Pushing Paradigms: Feminist Posthumanist Theories and Storytelling in Music Education Research

In this article we - five music education scholars forming a writing collective - explore the boundaries of music education research through telling stories and reading them with and through feminist posthuman theories. We trouble the binary of culture/nature that is often taken for granted in music education research through sharing five stories that, in different ways, make tangible how music making practices are relational and distributed across human and nonhuman agencies. We also trouble the privileging of written words over sounds that is common in research through expanding this written article with recordings of us telling the stories, with a soundscape where the sound and music of the stories become entangled with each other, and by offering a visualisation as a way of closing the article. Through our collaborative process, we explore how pushing the dominant paradigm can open more just and inclusive spaces and approaches to music education, offering possibilities for porous methodologies and flexible educational practices.