Meeting the musician-teacher halfway: a Baradian perspective on identity research in music education

ABSTRACT

This theoretical paper explores how researching the identities of musician-teachers can be differently conceptualised through a critical posthuman lens. Wider calls to action demand an expanded professionalism of musician-teachers, but when such recommendations are combined with fixed notions of identity as self-contained and producible, they risk becoming essentialistic and exclusionary. Foregrounding the intricacies and tensions in locating the teacher subject therefore posits a need for theories of complexity and becoming. Barad’s agential realism provides an onto-epistemological shift, such that the musician-teacher is not separable from the world, but intra-actively comes into being through a relational ontology, exposing identity as a mechanism of capture through series of agential cuts. These material-discursive entanglements and performativity of the dichotomous musician-teacher role are then discussed. By thinking difference differently and addressing relations of power, these have ethical implications for research and what comes to matter, drawing on non-representationalism and signalling post-qualitative methodologies. This philosophical framing does not serve to reduce complexity, to figure out what works, but rather stays with the trouble – the messiness – by arguing for future empirical work that is inclusionary in the widest sense and grounded in the embodied, affective experiences of musician-teachers themselves.

KEYWORDS:

• Musician-teacher identities
• critical posthumanism
• Barad
• agential realism
• relational ontology
• music education

Introduction: the many identities of the musician-teacher

Identity work is complicated and messy (Jordhus-Lier 2021; Lambert 2021). As such, an inexhaustible range of situational and contextual factors influence the conditioning and labelling of role identities in education, coded along the axes of teachers’ personal and professional selves (Alsup 2006; 2018; Boyle 2020; Day et al. 2006; Zembylas and Chubbuck 2018). From temporal markers that situate teachers on a continuum of career development (Adams 2021) to a lifelong mapping of transformative learning (Chua and Welch 2021; Leung 2014), the aim of such identity work remains to locate the teacher-self or the produced teacher subject. Such framings are important for teacher education, especially where complexity reduction is required to figure out what works (Biesta 2020) and how best to socialise teachers into the profession. But this process has its challenges (Wallace, Rust, and Jolly 2021), especially when the work of musician-teachers is not exclusive to formalised, schooling contexts (Burwell, Carey, and Bennett 2019; Gaunt, López-Íñiguez, and Creech 2021).

Musician-teachers may occupy a variety of roles as part of their portfolio careers. Working across multiple settings (Gaunt, López-Íñiguez, and Creech 2021), the tensions of these role identities have long been problematised between the dichotomy of musician and teacher (Jordhus-Lier 2021; Karlsen 2019; McClellan 2017; Natale-Abramo 2014). For example, (Jordhus-Lier 2021, 199) noted that most teachers identified with various ‘subject positions’ and often interchangeably, including ‘Music Teacher, Instrumental Teacher, Musician, Musician-Teacher, Coach, and School of Music and Arts Teacher’. Despite the definitional conundrum of these role identities, the harmonious coming together of a musician-teacher identity has been posited (Karlsen 2019). However, conflicting sub-identities informed by personal experience and context (Ballantyne, Kerchner, and Aróstegui 2012; Dolloff 2007) continue to influence what values and aims music teachers consider important in their work, which sees a negotiation of their ‘ideal ego’ – preferred self-image – and ‘ego ideal’ – socially accepted image (Clarke 2018, 222).

The multidimensional nature of music teacher identities has been theorised (McClellan 2017; Tucker 2020), particularly the ways in which teachers adapt between roles and contexts (Ballantyne and Canham 2023; Ballantyne, Kerchner, and Aróstegui 2012), leading to situational identities (Rowley, Reid, and Bennett 2021). However, the notion of identity as a fixed state or bound entity, only captures one singularity that becomes measurable and determinate. The notion of multiple identities implies several fixed states and bound entities, leading to many singularities that become collectively measurable and determinate. The problem of such definitional work, that attempts to delineate between these multiple states or hybrid personas, is that it becomes exponentially fractal. Instead, Jordhus-Lier (2021) concludes that embracing the messiness of identity work provides a generative departure from much of the literature that has centred on the musician-teacher dichotomy.

Further to this, where much of education research has been rooted in social constructivism (Murris 2022), the limitations of identity and psychoanalytic theories have been critiqued for not taking power differentials into account, instead assuming a Eurocentric vision of the subject with the Cartesian logic of the mind and body as separate (Barad 2007; Braidotti 2006; 2013; 2019a; 2022). Identity work that begins with an idea of the human as individual, rational-minded, and self-autonomous, therefore requires disruption in support of an anticolonial project. This is especially important where the hegemonic positioning of Western music education impacts pedagogic approaches and cultural identities in non-Western contexts (Ho and Law 2020; Leung 2014; Lum and Chua 2016), having the potential to both displace local musics and create a cultural othering of musician-teachers (Au 2022). Therefore, by de-centring the human, new perspectives of our world-making and worlding processes emerge (Haraway 2016), indicative of the posthuman turn that affirms ontological pluralism (Pratt and Rosiek 2023), which altogether have not been extensively adopted in music education research (Crickmay and Keene 2022).

