Disability and the complex politics of inclusion in music education

In music education, attention to matters of disability often takes place within therapy or special education contexts. In more general contexts, students who are assigned in the category of having special needs are perceived more as a problem, demanding more resources, more ideas, and more compromises. In recent educational scholarship and practices, the inclusion principle is increasingly criticized for supporting special educational agenda rather than actively moving away from student labeling. In my keynote that I gave in the ISME Commission on Special Music Education and Music Therapy conference in the summer 2020 (filmed in the Finnish forest due to COVID-19 restrictions), I examine how and why disability could be reconsidered in music education through the conceptual ideas of performativity, intersectionality, and complexity.