Background & aims

Arts education is often positioned as a vehicle of social justice, cultivating empathy, critical reflection, and civic responsibility through practices such as music and dance. Researchers frequently advocate for inclusion, diversity, and engagement with global challenges (Juntunen & Partti, 2022; Wilson, 2023). But what happens to arts education research in times of genocide and mass atrocity? This paper presents findings from a systematic literature review investigating how educators and communities engage with and mobilize music and dance education amid genocide, and how such practices compare across contexts including the Holocaust, Armenia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Gaza. In doing so, it raises a critical but underexplored question: How does arts education contribute (or not) to awareness, testimony, survival, support, and critical consciousness in times of genocide, not just in its aftermath?

Method

Using the PRISMA 2020 framework (Page et al., 2021), this review identifies and synthesizes peer-reviewed and grey literature on music and drama education enacted during or in response to mass violence. Eligible studies span formal, non-formal, and diasporic contexts involving learners and educators. Special attention is given to power relations and political dimensions – such as testimony, cultural resistance, psychosocial survival, and the ethical tensions of creating or researching under atrocity.

Main contribution & implications

Our review study exposes silences and possibilities, and assesses tensions between “after-the-fact” and “in-the-moment” approaches. Emerging findings call for reframing arts education research as an urgent, politically accountable practice in times of mass violence. In turn this has implications for the ethical and social responsibilities of arts education and its researchers. Final results will be available in spring 2026. This contribution invites discussion on the responsibilities and risks of arts educators working under conditions of power, politics, and structural violence.

Music Education 2010–2025.

This presentation examines English music education policy from 2010 to 2025 as a manifestation of intersecting neoliberal and neoconservative political rationalities, exploring how these have shaped music teachers’ opportunities for democratic engagement in developing the structures, epistemologies, and pedagogies of music education. It argues that the alignment of these rationalities has produced an emphasis on, on the one hand, accountability, performativity, and efficiency, and on the other, cultural restoration, moral authority, and a return to traditional repertoires and values.

Drawing on Phelan’s (2014) and Laclau’s (1996) concepts of shared antagonisms, empty signifiers, and antagonistic others, the presentation contends that influential actors within English music education have aligned with government policy to reconcile ideological tensions in ways that promote a traditionalist paradigm serving both neoliberal and neoconservative ends. This alignment has contributed to the erosion of democratic spaces in which dissent and alternative visions for music education might otherwise flourish. Music subject association acting as discourse communities, policy actors and policy and inspection frameworks have played key roles in embedding these discourses in practice, often at the expense of teachers’ professional autonomy and capacity and opportunities for democratic engagement

Nevertheless, possibilities remain for teachers to resist, subvert, and reimagine music education as a diverse, inclusive, and socially meaningful practice, and for music subject associations to be re-envisioned as politically engaged discourse communities supporting teachers’ democratic agency. Ultimately, the presentation argues for recognising the deeply political nature of music education and for reclaiming professional agency and autonomy against constraining policy discourses.