Re-thinking identity, so far as being unfixed, is also no longer self-owned nor self-constructed. Indeed, following (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), Braidotti (2018) asserts that identity is a mechanism of capture, that pins you to a politics of location. And through such a process of complexity reduction, or what Barad (2007; 2014) would define as creating agential cuts, identities are made visible, measurable, representational. But in the averaging process of doing so, what gets left out? Whose differences are unaccounted for? What subjects remain missing? This theoretical paper presents the role of critical posthumanism, then, as a re-framing for such identity work and an invitation to stay with the trouble (Haraway 2016), not reducing but instead embracing the complicated and the messy. Furthermore, dualisms that form modes of control and governance are challenged, with binary thinking dissolved through an onto-epistemological shift introduced through Barad's (2007) theory of agential realism. This theory is centred around the idea of a relational ontology, where difference becomes the starting point for conceptualising our ways of being in the world (Barad 2007; 2019; Murris 2022). By foregrounding the tensions of the musician-teacher dichotomy and discussing the existing literature, the application of such complexity theories provides more nuanced understandings of teachers’ lives in specific contexts. Finally, Barad’s agential realism is positioned as a non-representational theory and has methodological implications, which are discussed in the context of doing identity research and critically engages with how things come to be represented and why matter comes to matter (Barad 2014).

From identity to becoming – towards a theory of complexity

In more recent music education research, scholars have started to consider the messiness of identity work (Jordhus-Lier 2021), reflecting on the idea that identities are fluid, and can be viewed as a process rather than static or fixed (Westerlund, Karlsen, and Partti 2020). Although much of education research is more broadly rooted in social-constructivist orientations, several authors acknowledge the dynamic complexity and non-linearity of teacher subjects, conceiving identity as a process (Clarke 2018; Hong, Francis, and Schutz 2018; Kaplan and Garner 2018). A process, rather than something fixed, can also be characterised from being to becoming – that is, an open-ended, indeterminate state (Adams 2021, 394). Following Deleuze, a different concept of becoming-teacher emerges to frame learning and growth – ‘an ongoing view of transformation that is non-linear, non-directional, and never quite actualized’ (Strom and Martin 2017, 9). This indeterminate state defies the notion of fixed start and end points, thus always being in the middle (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). This notion no longer resonates with more linear, replication models of teacher education – the produced teacher subject – nor the fixed conventional terms for stages of career progression (Adams 2021). Instead, the ‘incalculable subject’ (Lather 2016, 126) that is neither predictable nor fully knowable (Wallace, Rust, and Jolly 2021), is always in a process of becoming, and one of continual differentiation (Braidotti 2013; Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Therefore, making a ‘science out of indeterminacy … is more in touch with contingencies, relationalities, instabilities, and history’ (Lather 2016, 129). Hence, the ontological turn (Pickering 2017; Zembylas 2017) creates critical openings for conceptualising the existence and work of musician-teachers, such that epistemological questions of how we come to know teachers – identify and label them – become replaced with questions of what the teacher is and how the teacherly-self is constituted and enacted, ‘bringing empiricism back to include a grounding in lived experience’ (Braidotti 2018, 207).

Turning attention to the nature of reality itself calls for more ‘complex, connected, relational, vital ways of understanding the world’ (Strom and Viesca 2021, 210). Rather than the notion of a single, unified reality there instead exists multiple realities and perspectives, which necessitates onto-epistemological shifts (Barad 2007). A core component of this requires moving away from dualisms and binary or individualistic thinking (Braidotti 2013), which promote essentialist or reductionist views of the teacher subject. Furthermore, where identity labels become simultaneously exclusive and exclusionary (de Freitas and Curinga 2015), binary thinking has been criticised for its Eurocentric, rationalist human thought, that bolstered ideas of intellectual superiority and certain groups being more human than others (Braidotti 2013). Feminist epistemologies have troubled the geopolitical location of such knowledges (Braidotti 2019b; Haraway 1988) and the hegemonic, colonising ways in which such knowledge production operates in indigenous contexts (Tuhiwai Smith 2021). Engaging with alternative ontologies not only creates visibility for those missing peoples whose voices have been left unheard (Braidotti 2019b; Murris 2020b), but the deconstruction and blurring of binary thinking challenges the very representationalism that governs much of educational research (Adams 2021; Fullagar 2020; Murris 2022). Hence, these dualisms do not fully capture the entangled nature of humans as embedded, embodied, relational and affective subjects (Braidotti 2019b). A non-essentialistic recalibration and expanded conception of teacher identity is therefore made possible through critical posthuman and new materialist lenses (Martin 2019; Wallace, Rust, and Jolly 2021). In turn, complex ideas of ‘nonlinearity, an emphasis on matter, and affect’ are embraced (Martin 2019, 4) and consequently necessitate methodological shifts in educational research (Strom and Viesca 2021; Zembylas 2021).

