Tom Parkinson

Music education institutions have played a prominent role in mediating national identity in the Republic of Turkey since its founding in 1923. Initially tasked with suppressing Ottoman heritage, their nature and status changed with the ascendance of political Islam, when interest in Turkey's Ottoman past grew and the Western aesthetics of the founding elite were increasingly contested. While music education continues to be a site of national identity construction in Turkey, no studies focus on the ideological climate of music education in the era of the Justice and Development Party, who have heralded a 'New Turkey' rooted in conservative Islam. We explore the discursive terrain of Turkish music education by analysing the mission and vision statements and other website texts of 71 conservatoires and music departments. Our findings reveal protectionist attitudes towards repertoires and traditions associated with competing nationalist visions, but also an emergent, reconciliatory structure of feeling and advocacy for pluralism.

Academics in conflict and refugee contexts often work in settings that are at stark odds to those typically portrayed in academic development research and can encounter different challenges. Normative academic development resources can therefore be inadequate, inappropriate or inaccessible to academics marginalised by conflict or displacement. This paper reflects on a round table event held in June 2019, where Syrian academics gathered together with counterparts from post/conflict contexts including Belarus, Bosnia Herzegovina, Kenya, Northern Ireland, Palestine, Serbia and South Africa to share experiences and formulate strategies. This short paper foregrounds the perspectives of Syrian academics who participated, and their insights into the value and challenges associated with international fora concerning academic development in conflict contexts.

This paper aims to provide insight and guidance for developing and leading interdisciplinary collaborative writing groups when working with researchers in Centre–Periphery contexts. The participants in this study were exiled Syrian academics domiciled in Turkey working in interdisciplinary project groups with their UK-Turkey-based academic mentors and UK-based workshop leaders. The groups were at the writing for publication stage of the project. In exploring the processes involved in writing in such groups, the study identified a key dimension to successful collaborative writing – that of relational expertise. The study found that authorial identity played a significant role in the process of writing and that relational expertise was evidenced through confidence in knowledge, positive attitudes to others' knowledge and willingness to negotiate. We argue that explicit articulation of authorial identity and power differences are necessary first steps in establishing interdisciplinary collaborative writing groups in Centre–Periphery contexts.

Occasions for in-depth dialogue among academics in times of conflict are rare. This piece provides brief insight into the value and challenges of one such occasion, which brought Syrian academics together with international colleagues from contexts undergoing conflict or grappling with post-conflict legacies. Seven dominant themes that emerged from two days of roundtable discussions and workshops are identified and discussed: (1) brokering and relational expertise when under conditions of [post-] conflict, (2) international involvement and expertise, (3) the question of whether it is desirable to depoliticise higher education, (4) issues of academia and academics' complicity in conflict and division, (5) pathological constructions of conflict, (6) the invisibility and inaccessibility of resources, and (7) how being in exile can create space for dialogue, but also burdens of responsibility for representation. The authors reflect on the rhizomous connections, strategic insights and support shared by contributors at this event, in addition to highlighting the consciousness that was raised around the agency, limitations, complicity and intergenerational legacies borne by academics and the academy in contexts of conflict, crisis and post-conflict development.

Prior to 2011, public universities and private institutions in Syria were the main sources of knowledge and skills training for industry and agriculture. Due to the ongoing conflict and humanitarian crisis however, the country's education system has been decimated at all levels, with disastrous effects for the nation's knowledge base and training provision. To address these circumstances, strategies and methods for effectively re-skilling and up-skilling the agricultural workforce inside Syria are urgently needed. Traditional face-to-face models of education are difficult to implement due to conditions of conflict. This action research project centres on the delivery of participatory e-learning courses by Syrian academics in exile to learners inside Syria. In this paper, we describe and evaluate the delivery of a 5-week pilot course on Soilless Cultivation Systems. In addition to delivering an effective course, we sought to understand the challenges associated with distance learning in the Syrian context, to inform further development of approaches that can surmount these challenges, and which might in due course be extended into other areas beyond agricultural engineering. Accordingly, we developed a course that at a) constituted a meaningful educational experience for learners; b) facilitated the trial of a range of pedagogical approaches; and c) allowed for the collection of evaluative data to inform subsequent learning design. Findings highlighted the challenges of achieving applied relevance without laboratory or field access, meeting the needs and expectations of diverse learners, and facilitating sufficient interaction between learners and the lecturer. Possible strategies to address these issues include use of high-quality video and images and planned use of routine social media technologies to facilitate parallel networking and resource share.

