EVA GEORGII-HEMMING
Örebro University (Sweden)
NADIA MOBERG
Örebro University (Sweden)
February 2026
Published in Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 25 (2): 98–123 [pdf]. https://doi.org/10.22176/act25.2.98
Abstract: Like broader society, the ways people engage with and interact around music are profoundly influenced by power relations. Inequities related to social categories such as class, gender, age, race, and ethnicity permeate all aspects of music—be it education, creation, or consumption. Furthermore, norms and expectations tied to specific places, genres, educational settings, and professional domains often create barriers to participation and freedom to act. While there is a substantial body of scholarship on social inequities in music education, much of it focuses on marginalized individuals, overlooking the structural dynamics of power. This essay argues for a critical approach attentive to how power relations are constituted through the positioning of different social groups within structural contexts. Emphasizing social class, we argue that research must investigate how power, norms, and cultural values are maintained and reinforced by elites, the privileged, as well as marginalized groups. In an era where social inequity is increasingly reinforced, understanding the structural underpinnings shaping music practices—including music education—is crucial.
Keywords: Music education research, power, social class, inequity, inequality, relational analysis
Much like society at large, musical engagement is shaped by power relations.[1] Those privileged by virtue of their position or access to economic, cultural, and social capital can influence other people’s scope for action and opportunities to participate in music life.[2] Inequities tied to social categories such as class, gender, age, race, and ethnicity permeate all areas of music—be it education, creation, or consumption. Moreover, norms and expectations linked to specific locations, genres, educational settings, and professional fields frequently impose constraints, limiting individuals’ ability to engage fully and navigate within music life. If not approached critically, music education at all levels can reproduce and maintain inequity and injustice (Bates 2018; 2019; 2023; Richerme 2021; Wright 2015).
Power is a dynamic that emerges in interactions between individuals, groups, or institutions when there is an imbalance in positions or resources. It operates within relationships, shaping both opportunities and constraints. Across various disciplines in music research, a substantial body of scholarship has examined how such imbalances contribute to social inequities, often reflected in measurable inequalities (e.g., Bates 2021; Bull 2016; de Boise 2016; Goodrich 2022; Knapp and Mayo 2023; Malcomson 2014; Laes 2017; Werner et. al 2020).[3] Building on prior scholarship, we conducted a literature review (Moberg et al. forthcoming) that explored the ways in which power relations in and around music have been studied over the past decade in scholarly music research—covering practices of making, listening to and consuming music as well as the laws and policies surrounding the regulation of music-related activities.
Three key findings emerged from the analysis. First, issues of power and inequalities are rarely examined as relational. Instead, power is often treated as a one-way force, with limited discussion of how it operates to perpetuate inequity. Second, researchers tended to focus on marginalized individuals or groups, giving little attention to dominant actors, and third, just 12 out of 154 articles specifically addressed social class. Of these, six focused on educational contexts.
In response to these findings, we advocate for analyses that move beyond viewing social groups and structures as separate entities and instead examine how their dynamic and reciprocal relationships continually shape and reshape one another. By foregrounding social class (Savage 2015), we call for research that examines how power is maintained and reinforced not only by marginalized groups but also by elites and the privileged. As social inequity deepens (Chancel et al. 2022), it becomes increasingly urgent to understand the structural underpinnings that shape music practices—including education—in line with Táíwò’s (2022) argument that structural arrangements rather than individual attributes produce and sustain privilege. Such inquiries must move beyond individual voices toward comprehensive examinations of the social order and the discursive practices that uphold it (Fairclough 2014; López 2003).
Power Relations and Social Class as a Case
Power is multifaceted: it can be formal, governed by laws and institutional roles (Weber 1947), or informal, emerging through social networks (Castells 2009) and symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1984), such as prestige or expertise. These dynamics are often subtle yet deeply influential, determining who has access to resources and opportunities (Gramsci 1971). Norms (Foucault 1980) also play a central role in shaping power dynamics, acting as implicit rules that guide behavior and determine authority within specific contexts. Often linked to social categories like class, gender, and ethnicity, such norms tend to privilege certain groups while marginalizing others, thereby reinforcing established hierarchies.
