This essay, centered on the creation and performance of a song, documents an autoethnographic and a/r/tographical inquiry focused on issues of personal/ professional transition from musician/pedagogue to artist/researcher. As artists are called to bring their practice to the academic research process, a common thread of identity transition marks many of our journeys—especially those of musicians. In this paper, reflections on the content and process of songwriting extend into a theoretical conceptualization that demonstrates the unique potential of song to render meaning, teach, address ethical issues, and enhance knowledge-communities. The result embodies research through practice, and integrates music, lyric, story, and exposition to display theory in action.

This dissertation is an a/r/tographic inquiry in which I explore how songs and stories about songwriting can serve as a means for theorizing new ways of conducting research in music education. I a/r/tographically braid music, lyrics, scholarship and research, autoethnography, and other creative analytical practices to demonstrate how songs and memories can be used as interpretive texts for understanding artistic identity and the nature of being a musician. Through a collaged and multi-modal method of inquiry, I show how music and its renderings, i.e., recordings, lyrics, videos, memories, and lived shared expressions (e.g., performance) can hold and uncover new ‘knowings’ about music making, the self, and society. Using a bricolaged métissage approach, I explore how and why the ethnographic study of autobiographical material and artistic renderings through (and about) song can broaden understandings of the lived experiences of musicians, music learners, and teachers. Supported by Pinar’s re-conceptualist theory of currere, hermeneutic epistemologies, and praxial approaches to music education, this dissertation exemplifies performative autoethnography as research through music-making. I ultimately arrive at two interwoven outcomes: 1) song may function simultaneously as the method, results, and interpretation of research; and 2) the lived experiences and ‘musicings’ of musicians may be considered as a form of artful scholarship. Digital audio and video files of six original songs are attached to this dissertation not only as data in support of the research, but also as a representation and report of findings through storied/scholarly renderings in lyric, prose, image, and music.

We offer a multi-voiced performance autoethnography where contemporary music education practices are informed and imbued with the voices of teachers and learners. By dialogically and musically engaging with the very people who live, make music, and engage with learners in music classrooms, we promote contemporary qualitative forms of research and the (re)conception of a sociology of music education as a political and an ethical construction that needs to be grounded in serving communities of music practitioners. Through a pedagogical story, told from the perspectives of music teachers using their own voices, we begin an open conversation about the nature of power structures and struggles in music education research. We invite new possibilities in developing understandings of the complex socio-cultural dynamic of music making, music learning, music teaching, and music researching in all facets of contemporary society. By embracing a broader set of traditions--Arts-Based Educational Research and Creative Analytical Practices--that enable us to go beyond socio-cultural frameworks and orthodox beliefs that currently exist in the music education profession, we seek to (re)form a culturally contextualized, ethos-rooted, sociology of music education.

During the last three decades, neoliberal capitalism has consolidated its hegemony worldwide by increasing its social, political and economic influence and by expanding a market centered rationality throughout the world. Nocella and Juergensmeyer in their book Fighting Academic Repression and Neoliberal Education: Resistance, Reclaiming, Organizing and Black Lives Matter in Education remind us that the reforms implemented to higher education institutions around the world correspond to the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism spreading out and taking over education. Neoliberal reforms are designed to adjust education systems to the needs and requirements of highly marketized economies. As a result of the implementation of neoliberal reforms, universities have been forced to mirror practices and behaviors usually employed by private corporations under the logic of a ruthless capitalist competition where there is a continual need for profit in an imbalanced, unjust and unscrupulous market. However, as policy makers continue to saturate higher education with neoliberal reforms, countless resistance movements have emerged globally to fight against the expansion of neoliberal capitalism. Likewise, inside academic communities, students, faculty and staff constantly organize themselves to fight back, defend their jobs, their rights and their institutions against the neoliberal assault to education (Mathison & Ross, 2008; Petrina & Ross, 2014). Higher education is a compound and multifarious field; it includes various conditions and settings in which students, faculty and staff could engage in resistance: teaching, studying, researching, conducting applied work, among many others. Neoliberal capitalism has transformed most of these settings and has deeply influenced the relationships and dynamics between social agents, collective action and academic life. Nocella and Juergensmeyer's book portrays some of these complexities in the activist work engage in academia. Their book helps us to understand that resistance in academia emerges and is upheld in interaction with a complex, diverse and conflicting range of political, economic, and social interests that come together and form an integral part of the field of higher education.

Volume 3 | Issue 1 | 2013 i UNESCO Observatory Multi-Disciplinary Journal in the Arts The UNESCO Observatory refereed e-journal is based within the Graduate School of Education at The University of Melbourne, Australia. The journal promotes multidisciplinary research in the Arts and Education and arose out of a recognised need for knowledge sharing in the field. The publication of diverse arts and cultural experiences within a multi-disciplinary context informs the development of future initiatives in this expanding field. There are many instances where the arts work successfully in collaboration with formerly non-traditional partners such as the sciences and health care, and this peer-reviewed journal aims to publish examples of excellence. Valuable contributions from international researchers are providing evidence of the impact of the arts on individuals, groups and organisations across all sectors of society. The UNESCO Observatory refereed e-journal is a clearing house of research which can be used to support advocacy processes; to improve practice; influence policy making, and benefit the integration of the arts in formal and non-formal educational systems across communities, regions and countries. Volume 3 | Issue 1 | 2013

Framed by the theoretical concepts of assemblage and desire from philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and his collaborative writings with psychoanalyst Félix Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, 1987), this study inquires into the qualities and productive potential of the art encounter in a gallery setting. The study brings together my practice in the field of art museum education, and my interest in the art encounter to inquire what the art encounter does. Thinking with Deleuzian concepts enacts a view of the art encounter as a milieu of experimentation where affects move a body to create assemblages, connections with things, human and non-human bodies, expressions, qualities, ideas, spaces. Assemblages allow desire (as a force) to circulate; desiring-assemblages move bodies to produce connections with other human or non-human entities, thoughts, they produce subjectivation as a mode of existence. For Deleuze, one does not 'have' an experience of an artwork or exhibition detached against the background of life; experience is a milieu which contributes to actually making life. My study inquires how working within a philosophy conceived in terms of relationality, connections, flows and multiplicity (rather than fixed identities) enact a view of the art encounter as a milieu of immanent ethics. By immanent ethics, Deleuze means that encountering increases the potential for new connections, it can actualize the possibilities already in life. The experience of encountering art is inviting one into experiences of living. This post-qualitative study followed a process of research as assemblage formed by: the research site at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the dynamic constellation of interconnected objects, bodies, ideas such as my field notes, photographs, the writing of personal narratives of my encounterings in the gallery space, and scholarly texts. Throughout v PREFACE This dissertation is original work by the author, Marie-France Berard. I conceptualized and crafted this research following the guidance of my supervisor, Dr. Dónal O'Donoghue and my committee members Dr. Rita Irwin and Dr. William Pinar, and building on the support of the Vancouver Art Gallery and many other peers and classmates recognized in the acknowledgements.

Utilizing a/r/tographic methodology to interrogate interpretive acts in museums, multiple areas of inquiry are raised in this paper, including: which knowledge is assigned the greatest value when preparing a gallery talk; what lies outside of disciplinary knowledge; how invitations to participate invite and disinvite in the same gesture; and what new forms of interaction take place within acts of interpretation. Five concepts organize our investigations into museum interpretation-framing, mapping, shifting, in-between, and potentiality. We employ a conceptual fold by bringing our individual research narratives into contiguity, continually seeking for resonances and dissonances in our studies that point to meaningful understandings about art museum interpretation.