This paper focuses on academic development for Syrian academics in exile. Academic development first emerged in resource-rich, global North environments including the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and Scandinavia nearly 50 years ago (Gosling, 2009), and the majority of research studies in this field focus on activities in global North, resource-rich, institutional settings. Yet academics in resource-poor, [post-] conflict and post-colonial contexts face different challenges and circumstances, and have different academic development needs. This paper extends the conceptual and contextual scope of this field by investigating the experiences and academic development needs of Syrian academics in exile, and interrogating the concept of academic development within that context. It establishes the background context of Syrian academia in exile, before summarising the nature and aims of the Council for At Risk Academics (Cara) Syria Programme. It then outlines the study's methodology, before presenting the findings of a thematic analysis of a multi-level data set. It then interrogates the concept and normative terrain of academic development in light of these findings, and proposes a model for academic community development to support academic communities in exile, and marginalised academic communities more widely.

Purpose The purposes of this paper are twofold: to generate insight into the experiences of Syrian academics in exile in Turkey, and to explore approaches to collaboration and community building among academics in exile and with counterparts in the international academic community. Design/methodology/approach The study employs a hybrid visual-autobiographical narrative methodology, embedded within a Large Group Process (LGP) design Findings Findings are presented in two phases: The first phase presents a thematic analysis of narrative data, revealing the common and divergent experiences of twelve exiled academics. The second phase presents a reflective evaluation of undertaking the LGP and its implications for community building and sustaining Syrian academia in exile. Research limitations While this is a qualitative study with a small participant group, and therefore does not provide a basis for statistical generalisation, it offers rich insight into Syrian academics' lived experiences of exile, and into strategies implemented to support the Syrian academic community in exile. Practical implications The study has practical implications for academic development in the contexts of conflict and exile; community building among dispersed academic communities; educational interventions by international NGOs and the international academic community; and group process design. Originality/value The study makes an original contribution to the limited literature on post-2011 Syrian higher education by giving voice to a community of exiled academics, and by critically evaluating a strategic initiative for supporting and sustaining Syrian academia. This represents significant, transferable insight for comparable contexts.

The Council for At-Risk Academics (Cara) has supported persecuted academics from across the world since 1933, combining its historical core Fellowship Programme with country programmes over the past decade, in instances where academics, as a group, are being specifically targeted by states or parties to a conflict. Working in partnership with the 117 universities that make up the 'Cara Scholars at Risk UK Universities Network' the Cara Fellowship Programme offers periods of sanctuary in the form of doctoral and post-doctoral placements, to allow academics at risk to continue their work in safety until such time as they are able to return to their countries of origin. The Cara Syria Programme was launched in 2012 in response to the country's civil war, which has precipitated the world's worst humanitarian crisis for over a generation. In 2015, the growing number of Syrian academics seeking Cara's help led to the decision to extend Syria Programme to the region and, following initial consultations, a roundtable (Cara, 2016) and needs analyses involving Syrian academics, a twelve-month pilot (Phase 1) was launched in Turkey in September 2016. Phase 2 was launched in October 2017. The aim of the Syria Programme in Region is to use this period of uncertainty to connect and strengthen Syria's academic community in exile to ensure they can play their vital role in the rebuilding of Syria's higher education and research sectors when security allows. The Programme provides in situ support across five strands: English for Academic Purposes (EAP), Academic Skills Development (ASD), Research Incubation Visits (RIV), Cara-Commissioned Research (CCR), with a fifth introduced in Phase 2, The Syria Research Fellowship Scheme (SRFS), offering small and medium research grants to support research of relevance to Syria and Syrian populations in exile. Central to each of these activities is Cara's partnership model, facilitating collaboration with colleagues from the wider regional and international academic and scientific communities. Since February 2017, the EAP and ASD strands have been delivered through a blended learning approach, combining two-monthly intensive residential events in Istanbul with weekly one-to-one English lessons and webinars to address the emerging academic development needs of our Syrian colleagues. A dedicated Portal supports all online activities, which are delivered by over 80 volunteer tutors, facilitators and academics (hereafter collectively referred to as volunteer experts). The development and delivery of these intensive programme of workshops and activities are guided by the EAP and ASD steering groups over email and Skype, with input from a wider pool of colleagues, and relate to themes such as research planning, teaching and learning, communication, and technology. As the Syria Programme has developed, we have found ourselves working in a context that is often at stark odds with our professional experiences in the UK, and in which our assumptions, expertise, and practices are routinely challenged. This article provides us with an opportunity to take stock of our experiences thus far, and document some reflections and insights relating to our work on the Cara Syria Programme and its implications for academic development more generally. Over 300 Syrian academics are now registered with the Programme, of which over 80 who are actively involved in one or more of the Programme's five strands.