There are numerous approaches to power analysis, including decision-making, non-decision-making, and ideological power (Lukes 2005). Each offers a distinct lens for examining power dynamics, ranging from traditional structures of authority to more subtle forms of social influence and control embedded within culture and institutions. Rather than defining power as a fixed concept, we emphasize its relational nature: power emerges through interactions among individuals, groups, and institutions and is influenced by the distribution of resources, positions, and forms of capital—whether economic, cultural, or social. This view understands power as not simply held but negotiated and exercised within specific social contexts. Among the diverse social formations in which such dynamics are observable, class offers a particularly instructive instance.
While sociologists have long recognized social class as a key axis of inequity (Sherman 2024), and despite broad consensus in research that it plays a critical role in shaping who participates, thrives, and progresses within various music practices and occupations (Bull 2016; Bull et al. 2022; Holt-White et al. 2024; Liu et al. 2024),[4] class often remains overlooked in music education as well as music sociological research (Moberg et al. forthcoming; Bates 2019; Dyndahl 2024). In studies addressing social class, its influence is frequently conflated with or overshadowed by discussions of race, ethnicity, or migration (Bates 2019). While extensive North American music education literature on social justice and anti-racism exists (e.g., Benedict, Schmidt, Spruce, and Woodford 2015), these authors rarely address class directly (for an exception, see Wright 2010).
The absence of class perspectives in music education research can have multiple causes. Bates (2019) points to the strong historical and ideological focus on social justice within American scholarship, which often overshadow discussions of economic inequality and social class. He also notes that addressing class could reveal uncomfortable truths about systemic inequalities, potentially challenging the dominant, middle-class norms prevalent in music education research and practice. Dyndahl (2024, 161) offers a further explanation, suggesting that an underlying reason may lie in music education’s close ties to its aesthetic dimensions. When music educators focus on aesthetic experience, and researchers view music as a universal or neutral form of culture—such as classical music being considered “apolitical” or folk traditions seen as “authentic expressions of humanity”—it can obscure the social dimensions of musical practice.
In advocating for more comprehensive consideration of class issues, Bates (2019) emphasizes the importance of forging a stronger intersectional alliance between critical class and antiracist scholarship, highlighting its explanatory and political potential in the field of music education. Intersectionality is key to understanding how power structures intersect (Crenshaw 1989), but we argue that it is equally vital to foreground individual dimensions of power—such as class—in their own right. Class, for instance, has distinct expressions that in themselves generate inequities, independent of other social categories, reflected in access to economic resources, educational capital, and social networks. While no one experiences life through a single social lens—those facing discrimination due to class, gender, ethnicity, age, disability, or sexual orientation belong to multiple intersecting groups (Ahrne 2016)—neither approach should be considered superior. Distinct analyses of specific power relations must work in tandem with intersectional approaches to offer a fuller understanding of the layered and interlocking nature of social inequities.
Despite various efforts to democratize music and arts education, problems of inequity persist (O’Brien et al. 2022). Class-based disparities have become increasingly pronounced in the wake of global crises such as economic instability, climate change, and technological transformation. These converging crises not only exacerbate existing inequities but also expose how institutions continue to reproduce privilege and disadvantage—often under the guise of neutrality, meritocracy, or inevitability. In this context, class becomes an analytically urgent and politically relevant lens for understanding the structural conditions that shape access, opportunity, and participation in music education.
For example, admission tests for music teacher education often privilege skills rooted in Western art music traditions, reinforcing both the system’s structural requirements and the ideological belief that these skills define “true” musicality (Kingsbury 1988). This example shows how structural arrangements are inseparable from human agency, as institutional rules and material requirements both shape—and are continually reinforced by—the beliefs, actions, and decisions of those who participate in and uphold them. This interplay between material conditions and cultural-ideological mechanisms lies at the heart of our theoretical stance. Our argument for relational analysis rests on Marx’s foundational understanding of the material conditions and class relations underpinning capitalism, developed through Nancy Fraser’s (2017, 2019, 2021) theorization of the “background conditions”—including cultural-ideological mechanisms—that sustain capitalist accumulation, and further clarified by Vanessa Wills’ (2018) account of Marxism as a production-based theory in which class mediates the conditions under which all forms of social life are produced and reproduced. Together, these perspectives help us address the interplay between structures and ideology while avoiding class reductionism.
