Rethinking Music Education and Social Change

The arts, and particularly music, are well-known agents for social change. They can empower, transform, or question. They can be a mirror of society's current state and a means of transformation. They are often the last refuge when all attempts at social change have failed. But are the arts able to live up to these expectations? Can music education cause social change?

Rethinking Music Education and Social Change offers timely answers to these questions. It presents an imaginative, yet critical approach. At once optimistic and realistic, the book asseses music education's relation to social change and offers a new vision for music education as utopian theory and practice. As an important topic in sociology and political science, utopia offers a new tradition of thinking and a scholarly foundation for music education's relation to social change.

Alexandra Kertz-Welzel is Professor and Chair of Music Education at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet in Munich (Germany). She obtained her PhD in musicology from Saarland University in Saarbruecken (Germany), as well as master's degrees in music education, German studies, philosophy, piano, and
harpsichord. From 2002-2005, she was Visiting Scholar and Lecturer in Music Education at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA (USA). With research interests in international music education, philosophy of music education, music education policy, and community music, she has regularly
presented at national and international conferences. She is author and editor of several books and a frequent contributor to leading journals in music education. She was Chair of the International Society for the Philosophy of Music Education (ISPME) from 2017-2019 and Co-Chair of the ISME
Commission on Policy from 2016-2018.