Revival and resistance: re-imagining policy agency in music education

In this article, we examine how collaborative, critical policy thinking can serve as an imaginative resource to co-construct future horizons for higher music education. The context for this research was a three-day policy forum that invited scholars from around Australia to critically interrogate the nation’s first published cultural policy in over 13 years. An abductive thematic analysis of collaboratively produced artefacts and researcher field notes identified shared values and understandings of arts and cultural policy by which possible futures for music education were imagined. We argue that mapping such values and understandings is an important first step towards critically engaging with what music education is and what it ought to be, a process of moving through possibility in working towards a differently resistive and more ethical future.