One stark illustration of intensifying class divisions is the growing concentration of wealth. While overall wealth inequality has increased only moderately across most Western nations during the past thirty years (Piketty 2020; Ahrne et al. 2018), the concentration of wealth among the richest individuals—especially on a global scale—has intensified significantly (Wikström 2024). Since 1995, the proportion of global wealth held by billionaires has more than tripled (Chancel et al. 2022). By 2020, the combined wealth of the world’s billionaires exceeded that of the poorest 4.6 billion people (Oxfam 2020; 2023).
Yet political engagement with class has declined. Since the 1970s, the political right has worked to displace class from the agenda through a sustained rhetorical shift (Sunnercrantz 2021), while the political landscape has been reoriented toward the authoritarian–libertarian axis (GAL–TAN), which has gained increased salience in shaping political consciousness. Still, class remains a powerful analytic for revealing how structural conditions generate and sustain inequity and exclusion. It offers essential insights into the economic and institutional mechanisms that underpin social injustice. Considering intensifying disparities and the ongoing marginalization of class in political and academic spheres, there is an urgent need to reassert it as a central category in both public discourse and scholarly inquiry (Bates 2017).
The Individualized Gaze: on Individualism as Method and Myth
Despite ample evidence of persistent structural inequalities, much research in music education continues to frame such issues through the lens of individual experience (Moberg et al. forthcoming). This tendency is perhaps unsurprising, as individualized narratives align with broader societal trends that prize personal fulfillment and self-discovery, where emotional authenticity plays a central role in how individuals make sense of themselves and the world around them.
While the dualism between mind and body has long structured Western thought, emotions have gained increasing status in recent decades (Ljunggren 2015). Emotions are no longer seen merely as internal states but as epistemological tools—we think through our emotions; we use them to navigate social life, and people research them (Hess 2021, 2024a, 2024b). This “emotional turn,” which emerged in the late 1960s and developed during the 1970s through progressive political movements where collective anger became a political force, gradually merged with therapeutic discourses and later intensified through neoliberal ideals of self-optimization and the cultivation of the self as a project (Svenaeus 2023).
Today, the grand narrative of the market dominates the official conversation and shape the stories humans tell about ourselves. As the philosopher Byung-Chul Han (2024) observes, contemporary culture has shifted from a paradigm of shared storytelling to one of “story-selling.” We binge on reels, shorts, and series about consumption—all crafted to keep us consuming. In this shift, we have lost the grand, collective frameworks that once helped us understand who we are and what the world means.
Historically, grand political, religious, and scientific narratives (Lyotard 1986) not only offered cohesive explanations of existence but also served as engines of social change. The Enlightenment narrative, for example, replaced the idea that living conditions were divinely ordained with belief in human capacity, tolerance, and freedom (Kant 1784/2023). The grand narrative of freedom initially served as a collective force to dismantle the dominance of church and monarchy—on the premise that only free individuals can shape their own lives and contribute to the development of society (Tengström 2019). As classical liberalism took shape in the late eighteenth century—articulated most influentially by Adam Smith (1776/2010)—freedom became closely tied to economic exchange and market principles, with the ideal of minimal state intervention (much) later shaping political agendas, including education policy.
Let us give an example from our home country of Sweden. In Sweden, politics were long heavily influenced by the social democratic vision of the Folkhemmet (“the People’s Home”), which sought to reduce class inequalities and promote collective welfare (Suhonen et al. 2021). This narrative informed reforms such as comprehensive schools and municipal culture schools, ensuring that children from all social backgrounds could meet and make music together. In recent decades the liberalistic narrative of freedom of the market has culminated in Sweden’s unique for-profit school system that has deepened segregation, making musical encounters increasingly rare and eroding the collective ideal of education as an equalizing force.
