participants. I then discuss the importance of counter-hegemonic, dialogic praxis as a way to foster critical consciousness and to enable the facilitation of the onto-epistemic heterogeneity that our field needs to cultivate if we are serious about engaging in truly inclusive, humanising, liberatory education.