Materiality and affective becomings

In the context of music education, Richerme (2020, 22) comments on the prevalence of cognitive-centric discourses, despite the notion that ‘music making involves individuals’ bodies, emotions, and sociality’. Furthermore, focussing on narratives without attending to these affective qualities fails to account for ways in which the body speaks (Richerme 2020; de Freitas and Curinga 2015). Embodied engagements therefore have implications for what ‘constitutes data and how data are “collected” and “analyzed”’ (Zembylas 2021, 9). However, continuing a thorough exploration with Deleuze, Richerme (2020, 30) further comments:

conceiving of humans as multiplicities enables our various integrated qualities to hold value apart from a unified “being.” This means, for instance, that one can talk about emotion and its interrelations without subordinating it to a cognitive-centric vision of a whole human.

Indeed, this humanist view of the self has been critiqued in the context of music teacher identities (Cooke 2021) and more widely in research that prioritises disembodied forms of knowledge production (Haraway 1988; Harding 2008). Hence, forms of knowing do not ‘come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world’ (Barad 2007, 49). Although these notions begin to challenge the idea of human exceptionalism, the human is not in fact rejected nor a stance of anti-humanism taken. Rather, by de-centring the human, agency is no longer the property of an individual autonomous being (Bozalek 2020; Jackson and Mazzei 2022), but recognised as a distributive agency across more-than-human collectives (Bennett 2010). Rethinking human agency as no longer unidirectional – the human exacting their agency upon the world – but a reconceptualised notion of the teacher subject emerges:

Teaching is not something the teacher does as an isolated actor, but rather is jointly produced by the [more-than-human] collective. Therefore, teaching activity, as well as teacher learning, has to be considered as heavily mediated, multiply produced, co-constructed phenomena. (Strom and Viesca 2021, 218)

Teaching is posited to be a continuous enactment of ‘relational encounters, producing a complex entanglement of matter and meaning’ (Wallace, Rust, and Jolly 2021, 410), positing the way for a different philosophical framing for such teacher identity work.

Barad’s agential realism and posthumanist performativity

Barad's (2007) theory of agential realism offers an entangled understanding of reality and knowledge, and resists the separation of the human and non-human, such that an

onto-epistemological stance asserts that practices of knowing and being cannot be isolated from one another, but rather are mutually implicated … We therefore know as a result of our being in the world. (Jackson and Mazzei 2022, 92)

This challenges the subject-object dichotomy and therefore the problems of epistemological relativism that are produced by scientific realism and social constructivism (Barad 2007, 44–45), that ‘can acknowledge the situated/constructed character of only one of the poles of the dualism at a time’ (Jackson and Mazzei 2022, 91). Refusing the separability of entities, they are mutually constituted through a process Barad calls intra-action. Entities are not a priori (that is, understood to exist by theoretical deduction rather than from experience or observation), but come into being through relationships (Kuby and Murris 2021). To be entangled is not about two separate entities joining or being intertwined,

but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. (Barad 2007, ix)

A relational ontology unsettles the notion that there are ‘pre-existing, separately determinate entities of one kind or another that exist prior to the relations they are part of’ (Murris 2020a, 8). This has implications for identity work, that normatively creates fixed meanings from which the world can be understood and gazed upon, hence the ‘synthesizing rationality of the human subject’s reliance on a priori categories or concepts to identify/sense something in the world’ (St. Pierre 2016, 118). Instead, the focus on intra-action between entities means that human and more-than-human relations are ontologically prior (Barad 2007).

Entities are no longer determinate in their pre-existing, pre-interacting state, and so, inspired by Derrida, Barad explains that the ontological starting point of relationality is difference, not identity (Barad 2019; Murris 2022). The relational, intra-active nature of entities that mutually come into being are characterised by their difference, in a process Barad (2007) calls diffraction. Hence ‘the relational ontology of post-qualitative, new materialist, and critical posthumanist research starts from difference, instead of identity and troubles the exclusive social sciences lens to explain social phenomena’ (Murris 2020a, 7). Through this process of diffraction, the teacher is not just in a process of becoming, but a process of becoming-with, that is, becoming with something else – transforming with and through the other entity. Becoming is not an individual project or possibility, but through a worlding process (Haraway 2016), becoming-with emphasises the processual, intra-active ‘entangled state of agencies’ (Barad 2007, 22–23) between humans, nonhumans, and more-than-humans, that exceed

the traditional notions of how we think agency, subjectivity, and the individual. Crucially, for Barad, “agency is a matter of intra-acting; it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has.” (Jackson and Mazzei 2022, 97)

Agency has been clarified more widely in educational research not as something people have, but something that people do (Alsup 2018). It is also this doing where ‘agency lives in the constant interplay between strategies of power and resistance’ (Foucault 1997, quoted in Ball 2017, 55). Therefore, it is these ways of being and doings/enactments in the world that also come to explain relations of power, where language and the discursive realm also intra-act, in what Barad (2003) describes as posthumanist performativity. With these concepts in mind, the following sections discuss the existing literature on musician-teachers, reflecting specifically on themes addressed in the introduction and the critical openings made possible through Barad’s agential realism, as well as implications for future identity research.