The term 'large group process' (LGP) refers to a range of participatory approaches to community engagement, geared towards exploring and/or identifying solutions to shared issues and problems, and planning change. Primarily used for applied purposes, they can be also used as a method of inductive inquiry in social research, particularly within action research projects. In this methodological paper I outline and critically evaluate an LGP design implemented within an action research project focused on the needs of Syrian academics in exile. The LGP elicited multi-level data from a geographically-dispersed community, while simultaneously constituting a relational learning experience and community action event for the participant population, and therefore aligned with the threefold aims of educational action research. The paper makes three significant contributions: a model for LGP design that elicits participants' collective and individual meaning frames; a trialectic framework for ensuring that the research, action and learning aspects of educational action research projects are mutually-supporting; and an accompanying orientation to researcher-participant relationships that may help to enhance the epistemological validity, catalytic validity and ethical foundations of projects.

This article contributes to the growing research base in Turkish popular music studies with a focus on indie music from Istanbul. It situates this music within Turkey's contemporary social, cultural and political landscapes, and in relation to the country's historical cultural narrative. Istanbul indie musicians' responses to the 2013 Gezi protests suggest that indie's counter-hegemonic aesthetics are being explored and engaged with in alignment with 'Third Republicanism', an emerging vision for Turkey that holds liberalism and human rights as its core ideals where the 'First' and 'Second' Republican visions held secularism and Islam respectively.

Since the first degree programme in Popular Music opened in 1990, the academic field of higher popular music education (HPME) has grown exponentially in the United Kingdom. The current provision includes 128 programmes offered by 47 institutions including Russell Group universities, specialist conservatoires and private providers. The majority of programmes, however, are found within 'post-92' institutions, reflecting the political and cultural conditions from and challenging which the field has emerged. This article critically appraises the field's emergence within the frames of higher education policy, discourses of employability and widening participation, the high/low culture dichotomy and the dialectic of commerce and art, which has been identified as a perennial issue at the crux of popular music as a cultural phenomenon. It proposes that the field is characterized by dilemmas concerning its nature and purpose, and that the narrative of HPME's emergence might serve as a valuable case study against which other young fields or subject areas might be compared and appraised.

Since its beginnings in the late 1970s, punk culture has been associated with counter-mainstream ideology and anti-institutional antagonism. In particular, formal education has been criticised in punk for sustaining oppressive social and conceptual orders and associated behavioural norms. Drawing on literature and interviews, this paper focuses on the experiences of higher education teachers who self-identify as punks, and considers how they negotiate and reconcile their subcultural and academic identities in their academic practice. The findings reveal that participants' affiliations with punk subculture give rise to counter-cultural pedagogies in which both the ethics and aesthetics of punk are applied in classroom contexts. Furthermore, the participants draw upon subcultural ethical and epistemological narratives to formulate and rationalise their responses to the state of contemporary UK higher education.

Popular music education is becoming firmly established as an academic field, in the UK and internationally. In order to help ensure that scholarship and practice within the field develop in reflexive and ethical ways appropriate to particular traditions, musics, people and institutional contexts, the authors advocate a discursive and iterative approach to the question of what it means to be "authentic" across higher popular music education (HPME). With reference to current research, policy and industry documentation, the authors present a discussion framed by theories concerning authenticity in the domains of the vocational and academic, employability, music, gender, and pedagogy. The authors conclude that institutions and individuals working in higher popular music education have a responsibility to place the issue of authenticity at the center of pedagogy, curriculum design, institutional strategy and disciplinary knowledge share, in order for the field to develop in ways that are beneficial to all involved.

This article offers a model to assist music teachers in reflecting on their teaching practice in relation to their aims and values. Initially developed as a workshop aid for use on a music education MA program, the model is intended to provoke critical engagement with two prominent tensions in music education: that between mastery and enjoyment, and that between tradition and innovation. The experiential and theoretical bases of the model are discussed, and literature relating to the theoretical issues is reviewed. The design and application of the model are then outlined in detail, and explored through the perspectives of an international group of instrumental teachers. The model contributes to music education practice in three ways: as a workshop aid for music teacher trainers; as a versatile tool for instrumental teachers, assisting both critical reflection and teaching practice; and as an adaptable data collection instrument for future research in music education.