Han (2024) warns that the loss of overarching narratives isolates individuals in private spheres, fostering both social atomization and the illusion that self-expression and willpower alone govern our lives, detached from structural constraints.
A vivid example of this cultural trend can be found in the United States, where college applicants increasingly write personal essays centered on traumatic experiences. These so-called “trauma essays” (Mintz 2023) reflect a broader narrative mode in which suffering becomes a credential—an entry ticket to upward mobility and cultural legitimacy. Our concern here is not with trauma itself, nor with those who live with its ongoing and often devastating consequences. Rather, the critique targets the ways in which trauma narratives, when mobilized in institutional or market-driven contexts, can be reframed from collective symptoms of injustice into individualized stories of resilience or merit. As Parul Sehgal (2021) observes in her critique of the “trauma plot,” trauma has been recast from a stigmatized psychiatric condition into a form of cultural capital. This reframing risks depoliticizing suffering, narrowing its meaning to a personal brand, and shifting attention away from dismantling the deeper structures that produce harm in the first place.
Educational research also mirrors this privileging of personal narrative. Focusing on individuals—whether students, teachers, or isolated cases of social mobility—can create a sense of proximity and relatability for teachers and researchers, offering a more humanizing approach because readers perceive these personal experiences as closer and their struggles more tangible. In contrast, adopting a collective or structural perspective may appear more abstract and detached. Although personal narratives offer valuable insights into experiences of marginalization, they can inadvertently deflect attention from the broader systems that shape and sustain these experiences.
Recent feminist scholarship also raises this concern. While early feminist theory famously insisted that “the personal is political” (Eagleton 2004, 144), more recent critics argue that this emphasis has yielded limited traction in confronting the systemic roots of injustice (Rottenberg 2014). Scholars point out that neoliberal feminism often recasts gender equality in terms of individual autonomy and choice, thereby sidelining questions of power, social positioning, and collective struggle (Johansson Wilén 2021; Lane and Jordansson 2020). The move to a discourse centered on individualism has depoliticized collective claims and redirected attention away from the deeper structural tensions that continue to organize social life. This shift has significant implications for both research and policy.
Given broader neoliberal[5] currents promoting ideals of personal responsibility and meritocracy, the focus on individual experiences is not only understandable but also ideologically reinforced. As Abramo (2025) argues, neoliberalism often absorbs critical perspectives by channeling systemic critiques into personalized strategies (see also Marsh 2017). “Class blindness” (Sherman 2024) enables those who benefit from class privilege not only to shape the conditions of the disadvantaged but also to minimize, obscure, and ultimately preserve class inequalities. It permits them to denounce class injustice in theory, while continuing to act in ways that reinforce it in both everyday interactions and broader institutional contexts. From an ideological standpoint, class blindness functions as a mechanism that enables those who benefit from class privilege to condemn inequity rhetorically while sustaining it in practice. Neoliberal ideals of individual merit, competition, and success serve to further obscure these dynamics by framing advantage as earned rather than inherited. As Phillips and Lowery (2018) note, privilege is often invisible to its holders, sustained by social mechanisms that both conceal inequity and preserve dominant positions. Together, these processes allow class distinctions to be justified, ignored, and reproduced simultaneously.
Conditioned by these logics, music education researchers frequently examine social issues through an individualizing lens, thereby reproducing—rather than challenging—the forces that sustain inequity. When research highlights personal experiences of marginalization, it risks sustaining discourses that cast individuals as responsible for navigating and remedying inequity through personal initiative, optimization, and innovation (Rottenberg 2014, 421–22). Consequently, efforts to address inequity often shift toward identifying ways for individuals to navigate and mitigate the barriers they encounter, rather than interrogating and transforming the conditions that produce those barriers (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Giddens 1991; Rose 1999; Whyte 2019). An emphasis on individual agency aligns seamlessly with neoliberal discourses that celebrate entrepreneurship and personal achievement, while diverting attention from the social class divides and inequalities that shape opportunities and outcomes. Neoliberalism thus influences education both directly, through policy reforms, and indirectly, by steering research practices toward individualized explanations and away from systemic critique (Alexiadou et al. 2016; Dahlstedt 2019; Münch 2020)[6] This dual influence creates a feedback loop in which narratives of personal resilience or failure obscure broader social injustices, ultimately legitimizing the very systems that sustain inequity.