Discussion and theoretical re-positioning

Thinking with theory (Jackson and Mazzei 2022), it is possible to reconsider existing models of social constructivism that underpins so much of identity research in education (Murris 2022). The following examples consider norms in teacher education, the hierarchy of musician-teacher roles, and limitations within existing identity research.

Firstly, from the perspective of those qualifying as classroom music teachers to work in schooling contexts, symbolic interactionism has become a prevailing concept in training teachers and understanding their professional identity (Isbell 2008; 2015; McClellan 2017; Pellegrino 2019). Looking at the symbolic meaning teachers attach to the self and other, this model has been used to understand the socialisation and occupational identity of teachers graduating into the profession (McClellan 2017; Tucker 2020). Part of this socialisation process may occur during teacher education programmes, in which replication and linear models for teacher preparation have been critiqued (Adams 2021; Wallace, Rust, and Jolly 2021). These fixed, reproducible notions of the teacher’s role identity may create tensions with personal, sub-identities that pre-service music teachers bring to their practice, potentially leading to praxis shock (Ballantyne and Retell 2020). Jenlink (2021, 1) highlights that teaching is a ‘complex process of socialisation’, where occupational roles are multidimensional (Tucker 2020), and professional identity is contextual. This points to the importance of socio-cultural dimensions (Pellegrino 2019), where cultural norms and beliefs are also integrated as part of an enculturation process for the in-service teacher (Schutz, Hong, and Francis 2020), adapting to new school environments and communities of practice.

Thinking instead with Barad, the teacher identity is not a self-contained code to be known and (re-)produced in a linear way. An onto-epistemological stance demonstrates that practices of knowing and being are not isolated from one another (Jackson and Mazzei 2022). Rather, the teacherly-self intra-acts with the world and does not pre-exist these encounters, as dichotomised through the self/other binary. The notion of becoming-with not only challenges processes of enculturation and praxis shock, as identities of self and other are negotiated; but also emphasises the material and embodied ways in which the teacher is becoming-with the surrounding environment. This is not a psychoanalytic pinning of identity to a specific context, but as Barad incisively points out,

the notion of context connotes separability as a starting point: it presumes there is an object that exists apart from its environment or surroundings and that this environmental context matters in some way. (Barad 2007, 459)

Secondly, to what extent musician-teachers self-identify, and place greater importance, as a musician or a teacher, is conditioned by their personal understandings and the structures within which they are socialised and enculturated (McClellan 2017). This is problematic where musical and personal artistic aims may precede wider, educative ones. Regelski (2012, 53) critiques ‘musicianists’, whose own musical aims and interests dominate their teaching practices, with their ‘calling’ to the profession being more personally and artistically guided, than for the benefit of their students, community, or society (65). Such divides between commitment and affiliation of roles potentially serves to weaken the music teaching profession (Jordhus-Lier 2015), especially when a perceived hierarchy of professional roles in music may further subordinate the importance of the teacher role (Boyle 2020; Pellegrino 2009). This has implications for the socialisation of music teachers into the profession, especially when these preconceived ideas around the importance and status of music education are coupled with notions of it being a fallback career or being a failed performer (Boyle 2020; Burwell, Carey, and Bennett 2019). This divide has often been ingrained within university music departments, where performance majors outnumber music education majors and where high standards and virtuosity in musical performance are praised (Austin, Isbell, and Russell 2012; Isbell 2015). These identity instabilities, which are conditioned by the interrelationship of the personal and the professional, can manifest in various ways, leading to dynamic or contrived outcomes (Day 2018; Day et al. 2006), and contradictory motivations for becoming a teacher and entering the profession.