In this chapter, we consider the relationship between music education and national identity through a chronological focus on the Republic of Turkey. We chart how theories of Turkey's preeminent sociologist Ziya Gökalp provided the basis for a new, post-Ottoman Turkish nationalism and directly informed models of music education that were intended to establish the cultural hegemony of the dominant political elite, but which inadvertently positioned music education as a key site of struggle for cultural representation, memory and national identity for at least the next century. We contribute to the internationalisation of both sociology and music education, in two principal ways: firstly, we situate Gökalp's work and legacy—little known outside of Turkey—in relation to mainstream European sociology by illustrating Durkheim's influence on Gökalp's concept of Turkishness, and consider its application through music education reform in terms of coercion and consent, within a Gramscian understanding of hegemony. Secondly, through this broader sociological framing of Turkish music education, together with close analysis of contemporary music education policy, we generate transferable insight concerning how music education can represent, shape and challenge national identity and official culture.

Introductory chapter to the volume, setting out the historical context of punk and its convergence with education.

This chapter reviews the literature relating to popular music in higher education and draws from a series of semi-structured interviews conducted between 2010 and 2012 with four senior programme staff from four degree programmes, as part of an ongoing multi-method study into the values held by students and staff within popular music educational settings. It examines the strategies employed in popular music education to address the absence of canonical authority of the kind found in classical music education.

The ongoing conflict in Syria has led to distortions in agriculture, food production and availability, distribution and consumption, with attendant effects on food insecurity and malnutrition. Uncertainties about and/or absence of governance, weakened institutions, changing donor funding priorities/involvement and diminished local research capacity constrain traditional opportunities for long-term contingency planning and access to and integration of local expertise that is essential for timely, evidence-based decision-making. The extensive loss of human and intellectual capital in Syria, as academics are displaced from high-risk areas, as a matter of safety and security, means that the pipeline of expertise necessary for future societal rebuilding efforts is narrow and fragile and requires attention. A Round Table (RT) meeting was held in June 2019 to provide a platform for Syrian academics in exile in Turkey to share their expertise and to initiate a discussion about transition strategies away from short-term emergency aid to long-term food and health security with other researchers, relevant decision-makers, international and local (including Syrian) NGOs and responders to the crisis. This resulted in a number of outcomes: – Creation of a nascent network of expertise exploring the question of transition and long-term contingency planning for food and health security in Syria. – Strengthened and extended partnerships between researchers, practitioners and decision-makers in the UK, Syria and countries in the region receiving Syrian academics in exile (primarily Turkey). – A provisional framework for an expert information ecosystem to incorporate local cultural and technical expertise into future Syrian socio-economic development and reconstruction programmes. This includes the development of repositories to house and curate a catalogue of expertise, data and ongoing research outputs, and funding opportunities. – Identification of an important role for knowledge broker organisations at the interface between researchers, decision-makers and practitioners to ensure knowledge mobilisation across different organisational and disciplinary boundaries.

Arts Council England-commissioned report on the state of grassroots music venues in the UK. Draws on interviews with venue owners and promoters, transcripts of industry round tables and a nationwide questionnaire.

Music Venue Trust has today (27 January) published the first piece of research from the Venues Day 2014, held on 9 December.Venues Day 2014, the first national gathering of small and medium scale UK music venues, brought together more than 120 venues, with 107 participating in the research project.'Understanding Small Music Venues: An Interim Findings Report' hopes to open a discussion about how small venues operate, the challenges they face, and the role they play in culture.The interim report details the challenges that small venues face, including money, community engagement, cultural value, youth engagement and education.

This symposium introduces new ideas and concepts from the forthcoming Routledge Handbook to the Sociology of Music Education. The field of the sociology of music education has experienced and continues to experience rapid and global development. It could be argued that this handbook marks its coming of age. The handbook is dedicated to the exclusive and explicit application of sociological constructs and theories to issues such as globalization, immigration, post-colonialism, inter-generational musicking, socialization, inclusion, exclusion, hegemony, symbolic violence, and popular culture. Contexts range from formal compulsory schooling to non-formal communal environments to informal music making and listening. The symposium will be organized in two panels. Each panel will be organized around a theme to which presenters will contribute with discussion of the key concepts from their work. Following each panel there will be a twenty-minute discussion period to which audience and panellists may contribute.