Yet even these narratives—so often perceived as deeply personal—are never entirely individual in nature. As Bakhtin (1981) states, language “lies on the borderline between oneself and the other” (293). Words are not neutral tools of individual expression; they are social, dialogic, and historically shaped (see also López 2003). Individuals articulate their experiences in response to existing discourses. This means that even highly personal accounts are inherently relational: they draw upon shared cultural meanings, norms, and expectations, and are shaped by people’s social positioning in relation to others (Richerme 2021). This underscores the need for a broader shift in focus—not only from individual experiences to systemic conditions, but also in terms of which groups we choose to study and how. In order for music education researchers to critically engage with the power relations that shape inclusion and exclusion, they must interrogate the mechanisms that produce and sustain inequity. A critical approach requires not only listening to voices but also asking what makes those voices possible, intelligible, and legitimate within a given social and institutional framework.
Power at the Top: the Case for Studying Elites and the Privileged
Recognizing the limitations of individualized framings invites a broader reconsideration of where scholarly attention is directed. While music education research has made significant strides in illuminating the experiences of marginalized groups, it continues to neglect a crucial counterpart: the study of how privilege is organized, maintained, and enacted.
In this text, “privileged groups” refers not only to economic elites, but to all social groups whose structural position affords them disproportionate access to resources, influence, and legitimacy. Such positions are produced and sustained by systems that concentrate economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital in the hands of certain groups—often through institutional pathways, inherited advantages, exclusive networks, and control over key decision-making arenas (Táíwò 2022). These groups include, for example, highly educated professionals, researchers, and university lecturers, as well as actors within cultural industries and other market-oriented institutions, whose mandates, capital, and recognized platforms enable them to speak, be heard, and shape discourse in ways less accessible to others.
Studying such groups is therefore not a matter of examining individual attributes or personal choices, but of analyzing the relational and structural processes through which they come to hold—and retain—privilege. Privilege is understood here as relational and multi-dimensional, contingent on context rather than fixed to a single class category.
This enduring neglect of privilege reflects a persistent faith in music’s capacity to bridge social divides, rather than acknowledging its entanglement with the reproduction of inequity—an assumption widely shared by policymakers and researchers. Music is frequently celebrated as a “bridge builder,” fostering cooperation, cultural understanding, and inclusion (Georgii-Hemming and Moberg 2024; Lilliedahl 2021). Yet such narratives rarely account for the ways in which music can be implicated in the reproduction of social hierarchies. A more critical engagement with power relations must attend not only to those disadvantaged by systemic structures, but also to privileged groups and institutions that uphold and benefit from them.
Indeed, inequities are not caused by the marginalized. As argued across the social sciences from various perspectives (Holmqvist 2018; Khan 2012; Sohl 2016), understanding inequity requires sustained attention to actors who hold power—those who shape institutional norms, define legitimate knowledge, and control access to resources (Fricker 2007; Savage 2015; Bull and Scharff 2021).[7] Despite their decisive role in reproducing inequity, scholars still know relatively little about their worldviews, institutional logics, and the mechanisms through which they perpetuate dominance. This analytical shift finds resonance in critical whiteness studies (Hunter and Van der Westhuizen 2022) and masculinity studies (de Boise 2021; Gottzén et al. 2019), which stress the importance of examining dominant positionalities—not merely to reverse the focus, but to understand how power is enacted and sustained. Our related literature review of power in music research (Moberg et al. forthcoming) underscores this point. While researchers frequently discuss structural ideologies—such as those underpinning neoliberal capitalism—there is comparatively little empirical work examining how dominant groups within music-related contexts understand, enact, and reproduce their position. This includes the institutional logics, discursive framings, and routine practices that sustain inequities. Addressing this gap is essential for complementing individual-level analyses with a more critical relational stance.