Trying to map such interrelationships then becomes intricately complex. It is here where Barad’s ‘agential realism pulls the rug from under our established educational assumptions about human agency, causality, intentionality, and voice’ (Murris 2022, 3), and provides a ‘reworking of familiar notions such as performativity, discursive practices, materialization, agency’ (Fiore 2018, 360) and so forth. Therefore, the performativity of such roles, and the hierarchies that are attached to them, become the site of material-discursive enactments that are affective. For example, teaching as a fallback career, set against a backdrop of precarious work conditions (Canham 2021), is entangled within hierarchical notions of professional status and personal needs. Such identity instabilities and contrived sense of agency, which are not removed from the political, discursive flows that compose them, are also felt through and acted upon the body, as a form of emotional labour (Day 2018). Barad (2003; 2007) critiques performativity theories that do not account for the affective, materiality of the embodied self. Overall, this framing mutually troubles binaries such as cognition/emotion, nature/culture, inner/outer selves (Barad 2007) and indeed what are very complex notions of personal and professional selves, which may be further compounded by issues of cultural othering and belonging as highlighted earlier (Au 2022). Such affective encounters require more than just representationalist ways of understanding and reflecting on the world, to be discussed later .

Thirdly, in the context of music education research, social cognition and symbolic interactionism have been regularly used to explore the psychological and sociocultural nature of identity construction (McClellan 2017; Pellegrino 2019). McClellan (2017, 69) explains that ‘Social Cognitive Theory provides a means of measuring social cognitions that may be important in behavioural regulation relative to identity’ but also adds that this self-theory is an ‘approach to understanding human cognition, motivation, and emotion, which assumes that people are active agents in shaping their environments’. However, this positioning that takes rational-minded humans as self-determined and equal does not account for issues of power and politics (Zembylas and Chubbuck 2018), for which several theorists have critiqued essentialist and reductionist forms of identity theories, including Foucault (1980; 2001) and Butler (2005b; 2006). However, this positioning also takes for granted the agency of individuals in actively constructing meaning through social interactions and has been similarly critiqued for not addressing relations of power and inequalities, often lacking contextual factors, or not focussing on macro processes, for which theorists like Bourdieu (1984) dismantle structures of culture and power. Such critiques were extended by (Bernstein 2000; 2001) who theorised ideas of symbolic control and the totally pedagogized society. Hence, agentic calls to action, such as Schmidt and Robbins (2011, 96), who claim that ‘for change to occur, [music] teachers must become architects of their own professional development’ (my emphasis), takes for granted essentialist notions of individual agency and relative control over their positional autonomy.

In the same way that identity can be understood as performed, agency is something someone does. For Barad, agency is a ‘collective action or an enactment – not something that an individual possesses’. (Jackson and Mazzei 2022, 89). Further still, within posthumanism, agency is understood to be distributed among human and nonhuman others (Bennett 2010) and Barad discusses this entangled state of agencies, such that the material and the discursive intra-act. It is this intersection of the real and socially constructed, where power relations can be exposed, and apparatuses are seen as boundary-drawing and exclusionary practices (Barad 2003). This has implications for the agential cuts that are made within research designs, that are based on fixed notions of identity and essentialistic ways of knowing the world.

Overall, this theoretical re-positioning that aims to embrace, rather than reduce, complexity is important, given that ‘the lines between the professions of musicians and the profession of music teachers are blurred occupationally, educationally, epistemologically and ontologically’ (Angelo 2016, 178). Furthermore, describing humans in terms of identity and dividing these into identity categories has been interpreted as potentially oppressive (St. Pierre 2023), where the ‘self is always deeply implicated in exclusionary boundary-making practices’ (Murris 2022, 9). The positional identity of music teachers can therefore lead to exclusiveness and being excluded (Burwell, Carey, and Bennett 2019), especially where colonising notions of identity create divides between self and other (Murris and Bozalek 2019). The notion of identity is not one that should be dismissed, but rather acknowledging that identity becomes a mechanism of capture (Braidotti 2018) and that identity is the effect of power (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Foucault 1980). Hence, ‘your identity pins you, nails you almost, to a location of power, which usually are binary machines’ (Braidotti 2018, 210). Working with identity in this way involves exposing and disentangling the power mechanisms that structure it.

More nuanced understandings of musician-teachers’ lives not only address issues of power, but also provide alternative starting points when considering the significance and impact of professional development programmes. This is particularly the case when there are wider calls to action for an expanded professionalism and to better prepare music graduates for the profession (Bennett and Rowley 2019) – in particular for their teaching work. Examples of such changes to build competencies, foster resilience, and improve employability have been more recently documented in higher education (Casas-Mas and López-Íñiguez 2022; López-Íñiguez, Pozo, and Echeverría 2022). However, Westerlund and Gaunt (2021, xiii) conclude from a universal perspective that ‘professionalism has not been embraced unanimously in music … [and] ways of working tend to be fragmented within specialised occupational silos’ (my emphasis). This disconnectedness and the identity instabilities that are produced not only lead to matters of precarity (Canham 2021), but politically situate the teacher subject and the values placed on their educative roles and responsibilities. Therefore, ways in which policymakers account for these issues and disparities are rooted in the identity construction of musician-teachers themselves, for which different approaches to research are required and discussed in the following sections. Depending on the geo-context, the working practices of musician-teachers may fall outside of policy frameworks (Bautista, Stanley, and Candusso 2021; Myers 2017), perhaps lacking decisional capital, which has also led to calls for graduates to be more policy-ready (Schmidt 2020). Attuning to power differentials within musician-teachers’ lives, then, is essential for policymaking, for which more nuanced understandings of material-discursive entanglements are needed. Hence, these onto-epistemological shifts and entangled state of agencies, presented through Barad’s agential realism, will create critical openings to address the potential limitations, biases, and exclusionary practices of existing and future identity work.

