Theatre and Performance Studies: Research Methods

This book presents an analysis of classic and emerging methodologies and approaches that employs the arts in the qualitative research process and articulates the challenges inherent in alternative methodologies. The editors highlight scholars using qualitative methods and to offer a comprehensive overview of the past, present, and future of arts-based research and present multiple ways to advance knowledge, including literary forms, performance, music, visual art, various types of media, narrative, folk art, and more.

A highly accessible introduction to arts-based research (ABR), this widely used text provides a practical guide for researchers who want to uncover information that traditional methods cannot capture. Patricia Leavy addresses eight major ABR genres--narrative inquiry, fiction-based research, poetry, music, dance, theatre, film, and visual art. Following a consistent format, chapters review how each genre developed, explore its methodological variations and the kind of research questions it can address, and describe sample studies. An exemplary research article or online video link demonstrates each set of techniques in practice. Chapters include checklists to guide methodological decision making, discussion questions, and recommended print and online resources.

A step-by-step guide to using five major approaches to research design: quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, arts-based, and community-based participatory research. Chapters on each approach present a template for a research proposal and explain in detail how to conceptualise and fill in every section. Terminology commonly used within each approach is identified, and key moments of ethical decision making are flagged. Interdisciplinary research examples draw on current events and social justice topics. The book also includes a general introduction to social research; an in-depth, practical discussion of ethics; and a chapter on how to begin a research study, from planning a topic to developing a research question via a literature review.

This book presents a diversity of contexts, locations and arts forms including theatre, music and fine art and brings together theoretical, political and practice-based perspectives on the question of evidence ' in relation to participatory arts practice in social contexts. This collection is a unique contribution to the field, focusing on one of the vital concerns for a growing and developing set of arts and research practices. It asks us to consider evidence not only in terms of methodology but also in the light of the ideological, political and pragmatic implications of that methodology. In Part One the editors reflect on evidence and impact in relation to recurring conceptual and methodological motifs. Part Two explores the diversity of perspectives, contexts and methodologies and issues that are often complex in the participatory arts. Part Three assembles case studies where practitioners and practice-based researchers consider the challenges to produce evidence for the impact of their practice.

This book explores the webs of vulnerability in methodological decision-making that illustrate the deceptive strength of qualitative research. Each chapter will resonate with readers differently as they read themselves into the tensions and tangles of qualitative research when confronted with the challenges of establishing methodological frameworks for educational and social enquiry. The authors are postgraduate, early career researchers and supervisors who analyse their methodological encounters with the nimble, fluid, messy and iterative processes of qualitative research. The book flows structurally from positioning the researcher within these processes to the manoeuvring of self across necessarily selective social science disciplines in education, arts and humanities. It rejuvenates the pioneering spirit, the sense of mission and innovativeness of qualitative research.  

This book addresses the rise in prominence of the creative arts and the accelerating recognition that creative practice is a form of research. The authors discuss methodologies of practice-led research and research-led practice, their own creative work as a form of research, research training for creative practitioners, researchers, students in the creative arts and university leaders. The book considers how creative practice can lead to research insights through what is often known as practice-led research and balances this with discussion of how research can impact positively on creative practice through research-led practice.The editors posit an iterative and web-like relationship between practice and research. Essays within the book cover a wide range of disciplines including creative writing, dance, music, theatre, film and new media, and the contributors are from the UK, US, Canada and Australia.

Internationally renowned scholars and practitioners come together in this volume to provide fresh insights into the cultural, institutional, theoretical, methodological, epistemological, ethical and practical aspects and implications of the rapidly evolving area of artistic research in music.

Logic of Experimentation offers several innovative and ground-breaking perspectives on music performance, music ontology, research methodologies and ethics of performance. It proposes new modes of thinking and exposing past musical works to contemporary audiences, arguing for a new kind of performer, emancipated from authoritative texts and traditions, whose creativity is propelled by intensive research and inventive imagination. Moving beyond the work-concept, Logic of Experimentation presents a new image of musical works, based upon the notions of strata, assemblage and diagram, advancing innovative practice-based methodologies that integrate archival and musicological research into the creative process leading to a performance. Logic of Experimentation creates an ontological, methodological and ethical space for experimental performance practices, arguing for a new mode of performance. Eight chapters appropriate music performance concepts from post-structural philosophy, psychoanalysis, science and technology studies, epistemology, and semiotics, displaying how transdisciplinarity is central to artistic research.