Critical sociologists explain distinctions between elites, privileged groups, and specific social classes through access to power, resources, and recognition. These distinctions are equally relevant in music education and music life more broadly, given the uneven distribution of opportunities for participation, advancement, and visibility across classed lines. In the cultural sector, power tends to be concentrated among institutional elites and high-ranking professionals—CEOs, board members, policymakers, and cultural administrators—who influence national agendas across performance, composition, production, and education. Privileged groups—such as chancellors, scholars, educators, and musicians—while not necessarily part of an elite, benefit from accumulated advantages, such as cultural capital, and networks that facilitate navigation of the professional systems. These groups gatekeep visibility, construct hierarchies of value, and maintain their status through institutionalized forms of control (van Dijk 1993).
Across the educational system—from primary school to higher education, and in both public and extracurricular forms—music education remains deeply entangled with processes of social selection and cultural distinction. Higher music education offers a clear example of the reproduction and legitimization of social and cultural hierarchies—not only through what music is valued, but also through how institutional norms shape students. While the privileging of certain genres and traditions—particularly Western art music—is well established, similar dynamics play out in jazz, pop, rock, and other genres taught in higher music education programs (Hesmondhalgh 2013). Despite growing attention to musical and pedagogical diversity, as well as equity concerns, the conservatoire model, underpinned by a Eurocentric ideal, continues to exert normative influence across institutional contexts (Coppes and Berkers 2022; Georgii-Hemming and Moberg 2024; Knapp and Mayo 2023).[8]
More fundamentally, music education transmits more than musical knowledge—it functions as a site of socialization, where students learn how to behave, belong, and succeed within a stratified cultural field. These processes operate both formally, through curricula and assessment, and informally, through the relational dynamics between students and teachers. Teachers—many of whom are gatekeepers to the (professional) music life—hold significant authority beyond pedagogy: they facilitate access to networks, performance opportunities, and recognition (Karlsen 2025). The teacher/master-student relationship thus becomes a key mechanism for the transmission of unspoken norms about musicianship, comportment, and value (Eckerstein 2025; Moberg and Georgii-Hemming 2019). While teachers may act as direct gatekeepers to professional networks, institutional gatekeeping also operates more diffusely—for instance, in selective upper-secondary programs or extracurricular music schools, where access hinges on parental support, financial means, and cultural familiarity.
Empirical work is needed to illuminate the social logics through which privilege is sustained and justified—logics often embedded in dominant understandings of cultural expressions as social markers, economic commodities, or symbolic capital. These perceptions shape who gains access, who is recognized, and whose practices are legitimized within musical life. When researchers neglect dominant actors, they risk reinforcing the very hierarchies they seek to challenge and inadvertently depoliticize critical inquiry. Compassionate yet limited interventions risk centering the benefactor, offering “feel good” solutions while leaving foundational structures intact (Vaugeois 2007; Eriksson et al. 2018). Confronting the realities of inequity in music education requires more than empathy; it demands sustained political engagement with the systems and agents that uphold inequity. This also calls for critical reflection of researchers’ own positionality (Vaugeois 2007). As researchers, many of us occupy positions of relative privilege, which can distance us from the lived realities of working-class individuals. Yet this positionality also grants access to the systems of power that sustain inequity—and affords the possibility to speak and be heard. Recognizing this dual role allows researchers to critically interrogate not only marginalized perspectives but also the dominant structures and groups that perpetuate inequity.
However, studying elites and privileged groups presents distinct methodological challenges (Khan 2012). These actors often operate behind layers of institutional protection, possess strong media literacy, and are skilled in managing their public image—making them less accessible and more adept at controlling their representation within research (Harrington 2016). Gaining access can require navigating guarded spaces and negotiating trust without reproducing deferential relationships. Furthermore, elite actors may resist scrutiny or provide strategic performances shaped by their awareness of academic or journalistic inquiry (Wikström 2024). Even middle-class groups, often considered more “ordinary” or accessible, pose challenges when positioned as beneficiaries of systemic advantage. Scholars such as Skeggs (1997) and Bourdieu (1984) assert that those who possess privilege tend naturalize and render it invisible. This invisibility can lead to defensive reactions, denial of advantage, or discursive strategies that displace attention onto others (e.g., working-class “failures” or “undeserving” groups), as noted in research on class subjectivities (Sherman 2024). Critically studying elites and privileged groups demands more than methodological caution; it requires a deliberate effort to confront systems of privilege from within. While access may be restricted and narratives tightly managed, these challenges must not deter inquiry. As researchers embedded in these structures, we hold both access and responsibility (e.g., Dyndahl 2024). Attending to how power operates among the privileged is crucial for understanding how inequity persists.