Implications for identity research

Ethical considerations

Understanding relations of power through our enactments and performances that are symbiotically material-discursive has methodological and ethical implications. In the context of educational research, Murris (2020b) cautions how the concept of the human, in this case the teacher/student or adult/child, works in knowledge practices. For Barad this is performative, since the human is conceptualised as ‘neither a biological nor an ontological given but a political concept and a material-discursive doing, not a thing’ (Murris 2020b, 69). However, like writers of posthuman and political care ethics (Bozalek, Zembylas, and Tronto 2020), Barad (2007, 185) calls for an ‘ethico-onto-epistemology’. This is important since we are part of a world of differential becoming, where the world and its inhabitants are remade through each intra-action, and so practices of knowledge-making become a deeply ethical matter (Barad 2007; Taylor 2020). This requires making knowledge practices ‘visible (intelligible, accountable for their effects) and enact a generative approach to research as sensitive doing and worlding’ (Fullagar 2020, 120). One example is to render others capable, such that participants have response-ability in the design of the research and knowledge-making practices (Bozalek 2020). This means reducing the conditions of unidirectional agency, allowing participants, and the universe, to speak back – hence not doing research on participants, but researching-with and becoming-with participants. An ethico-onto-epistemology necessitates conditions that both account for, clarify, and reduce the researcher’s phenomenological gaze (St. Pierre 2016, 2019), which is particularly important from a perspective of decolonising research methods, hence ‘agential realism resists pathologising and psychologising relationships with “others”’ (Murris 2022, 27). The researcher is therefore entangled in matters of accountability and response-ability (Taylor 2020).

Troubling dualisms and the role of language

Barad's (2007) onto-epistemological framing does not separate the nature of reality and how to know reality, but instead emphasises their connectedness and therefore ways of being in the world. This places importance on materiality in new ways, but without rejecting or turning away from the voice and language. Instead, Barad troubles the nature/culture continuum, essentially criticising disembodied knowledge production, including how ‘performativity theories fail to give an account of the body’s historicity that succeeds in bringing the discursive and the material in closer proximity’ (Fiore 2018, 360). Drawing on Foucault, and bringing in materiality and the embodied, Barad critiques that the ‘discursive constitution of the subject has been neglected in mainstream feminist science studies’ (Jackson and Mazzei 2022, 96). Hence, Barad (2007, 57) concludes that this is ‘precisely Foucault’s point in moving away from questions of linguistic representation and focusing instead on the constitutive aspects of discursive practices in their materiality’. Failure to account for the material, embodied, affected experiences,

reinstates the supremacy of culture and language as productive forces. What is needed to understand power in the fullness of its materiality is to account for the ways in which matter and discourse entwine and co-participate in the definition and materialization of the human and its others, so as to account for non-human forms of agency and matter’s implication in its ongoing historicity. (Fiore 2018, 360)

Therefore, a relational ontology refuses the fixity and separateness of words and things within representationalism, and the traditional humanist view of interactions with the real or the material as being unidirectional. Jackson and Mazzei (2022, 88) further elaborate,

it is a discontent, primarily fuelled by feminist scholars, with the failures of social constructionism and postmodernism that concerns itself with a definition of the “real” in a Cartesian sense – in other words, something “out there” to be conquered and known.

In acknowledging the distributive agency of things and vibrancy of matter (Bennett 2010), the posthuman perspective situates the voice as ‘part of an agentic assemblage that has an ontological force’ and its entanglement with other things where there becomes a ‘mutual production of agents, voices, becomings’ (Mazzei and Jackson 2017, 1094). Barad (2007, 210), thinking again with Foucault, explains that within power/knowledge practices, ‘power is not restricted to the domain of the social but is rethought in terms of its materializing potential’. Specifically, they draw attention to how words become material, affecting the embodied human subject, as Jackson and Mazzei (2022, 99), thinking with Barad, analyse a participant in their study: ‘words become a performative agent, writing and acting on her body’. Words inflict pain, wounds, trauma, and can become a form of subjugation that takes on a material effect. In considering this Barad (2014) politicises matterings, or how matter comes to matter (Jackson and Mazzei 2022). Finally, ‘semiotic sign and symbol systems are extensions of materiality itself’ (Martin 2019, 4), which has implications for reframing teacher identity as not only discursive, but instead identity ‘is the confluence of matter’s engagement with itself in multiple plateaus – social, psychological, discursive, biological, technological, and so on’ (4).