What does it mean to produce resemblance in the performance of written music? Starting from how this question is commonly answered by the practice of interpretation in Western notated art music, this book proposes a move beyond commonly accepted codes, conventions and territories of music performance. Appropriating reflections from post-structural philosophy, visual arts and semiotics, and crucially based upon an artistic research project with a strong creative and practical component, it proposes a new approach to music performance. The approach is based on divergence, on the difference between the symbolic aspect of music notation and the irreducible materiality of performance. Instead of regarding performance as reiteration, reconstruction and reproduction of past musical works, Powers of Divergence emphasises its potential for the emergence of the new. Chapter 4 is "On Methodology".

The Conflict of the Faculties looks at the emerging field of artistic research as a place of crossover between the artistic and academic worlds. Henk Borgdorff carefully examines how artistic research broadens and deepens traditional academic approaches to studying art, while observing the tension between the two disparate fields in terms of methods and practices. "Well-written and well-argued, this book will probably become a reference for many studies to come and required reading for anyone active in this domain."--Frans-Willem Korsten, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Leiden University, the Netherlands

This book is the first anthology of writings about the emerging subject of artistic experimentation in music and includes chaoters on practice as research.. This subject, as part of the cross-disciplinary field of artistic research, cuts across boundaries of the conventional categories of performance practice, music analysis, aesthetics, and music pedagogy. The texts have a common genesis in the explorations of the Orpheus Research Centre in Music (ORCiM) in Ghent, Belgium.The book critically examines experimentation in music of different historical eras. It is essential reading for performers, composers, teachers, and others wanting to inform themselves of the issues and the current debates in the new field of artistic research as applied to music. The publication is accompanied by a CD of music discussed in the text and by an online resource of video illustrations of specific issues.

In this definitive reference volume, almost fifty leading thinkers and practitioners of autoethnographic research--from four continents and a dozen disciplines--comprehensively cover its vision, opportunities and challenges. Chapters address the theory, history, and ethics of autoethnographic practice, representational and writing issues, the personal and relational concerns of the autoethnographer, and the link between researcher and social justice. A set of 13 exemplars show the use of these principles in action. Autoethnography is one of the most popularly practiced forms of qualitative research over the past 20 years, and this volume captures all its essential elements for graduate students and practicing researchers.

This methods book will guide the reader through the process of conducting and producing an autoethnographic study through the understanding of self, other, and culture. Readers will be encouraged to follow hands-on, though not prescriptive, steps in data collection, analysis, and interpretation with self-reflective prewriting exercises and self-narrative writing exercises to produce their own autoethnographic work. Chang offers a variety of techniques for gathering data on the self--from diaries to culture grams to interviews with others--and shows how to transform this information into a study that looks for the connection with others present in a diverse world. She shows how the autoethnographic process promotes self-reflection, understanding of multicultural others, qualitative inquiry, and narrative writing. Samples of published autoethnographies provide exemplars for the novice researcher to follow.

This book addresses and demonstrates the importance of critical approaches to autoethnography, particularly the commitment that such approaches make to theorizing the personal and to creating work that embodies a social justice ethos. Arts-based and practice-led approaches to this work allow the explanatory power of critical theory to be linked with creative, aesthetically engaging, and personal examples of the ideas at work. By making use of personal stories, critical autoethnography also allows for commenting on, critiquing, and transforming damaging and unjust cultural beliefs and practices by questioning and problematizing the relationships of power that are bound up in these selves, cultures and practices. The essays in this volume provide readers with work that demonstrates how critical autoethnography offers researchers and scholars across multiple disciplines a method for creatively putting critical theory into action. The book will be vital reading for students, researchers and scholars working in the fields of education, communication studies, sociology and cultural anthropology, and the performing arts.

Queering Autoethnography articulates for the first time the possibilities and politics of queering autoethnography, both in theoretical terms and as an intervention into narratives and cultures of apology, shame and fear. Despite the so-called mainstreaming of same-sex relationships and trans visibility, many within gender's 'liminal zone' remain invisible and unrecognized, existing somewhere outside of heteronormative relationships and institutions. At the same time, the political and scholarly potential of autoethnography is expanding, particularly in its potential to evoke empathic and affective responses at a time of public numbness, a practice crucial to making scholarly research relevant to the work of global citizenship and crafting meaningful lives. This volume considers flash points in contemporary scholarly and popular culture such as queer memorializing and mourning; unintelligibility and monstrosity; physical, digital and cultural transformations of queer lives and bodies; the power and danger wrought in the public assembly of queer people in a culture of massacre; and the promise of queer futurities in the contemporary moment. It also makes original theoretical contributions that include concepts such as massacre culture, queer terror, mundane annihilations, and activist affect. The authors write these ideas in action, joining theory and story as a contact zone for analysis, critique and change.

