Potential contributions of music education to peacebuilding: curricular concerns

Abstract

This article examines the potential role of music education in peacebuilding, specifically concentrating on issues of structural, indirect violence often unwittingly perpetuated through Eurocentric music curricula. I point out that such violence occurs not only in curricula that represent only European classical traditions, but moreover in the pedagogical practices or the ways in which music is represented. I draw on Walter Mignolo’s work on the decolonizing project as well as David Hansen’s theories of cosmopolitan education to theorize what a decolonized music education might look like. Ultimately, I turn to Mignolo’s encouragement of pluriversal cosmopolitanism to develop my own ideas of what a cosmopolitan music education might look like, how it contributes to decolonizing, and thus how it might foster peacebuilding at the levels of both structure and the individual student.