Non-representationalism and the post-qualitative

Thinking with Barad’s theory of agential realism has several implications for designing and conducting identity research in music education, particularly forms of proceduralism and representationalism. A critical posthuman perspective troubles the messiness of the teacher subject by embracing a ‘non-linear, unstable, emergent, and more complex view of teacher becoming’ (Wallace, Rust, and Jolly 2021, 417). The processual nature of the teacher subject and the lack of fixity defies conventional binary thinking, dualisms, and the divides between subject and object. Such essentialistic thinking has been challenged in terms of identity theories, with a lack of attention to power relations (Zembylas and Chubbuck 2018), but also through the post-qualitative refrain that critiques logical empiricism and phenomenology (St. Pierre 2016, 2019). While positivism is challenged for its belief in a fixed reality and interpretivism for its reliance on fixed meanings, these disembodied forms of knowledge production have been posited as exclusionary and imperialistic by feminist and anti-colonial scholars (Haraway 1988; Harding 2008; Tuhiwai Smith 2021). For example, this is problematised when using the idea of data collection, where researchers might assume that ‘data are somehow independent of them such that they can be “collected”, thus adopting the human/non-human divide of logical empiricism’ (St. Pierre 2016, 118). Post-qualitative research therefore aims to disrupt such prior assumptions and in particular the habitual gaze (Menning, Murris, and Wargo 2020) of the researcher – the knowing subject – that become entangled in the process (Murris 2022). Furthermore, (Taylor 2020, 30) introduces ‘knowledge-ing’ as the

processual nature of knowledge-making. It shifts from knowledge as a thing – separable, contained, over and done with – to knowledge as a doing, an unfolding, a process that is open, nomadic, unfinished and perhaps unfinishable.

A deterministic view of knowledge production, with a perspective of seeing the world in individual, discrete units, is replaced by entangled, co-constructed multiplicities (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) and an ontology of immanence (St. Pierre 2019). To make a science of indeterminacy (Lather 2016) an alternative orientation is required where the researcher can

approach methods propositionally, speculatively, and experimentally and maintain that it is the logic of procedure and extraction that needs undoing … [This needs a] shift from thinking about methods as processes of gathering data toward methods as a becoming entangled in relations. (Springgay and Truman 2018, 204)

The researcher’s entanglement is implicated through Barad’s onto-epistemological framing, which does not separate the real world from ways of knowing the world, but emphasises ways of being in the world and hence must be considered in the research design.

What is represented and how something comes to be represented are key components that are challenged through Barad’s theory of agential realism, applied as a diffractive methodology (Bozalek and Zembylas 2017). Primarily considered a non-representational theory, Barad (2003, 801) asserts that ‘language has been granted too much power’ and that performativity in its truest sense contests the representationalist belief in the power of words to determine what is real and to represent pre-existing things. In particular, the modes of reflection and reflexivity are critiqued. In the context of music education, narrative inquiry has been used extensively to generate meaning (Barrett and Stauffer 2009; 2012), with more recent research profiling marginalised perspectives (Smith and Hendricks 2020) and how cognitive-centred views of the world may not be emancipatory (Richerme 2021). Indeed, reflection aspects of teacher identity have been considered incomplete (Zembylas and Chubbuck 2018), not accounting for power differentials that shape such narratives. These dependencies may be conscious or unconscious to the individual, and so in ‘moments of unknowingness … [it is] primary forms of relationality that are not always available to explicit and reflective thematization’ (Butler 2005a, 20). Reflection is only able to repeat back on itself – that which it already knows. Reflexivity, which is a process of self-evaluation, has similarly been criticised for just ‘displacing the same elsewhere’ creating issues in searching for the ‘authentic and really real’ (Haraway 1997, 16). Theories of reflexivity that posit the human’s autonomous agency in critically reflecting as a self-liberating process are also seen to be reductive, suggesting that ‘social problems are presented as the consequences of poor decisions, rather as being influenced by social and political forces’ (Bozalek and Zembylas 2017, 3). The limitations on language and focus on cognition have remained disconnected from the affective (Richerme 2021; Zembylas 2021) and material encounters (Bozalek and Zembylas 2017; Lambert 2021) of teachers themselves.

Both Haraway (1997) and Barad (2007) draw on the notion of diffraction to profile patterns of difference and heterogeneity, rather than sameness. Barad therefore sees ‘diffraction as a way out of seeing the world from an individualist, humanist and representationalist perspective’ (Bozalek and Zembylas 2017, 9). Through a process of interference and troubling dualisms, ‘diffraction queers binaries and calls out for a rethinking of the notions of identity and difference’ (Barad 2014, 171). When taken for granted binaries such as teacher/student, adult/child, nature/culture, self/other are broken down, critical openings emerge through a relational-material approach that allows for intra-actions and patterns of difference that cannot be generated or captured, at least at first, by language alone. As Barad (2003, 811) explains, ‘this entails familiar notions of discursive practices, materialization, agency, and causality, among others’.

