Public scholarship in music education: Rethinking academic freedom by unthinking method

Beyond the political interference of authoritarian regimes, the neoliberalisation of the academy has emerged as one of the key threats to academic freedom in the twenty-first century. The demand to produce research outputs of sufficient quantity, quality, and impact for scholars to justify their taxpayer-funded appointments reconceptualises the responsibility of the public scholar from one who challenges the status quo and inequitable power relations, to one who provides a worthwhile return on investment. Accordingly, questions have been raised as to whether academia is a feasible realm in which to further ideals of equity and justice in music education. In this article, I examine the tension between critical imperative and methodological conformity, considering how the policing of method reinforces individualized frames of knowledge-production that fix and limit notions of what knowledge is and what it does. I argue that music education scholars may be well placed to deviate from procedural method in realizing a more creative and relational public scholarship, in working toward a more ethical conceptualisation of academic freedom through the inquiry process itself.