Cultivating Epistemic Justice in Music Education: Honoring Minoritized Knowers

Cultivating Epistemic Justice in Music Education helps music educators understand how to support minoritized populations in their capacities as knowers. The book puts forward important considerations for ways to better serve individuals across multiple minoritized identity categories, including racialized, gender-expansive, trans, disabled, neurodivergent, LGBQ+ individuals and groups, and people experiencing poverty.

Being understood and validated as a knower is crucial to education. Some harms that occur in music education are distinctly epistemic; they specifically relate to how a person is understood as a knower and the resources to which they have access to make meaning of their experiences. This book considers music education through a discursive framework of epistemic injustice to foreground issues related to credibility, authority, situatedness, silencing, prejudice, and exploitation. Recognizing the need to critique epistemic injustices in music education, Hess names and addresses these harms to encourage a move toward epistemic justice.

Offering considerations for a range of identities and supported by vignettes and practical examples, the book is the ideal resource for music education researchers, music teacher educators, practicing teachers, and graduate music education students interested in better serving minoritized populations.

Juliet Hess is a Professor of Music Education at Michigan State University, USA. She focuses on anti-oppression and justice-oriented work, critical pedagogy, trauma-informed pedagogy, and disability and Mad studies.