Non-representational theories have implications for what counts as data and calls into question research practices (Zembylas 2017), hence the need to ‘decentre the role of voice in the narrative and in the representation’ (Arndt and Tesar 2019, 138). For example, arts-based methods have been used to address the limits of language and what it expresses (Seppälä, Sarantou, and Miettinen 2021), foregrounding the agency and response-ability of participants (Ellingson and Sotirin 2020), which have also become instrumental within approaches to decolonising research methods. However, speculative reimagings are required to re-conceptualise the collection of data (Springgay and Truman 2018), or rather the way data emerges and glows. This does not mean an artistic reconfiguring of phenomenological and interpretivist models, but instead resisting the ‘gravitational pull of humanism’ altogether (Lather 2016, 126), which have been well illustrated through more rebellious ways of doing research (Burnard et al. 2022). Hence, Moxnes and Osgood (2018, 299) summarise that

the human subject (i.e. the teacher educator, the student teacher, the child) is displaced, and instead attention to emotion, affect, materiality, space and place, and how they become entangled (and what they diffractively produce), is central.

Altogether, this is achieved by disrupting linear modes of knowledge production (Wallace, Rust, and Jolly 2021) and therefore research design, that interrupts both habits of thinking and doing (Barad 2007), in both time and space, since ‘diffractions are untimely’ (Barad 2014, 169). A diffractive methodology therefore offers a compelling and renewed starting point for future teacher identity research in music education.

Conclusion

A Baradian perspective on musician-teacher identities leads us to thinking difference differently and how we can come to know the teacher subject. Through Barad’s agential realism and metaphysics, we meet the teacher halfway, at the point of intra-action, where entangled agencies and entities come together in a processual and relational ontology (Barad 2007). Identity is neither fixed nor pre-given, in the same way that agency is not something we have, but rather something someone does – a doing, a becoming. The challenges for teacher education shift from ways in which identities are constructed, to ways in which identities are performed, within material-discursive entanglements. Grounded in teachers’ lived experiences, which remain undertheorised in educational research (Schwartz, Cappella, and Aber 2019), the ontological and affective re-turnings resist the one-sided paradigms of social constructivism (Zembylas 2021) and therefore has implications for future research and what data looks and feels like. Barad (2003, 806) reminds us that ‘representationalism is so deeply entrenched within Western culture that it has taken on a commonsense appeal’. Indeed, this Eurocentric vision of the teacher subject in a globalised and internationalised world of music education is problematic, whereby cultural otherness also becomes a point of tension (Au 2022). Although beyond the main scope of the current paper, this anticolonial work requires significant attention in further philosophical and empirical work, for which a critical posthumanist framing affords many possibilities.

Furthermore, regarding power differentials and identity construction, ‘logic is often thought of as rules for reasoning that seeks certainty and epistemic closure as its ideal outcome’ (Pratt and Rosiek 2023, 2). These epistemic closures and agential cuts are precisely the mechanisms that politically situate the teacher subject (Braidotti 2013; 2019a), which risk establishing or perpetuating boundary-making practices within policy frameworks, thus requiring ongoing scrutiny. The claim here is not to dismiss identity, but it is a starting point from which these multiplicities and unfoldings can be mapped within new areas of research that embrace such messiness (Braidotti 2018).

Overall, these considerations have implications for future research, not only providing a renewed starting point for conceptualising the teacher subject, but also drawing attention to the standpoint and entanglement of researchers themselves. Altogether, this does not mean rejecting identity or indeed the human, but by starting with identity and de-centring the human in the process, critical openings emerge and assumptions about what it means to be teacher are no longer taken for granted. Unpacking the musician-teacher dichotomy is no longer a question of this or that role, more of one identity and less of the other, or relating to either the personal and professional self, as if these could ever exist exclusively and separately from one another. Instead, binary thinking is dissolved when teacherly enactments are seen and experienced as a worlding process and becoming-with (Haraway 2016). The temporal markers and mappings of such processes resist labelling, deny fixity, and are part of a continuous, material unfolding. Hence,

Time can’t be fixed. The past is never closed, never finished once and for all, but there is no taking it back, setting time aright, putting the world back on its axis. There is no erasure finally. The trace of all reconfigurings is written into the enfolded materialisations of what was/ is/ to-come. (Barad 2007, 264)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Research Training Program Scholarship, awarded by the University of Melbourne on behalf of the Australian Commonwealth Government.

Notes on contributors

Ryan Matthew Lewis

Ryan Matthew Lewis is a PhD candidate in Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He researches the professional identities of musician-teachers, using critical posthumanism, post-structuralist theories, post-qualitative inquiry, and decolonising approaches to research methods.