Toward a Critical Agenda in Music Education Research
In this inquiry, we argued for complementing the prevailing focus on marginalized groups and individual perspectives in music education research with studies that examine privileged groups or elites. Access to research on privilege—even when grounded in individual narratives—can ultimately contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the social whole. Marginalization cannot be meaningfully understood without considering the groups that hold privilege. These groups together constitute the social structures that, we contend, warrant deeper investigation.
We also suggest that compelling narratives based on personal testimonies and “unique” circumstances risk becoming journalistic in character rather than scholarly contributions. A key factor underpinning this trend is the influence of neoliberal ideology on societal development. Neoliberalism also embeds an ideal of charity or benevolence, which, while potentially commendable, can in research contexts foster the notion that merely amplifying voices of the marginalized equates to “exposing power.”
Storytelling is a powerful force, fundamental to how we imagine and make sense of our lives. Yet this very power can also be mobilized in ways that obscure complexity and reproduce dominant ideologies. In contemporary politics, movements across the ideological spectrum make strategic use of emotionally charged and affectively resonant narratives that reduce social contradictions to simplistic binaries—such as good versus evil or us versus them. Populist movements, for example, may assign blame to clearly identifiable actors—be it politicians, migrants, or public institutions—thereby providing a seductive sense of clarity and moral urgency. Conversely, liberal or progressive movements can also deploy such binaries in reverse, as in debates over “wokeness,” where the term’s shifting use illustrates how blame can be framed from different positions. These examples reveal that stories are never merely descriptive—they are always already entangled in broader discursive formations that assign meaning and power. As researchers, our task is not merely to amplify voices, but to situate them—critically—within the ideological, historical, and structural conditions that give them meaning and power.
In other words, the profession would benefit from critical studies of power that adopt a relational perspective on two interconnected levels: first, within individual studies, by embedding classed experiences in structural and contextual analyses; and second, across the research field as a whole, through a wider agenda that complements studies of marginalization with investigations of privilege, elites, and the structural conditions that sustain inequity.
A relational perspective invites researchers to move beyond isolated accounts of student or teacher experiences and instead attend to how structural conditions shape experiences. These include educational policy, institutional frameworks, and the unequal distribution of material, cultural, and symbolic resources across educational settings. For instance, analyzing how students in suburban schools engage with music education gains analytical depth when situated in relation to the opportunities afforded to students in elite or highly profiled institutions. Such disparities occur not only locally but also embedded within broader political reforms.
In many countries, neoliberal education reforms have reshaped the educational landscape through processes of privatization, decentralization, and consumer orientation (Alexiadou et al. 2016; Dahlstedt and Feyes 2019; Münch 2020), redefining education from a collective right to an individualized responsibility. Families with greater access to cultural and economic capital are better equipped to navigate these systems, thereby reproducing social hierarchies under a rhetoric of meritocracy. In music education, this manifests in stratified access to specialist programs, prestigious schools, and extracurricular infrastructures. This results in a growing differentiation of classed experiences, where music education often reinforces social divisions rather than counteracting them. Such dynamics demand critical scrutiny—not only of how access is structured, but of how discourses of excellence, inclusion, and opportunity are strategically mobilized in policy and institutional practice.
Neoliberal values also affect what counts as legitimate knowledge, the kinds of teaching promoted, and the forms of scholarship rewarded. This political dimension becomes particularly evident in policy efforts such as the Divisive Concepts Laws in the United States, which restrict how teachers can address race, gender, and history across the educational continuum (Salvador 2023). While such policies may not target music education explicitly, they nevertheless shape what is teachable, discussable, or even thinkable within music classrooms (Salvador et al. 2024), revealing curricular content, pedagogical approaches, and professional autonomy as subject to broader ideological and political pressures.
