Cosmopolitanism is basically a moral stance requiring every human to be concerned with the wellbeing of every other human being on earth. As such, it tends to privilege cosmopolitan--urban and culturally elite--populations while suppressing more "place-bound" groups. Cosmopolitan education constitutes a form of abjection whereby…

Archetypal images in stories and lyrics such as Lehi's Dream in the Book of Mormon, Country Mouse and the City Mouse, and selected Country music lyrics grow from perceptions of social, cultural, and geographical realities. For their purveyors, they likely stem from personal experience as the proverbial Country Mouse in the city and/or from…

In the summer of 2011 (June 16-19), the MayDay Group met in Salt Lake City, Utah (USA) for MayDay Colloquium 23, with presentations and discussions on the theme,"The End(s) of Music Education? A Call for Re-Visioning": In a time of rapidly changing political processes, power relations, and policies, music educators are challenged to…

The author of this article proposes an agrarian vision of music education that underscores fundamental, "down-to-earth" principles for human actions and interactions. An agrarian world-view encourages mass participation ("y'all come")--"musicing" is free and available to all and it is not treated as a…

"Poor white trash" is likely the most enduring and degrading in a long line of "stigmatypes"--"stigmatizing boundary terms that simultaneously denote and enact cultural and cognitive divides between in-groups and out-groups"--such as "redneck," "cracker," and "hillbilly." Some people apply these terms in reference to poor or working-class, usually…

In this article the author reviews needs theory as a field of research and scholarship, examines seven needs theories (including Nussbaum's capabilities approach), and synthesizes elements of all of these into a list he used tentatively and speculatively to analyze two common instructional practices in music education. The author's intent is to…