Did you notice that the previous statement is typically #Eurocentric or #Western? Only according to the #Gregorian calendar are there two #Ramadans in a year. According to the #Islamic calendar, this is not the case.

https://mastodon.social/@librarianbe/115373708753402915

#JaneGoodall's work insisting, with evidence from her brilliant and tenacious fieldwork, that we were not so separate from #animals, and they were much more like us than the #Eurocentric theorists asserted, was so important

https://bsky.app/profile/rebeccasolnit.bsky.social/post/3m25oqr5s7s2t

GROWING MUSIC THROUGH COMMUNITY

Despite an almost universal love for music, the question of who can or cannot be a musician has historically been at the behest of Eurocentric music education. Enter community music—an alternative approach to music teaching and learning with the goal of redefining what it means to be a musician.  

Lee Willingham, Professor of Music Education at Wilfrid Laurier University and the editor of Community Music at the Boundaries, has compiled contributions from a wide variety of academic scholars, researchers, music practitioners and administrators who seek to provide structure and validation to community music practices while challenging the status quo of formal music education. 

These contributions include Kelly Laurila’s “Song as the Catalyst That Promotes Envisioning Ethical Spaces”; Elizabeth Mitchell’s “Musical Identities, Personal Identities: Performance for Children with Disabilities” and Kathleen Turner’s “Words of Choice: Challenging A Discourse of Disadvantage and Social Change in Community Music”.  

Divided into six parts and 32 chapters, Community Music at the Boundaries explores a wide breadth of themes such as community borders, health and wellness, incarcerated settings, education reform and cultural identity.  

Willingham establishes that all communities are inherently formed by creating boundaries—another reoccurring theme throughout the book. In practice, community musicians seek to navigate these social, cultural, physical, financial and psychosocial boundaries and barriers of entry to create ethical spaces where the bridging of cultures and communities can occur. 

Community music settings such as church choirs, youth orchestras or drum circles are identified as non-formal, existing outside of traditional music education. These settings typically include facilitators and mentors who must balance the provision of meaningful goal-oriented learning opportunities for participants while simultaneously yielding control to participants so they can guide their own experiences. 

This community music practice is well exemplified in Mitchell’s work with Arts Express in Waterloo, Ontario. Arts Express works in partnership with the Faculty of Music at Wilfrid Laurier University and is a week-long inclusive creative arts day camp for children diagnosed with physical, developmental or neurodevelopmental disorders.  

The children participating in Arts Express were noted to have a strong sense of accomplishment, pride and confidence in their musical performances—a particularly significant experience for children who might not otherwise have access to music-making opportunities. 

Another example of community music in practice is the collaboration between Mino Ode Kwewak N’gamowak (Good-Hearted Women Singers)—an Indigenous women and girls drum circle—and the Waterloo Regional Police Chorus. Laurila, the facilitator of this collaboration, made note of the meaningful relationships that were developing between participants and the re-evaluation of their previous attitudes towards one another.  

Community Music at the Boundaries provides a plethora of other examples of the positive benefits and healing capacity of community music participation. These benefits include improved self-esteem, enhanced mood, lower blood pressure, stress relief, stronger relationships, improved academic achievement, increased concentration and motivation, stronger immune systems, and a greater sense of belonging.  

Despite these undeniable benefits, community music appears to resist categorization or definition, struggling to forge its own academic identity while competing alongside similar faculties such as music therapy. Perhaps only by engaging in community music experiences first-hand can individuals witness the benefits thoughtfully laid out by Willingham and hopefully further disseminate those positive changes throughout broader society. 

While I do not personally have any experience with formal or non-formal music education, I am an elementary school educator. It is impossible to miss the countless parallels between what Turner describes as the ideal community musician and, in my opinion, the idyllic childhood educator. 

“I now see the community musician as someone who encourages imagination, celebrates personal and collective expression, supports aspiration, champions achievement, embodies and facilitates creativity, hopes for kindness, asks for value, and engenders pride,” Turner writes. 

My reading of Community Music at the Boundaries has caused me to reflect on my own educational practices, and I have been inspired to find ways of better understanding my students—utilizing music-making as a catalyst to promote and develop a more welcoming and cohesive classroom community. 

For individuals interested in facilitating community spaces with a mindful focus on individual identity, equality, diversity and inclusivity, this book is an important and insightful read. 

#communityMusicAtTheBoundaries #Diversity #elizabethMitchell #Equality #eurocentric #identity #Inclusivity #JoshBoniferro #kellyLaurila #leeWillingham #lessAboutChords #minoOdeKwewakNgamowak

#Eurocentric #science #history

"When I started teaching the history of biology, the importance of this pivotal period of scientific history was often diminished in western analysis of science history. Studying the contributions of non-western scholars has shown me what history can teach us about the value of multiculturalism.

The story typically told in the West is that science was invented in ancient Greece and then, following close to a millennium of intellectual darkness, developed in Western Europe over the past 500 years.