Syrian higher education has been severely damaged by the ongoing conflict, with disastrous effects on the nation's knowledge base, academic infrastructure and training provision. This presentation reports on a participatory action research project structured around a proposed strategic intervention for delivering tertiary-level e-learning to agricultural engineering students, alongside farmers and other professional stakeholders such as United Nations agencies, NGOs and local organisations. Through collaboration within the e-learning environment, the learning community engages in activities across the action research trialectic of research, capacity-building and practice (Senge and Scharmer, 2001: 40). Contextual factors such as the ongoing conflict and humanitarian crisis are discussed. The programme aims are set out, and the cyclical action research methodology is outlined. Anticipated challenged are addressed, and solutions proposed. Finally, the projects wider implications for educational interventions in crisis contexts are considered.

Programmes in popular music studies and popular music performance are increasingly prevalent in higher education, especially at undergraduate level. Historically, however, popular music has been identifiable as a set of performance, commercial and creative practice whose currency has resided in championing values that sit in opposition to institutionalised culture and to notions o vocational training for employment in the professions, both of which are represented by the conservatoire and university. The presenters discuss some different and potentially oppositional dimensions of authenticity in popular music (including as commercialised artefact, in performance and in education) suggested by Adorno (1941), Green (2002), Lilliestam (1996), Soderman (2013), O'Hara and others, proposing that authenticity is a contested and unstable value concept in popular music. The authors argue that various dimensions of authenticity in popular music are problematised when popular music is brought into higher educaton, where the aesthetic and cultural values of staff and students may contradict those enshrined in curricula and pedagogy designed in response to state-prescribed impratives such as employability (e.g. QAA, 2008). Through a combination of interviews with staff and students, policy and curricula analysis and a review of current literature in the field of popular musc education, the authors propose steps towards attaining a multi-vocal (Kreber, 2007) and inclusive understanding of authenticity in the burgeoning field of popular music education.

In the 23 years since the first undergraduate popular music degree programme opened in the United Kingdom, the academic discipline of popular music has burgeoned to encompass over 160 programmes delivered across the higher education sector, by private institutions, Royal-chartered conservatoires, post-92 universities and Russell Group universities. This doctoral research project seeks to understand the values underpinning and informing educational practice in this growing academic discipline. It proceeds from an understanding of higher education and popular music as two highly complex domains in their own right, and from the proposition that values inhering at their nexus- Higher Popular Music Education- derive from and are borne by multiple human, institutional and disciplinary sources, and bear the trace of socio-cultural, economic and historical contexts related to each domain. It takes an inductive approach to a multiple-case study of four popular music degree programmes at different higher education institutions across the United Kingdom. Acknowledging from the outset the impossibility of identifying a conclusive 'roster' of itemisable values, this study draws on a combination of institutional literature, semi-structured interview and field observation data to explore the interplay of musical, educational and other values within the educational message systems of pedagogy, curriculum, institution, assessment, lifestyle and market. Analysis of the data suggested that seemingly unrelated values such as, for example, those relating to musical aesthetics and social justice, could in fact be oppositional in practice, resulting in surprising tensions and impacting on such areas as curricula and student lifestyles. Moreover, values enshrined in policy, or perceived by interviewees to be dominant within the higher education sector, appeared often to be at odds with individuals' personal opinions regarding the value of knowledge and education, or with what they saw to be the core values of popular music as an art form. This interdisciplinary study sits across the research fields of music education, the sociology of higher education and popular music studies, and makes original contributions to knowledge in each of these fields.

This portfolio comprises songwriting notes, demo recordings, audio recordings of songwriting sessions, and reflective correspondences captured between 2018 and 2021. A programme of workshops, presentations and scholarly articles is scheduled for 2022.

Punk Pedagogies: Music, Culture and Learning brings together a collection of international authors to explore the possibilities, practices and implications that emerge from the union of punk and pedagogy. The punk ethos—a notoriously evasive and multifaceted beast—offers unique applications in music education and beyond, and this volume presents a breadth of interdisciplinary perspectives to challenge current thinking on how, why and where the subculture influences teaching and learning. As (punk) educators and artists, contributing authors grapple with punk's historicity, its pervasiveness, its (dis)functionality and its messiness, making Punk Pedagogies relevant and motivating to both instructors and students with proven pedagogical practices.