Special Issue: Music Education Research and Critical Posthumanism
Editors: Alexis Anja Kallio & Jason Goopy
Deadline for Submission: 1 November 2025
Extending the poststructuralist critique of ‘objective’ truth, posthumanist perspectives interrogate the anthropocentrism, essentialism, exceptionalism, and speciesism inherent in “liberal humanism’s construction of ‘Man’” (Ellis, 2018, p. 18). Situated within the “posthuman condition”—a context shaped by the intersecting crises of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Mass Extinction (Braidotti, 2019, p. 2)—a growing body of scholarship is grappling with rapid technological advancement, climate risk realism, intensifying geopolitical tensions, and the proliferation of post-truth rhetoric, posing the question “where do we go from here?” (Herbrechter et al., 2022, p. 9).
Since its inception in 1993, Research Studies in Music Education has established a strong reputation as a forum for methodological innovation and critical discourse in music education. This special issue on Music Education Research and Critical Posthumanism extends that legacy by inviting submissions that interrogate “the discursive gestures or practices and methodologies that are being employed within and that constitute posthumanist discourses” in music education also speculating “about the need for new, more ‘creative’ and more inclusive – more-than-human – forms of knowledge production” (Herbrechter et al. 2022, p. 14). The prefix post- here signifies an opportunity for reflexivity, critique, and re-imagining the humanism of music education research, and the adjective critical calls for the “re-evaluation or even a reinvention of… humanist values and methodologies (including the very question of what critique is and does)” (p. 18).
We welcome contributions that challenge dominant inquiry paradigms, foreground relational and more-than-human ontologies, and engage with speculative, decolonial, feminist, environmental, and nonhuman-centered perspectives through research methods and approaches. In addition to traditional papers aligned with Research Studies in Music Education’s submission guidelines, we also invite experimental and collaborative scholarly formats that explore posthumanist ontologies, ethics, politics, aesthetics, and modes of knowledge production in ways that are intellectually rigorous and suitable for publication across RSME’s print and digital platforms.
Please select “Special Issue: Posthumanism” when submitting via the Sage ScholarOne Portal https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rsme
References
Braidotti, R. (2019). A theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities. Theory, culture & society, 36(6), 31-61.
Ellis, C. (2018). Antebellum Posthuman: Race and materiality in the mid-nineteenth century. Fordham University Press
Herbrechter, S., Callus, I., de Bruin-Molé, M., Grech, M., Müller, C. J., & Rossini, M. (2022). Critical posthumanism: An overview. In Herbrechter, S., Callus, I., Rossini, M., Grech, M., de Bruin-Molé, M., John Müller, C. (eds) Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism. (pp. 1-24). Palgrave Macmillan.