Other cultures might have contributed a clever trick here or there, like inventing paper or creating our modern number system, but science as we know it was developed almost entirely by white men. As such it becomes a story of superiority, one that demands gratitude.

The scars of this way of thinking are all over our geopolitical landscape. It shapes how many western leaders interact with other cultures, apparently entitling them to share their intellectual authority without needing to listen to others. It is a mindset that belittles other civilizations and led to centuries of colonial violence."

https://cosmosmagazine.com/history/changing-eurocentric-story-about-science/

Must read on Substack https://open.substack.com/pub/gaelicreexistence/p/are-we-indigenous-in-ireland?r=4y4k8c&utm_medium=ios

“Who is imagined to be ‘indigenous’?
To even begin answering this question we have to ask: who is the ‘we’ that would be ‘#indigenous’ in #Ireland, and why? Magan tells us the ‘we’ is “the #Irish people”. This is a problem. There are many different kinds of people and social groups on the island we currently call Ireland. Irish Travellers, Settled Anglophone white Irish, Black Irish, asylum seekers incarcerated in Direct Provision, native #Gaelic speakers in Gaeltachtaí, migrants of many different backgrounds, to name a few – these all in part make up who and what can be considered ‘Irish’ in different ways, each ‘category’ pointing to specific historical ruptures or processes. They are only historically legible within colonial systems that created the basis for such categorisations to materialise. Not to mention townie/rural divides, Dublin belt/rest of the island divide, class divides, religious divides, the existence of two states on the island, and settler descended populations (and mixing therein!). There are many diverse broad social groupings, and none of them are internally homogenous (no group can ever be). They aren’t discretely enclosed either (they overlap). The fact that we could begin from a place of imagining a coherent “Irish people” at all points to a major issue with thinking ‘we’ could call ourselves indigenous in Ireland, particularly at this historical juncture.
(…)
If the #people imagined to be ‘indigenous’ in modern Ireland are simply just Settled Anglophone white Irish people, then that should be self-evidently problematic. The idea that this loose cultural group/identity is ‘indigenous’ is an ahistorical position supported by racist ideas that lends well to #fascisms and #ethnonationalisms — which are on the rise in Ireland today. The idea of ‘indigeneity’ in the context of Ireland can be extended as Mallory suggests in The Origins of the Irish (2013), to include anyone that might find their home on the island, since there is no single origin of ‘the Irish’ in the first place. The mythohistorical text Lebor Gabala Éirinn tells of various successive waves of migrants and settlers as the origins of people on the island. This is getting closer to the point but it’s still explicitly missing the crucial elements of cosmology (cultural worldview) and relationality (with the land), which are likely the most substantial elements at the heart of what ‘indigeneity’ gestures to, and the void of which people are acutely feeling in their desires to be ‘indigenous’. ‘Irishness’ is underpinned by a #Eurocentric #colonial #cosmology and a denial of relationship with the land — the land is treated as an object for #human #exploitation. Claiming ‘indigeneity’ does nothing to disrupt that, but actually retrenches in it.
(…)
In contrast to modern Ireland, Indigenous peoples don’t have ethnically dominant nation states where they actively marginalise their own traditional lifeways and those of other groups. States based on national identities (ie. nation states) are colonial. When people decide to go the state-based or nationalist route of political and social organising, they are already playing a game colonialism created, as has been happening in Ireland for well over a century. Any serious appraisal of the reconcilability of ‘indigeneity’ and modern Irish society needs to account for what being ‘indigenous’ means for living Indigenous people, and not just hang off vague, romanticised and exoticised notions of ancientness and nature connectedness. I recommend Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999) for some nuance.
Indigenous people are far from being a monolith. ‘Indigenous’ is an enormously broad catch-all term. It comprises hundreds, if not thousands, of different cultural groups around the planet. Each group just like any other will have its own internal conflicts and individuals who will speak and think differently. People within this catch-all category can’t give ‘us’ permission to use the term by virtue of it happening to apply to them. The actual actions the word calls for is something that has to be worked out here in this place amongst the peoples and land it actually affects. This doesn’t mean ‘outside’ perspectives can’t inform what we do — in fact they directly inform the basis of everything I do.“

The Identity Politics of Masculinity as a Colonial Legacy

"The #PreColonial #Indonesian notion of personhood diverges from a western conceptualisation and is expressed instead through #cooperation, #mutuality, #sharing, #caring, and a readiness to #negotiate and #compromise – all of which are characteristics that are associated with feminine qualities and were thus considered inferior according to #Eurocentric understandings of the #subordination of women in #WesternSociety"

by Desi Dwi Prianti
03 Nov 2019

"[In this paper] I argue that a hierarchical structure between masculine and the feminine was introduced by the #Dutch #colonisers – a structure in which they considered themselves to represent the superior, masculine side of the binary, whereas the colonised were seen as their effeminate subjects."

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07256868.2019.1675612#d1e112

#ToxicMasculinity #Colonialism