At the Capitalist Crossroads : Popular Music Education in the Age of Neo-liberalism

In this article, I interrogate how neo-liberalism functions as a governing rationality that constructs the field of popular music education (PME) not as an educational space but as an economic space. Drawing on Wendy Brown, I argue that neo-liberalism operates as a normative form of reason that economizes, commodifies and marketizes all facets of PME. Specifically, I contend that PME both reflects and reproduces neo-liberal rationality through the pervasive and taken-for-granted discourses of entrepreneurialism, employ-ability, individualism and competition. Through training-focused and industry-centric curricula and pedagogies, students are configured within the field of PME as homo oeconomicus: market-driven, self-interested human capital wherein the main determinant of their educational success is employment in the music industry. The subjectification of students as homo oeconomicus produces an ontological crisis within PME because not only does it unethically shape how students relate to others and the world, but it also vanquishes all other forms of their being by reducing their existence purely within economic terms. I conclude this article by outlining how a stance of refusal rooted in critical reflexivity offers one possible avenue for resisting neo-liberal rationality.