Market-oriented logics increasingly shape not only the governance of education but also the conditions under which knowledge is produced and circulated. Within prevailing academic norms, efforts to engage critically with class, inequity, and the power structures that organize educational and cultural life face additional obstacles (cp. Bates 2016). Emphases on efficiency, frequent publication, and quantifiable output (Kaltenbrunner et al. 2022) make it easier to follow established trends and adhere to linear argumentation—while rendering it more difficult to pursue questions that unsettle dominant agendas. Against this backdrop, two challenges for critical work on class and inequality in education become especially evident.
Firstly, the narrowing of intellectual space under dominant academic norms conflicts with approaches seeking to situate individual experiences within larger social dynamics. Social life unfolds through contradiction and tension—between reproduction and transformation, conformity and resistance—shaped by discourse and power (Giroux 1983; Apple 2004; Archer 2000). Such approaches resist neat categorization and simplified causal explanation. Instead, they foreground complexity, contradiction, and relationality, moving beyond binary oppositions between structure and agency to emphasize their dynamic and historically situated entanglement.
Secondly, the call for relational, critical analysis is not merely a methodological preference—it is a political act. Relational analyses not only clarify conceptually—they act as critical interventions into the institutional and epistemic arrangements governing music education. In an era of accelerating inequity—where wealth and power increasingly concentrate while political and scholarly discourse has displaced class from view—the stakes of such intervention are high. Reasserting class as a central analytic means confronting not only economic disparity, but also the ideological mechanisms normalizing and sustaining it. This includes challenging the research agendas, publication norms, and pedagogical scripts —along with the politics of education—that constrain the scope and direction of music education. Seen in this light, relational analysis offers more than a way of framing inequity—it provides a means of resisting it.
Acknowledgements
This article is part of the research project Constructing Music Society through Elite Discourse (CORD), funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet).
About the Authors
Eva Georgii-Hemming, PhD, is a Professor of Musicology at Örebro University. Her research focuses on power relations in music education, music-making, and the use of music. Eva has published both nationally and internationally, addressing topics such as professional identity, forms of knowledge, academization, and unequal conditions in musical contexts. Her research has also led to regular presentations and keynote lectures at international conferences in Europe and the United States. Eva previously served as Head of the School of Music at Örebro University (2017–2023).
Nadia Moberg, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Music Education at Örebro University and earned her PhD in Musicology in 2022 with the dissertation Dis/harmony. The discursive (re)construction of higher music performance education with a classical music study orientation. Her research focuses on power relations and conceptions of music in both educational and other musical contexts. Nadia has previously served on the boards of the Swedish National Union of Students and the Swedish Council for Higher Education and has a broad interest in education policy.
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[1] Language revised with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI) to improve clarity. No content was generated by the AI.
[2] We introduce the term music life to encompass the full range of musical activities, whether situated in formal or informal settings, and whether commercial or noncommercial in nature. This term is a translation of a concept from our own language, and we find it better suited than music industry, which is commonly used in Anglo-American and Australian literature. While music industry can refer to a multifaceted and interconnected ecosystem—including educational institutions—we believe it emphasizes economic dimensions and tends to frame music primarily as a product generated by various sectors, such as the recording industry, live music production, and companies that train, support, or represent musicians. We also view this framing as contributing to a perception of people as commodities. In contrast, our use of music life is intended to highlight the broad, diverse, and relational character of musical engagement, including amateur activity, community associations, and developments in policy.
[3] Examples of empirical studies across different music contexts.
[4] Examples from different practices and occupational settings.
[5] When we talk about neoliberalism, we refer to it primarily as a political ideology that advocates the realization of a free market and strong private property rights, combined with individuals’ self-realization as entrepreneurial subjects, as the path to human well-being and prosperity (Harvey 2005; Author 2022, 25).
[6] Covering a historical UK overview, Swedish marketization in an international context, and a critical analysis of US-led neoliberal reform, respectively.
[7] Representing philosophical, theoretical, and empirical studies, respectively.
[8] Addressing popular music programs, higher music education broadly, and admissions processes, respectively.