Max van Manen offers an extensive exploration of phenomenological traditions and methods for the human sciences. It is his first comprehensive statement of phenomenological thought and research in over a decade. Phenomenology of practice refers to the meaning and practice of phenomenology in professional contexts such as psychology, education, and health care, as well as to the practice of phenomenological methods in contexts of everyday living. Van Manen presents a detailed description of key phenomenological ideas as they have evolved over the past century; he then thoughtfully works through the methodological issues of phenomenological reflection, empirical methods, and writing that a phenomenology of practice offers to the researcher. Van Manen's comprehensive work will be of great interest to all concerned with the interrelationship between being and acting in human sciences research and in everyday life. Max van Manen is the editor of the series Phenomenology of Practice, https://www.routledge.com/series/PPVM

Building off the success of its award-winning first edition, the second edition of Crafting Phenomenological Research continues to be the leading resource for those interested in a concise introduction to phenomenological research in education and social sciences. Joining leading contemporary practitioners, such as van Manen, Giorgi, and Dahlberg, Vagle walks the reader through multiple approaches to designing and implementing phenomenological research, including his post-intentional phenomenology, which incorporates elements of post-structural thinking into traditional methods. Vagle provides readers with methodological tools to build their own phenomenological study, addressing such issues as research design, data gathering and analysis, and writing. Replete with exercises for students, resources for further research, and examples of completed phenomenological studies, this book affords the instructor an easy entrée into introducing phenomenology into courses on qualitative research, social theory, or educational research. New to this edition: An additional first chapter that outlines the historical background of phenomenological philosophy and methodology. A feature called "snapshots" that provides brief commentary and/or examples to illustrate concepts and ideas. Updated "resource digs" providing more examples, with the addition of more international resources.

This collection of essays addresses emergent trends in the meeting of the disciplines of phenomenology and performance. It brings together major scholars in the field, dealing with phenomenological approaches to dance, theatre, performance, embodiment, audience, and everyday performance of self. It argues that despite the wide variety of philosophical, ontological, epistemological, historical and methodological differences across the field of phenomenology, certain tendencies and impulses are required for an investigation to stand as truly phenomenological. These include: description of experience; a move towards fundamental conditions or underlying essences; and an examination of taken-for-granted presuppositions. The book is aimed at scholars and practitioners of performance looking to deepen their understanding of phenomenological concepts and methods, and philosophers concerned with issues of embodiment, performativity and enaction.

In this volume, Clark Moustakas clearly discusses the theoretical underpinnings of phenomenology, based on the work of Husserl and others, and takes the reader step-by-step through the process of conducting a phenomenological study. His concise guide provides numerous examples of successful phenomenological studies from a variety of fields including therapy, health care, victimology, psychology and gender studies. The book also includes form letters and other research tools to use in designing and conducting a study.

Advancing the rising field of engaged or participatory anthropology that is emerging at the same time as increased opposition from Indigenous peoples to research, this book offers critical reflections on research approaches to-date. The engaged approach seeks to change the researcher-researched relationship fundamentally, to make methods more appropriate and beneficial to communities by involving them as participants in the entire process from choice of research topic onwards. The aim is not only to change power relationships, but also engage with non-academic audiences.

This book examines research using anti-oppressive, arts-based methods to promote social change in oppressed and marginalized communities. The contributors discuss literary techniques, performance, visual art, and new media in relation to the co-construction of knowledge and positionality, reflexivity, data representation, community building and engagement, and pedagogy. The contributors to this volume hail from a wide array of disciplines, including sociology, social work, community psychology, anthropology, performing arts, education, medicine, and public health.

Culturally Responsive Methodologiesputs forward a new position from which to navigate our research in the hope that we can contribute to a more respectful and humble way of working with all peoples. These new methodologies require the researcher to develop relationships that may enable them to intimately come to respect and know the "Other" with whom they seek to study. Such a process of reciprocity challenges traditional research notions of distance and neutrality, opening up instead streams of research that call for engagement through the establishment of relational discourses. Each chapter shows how researchers find, discover, and invent methodology that benefits both the researcher and subject, from their insider knowledge and from the epistemology of others.  This book is ideally suited for all those involved in qualitative research work including researchers, students, teacher educators and educators  throughout the world who share an interest in culturally responsive research and practice.

'A landmark in the process of decolonizing imperial Western knowledge.' Walter Mignolo, Duke University To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory. This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being. Now in its eagerly awaited second edition, this bestselling book has been substantially revised, with new case-studies and examples and important additions on new indigenous literature, the role of research in indigenous struggles for social justice, which brings this essential volume urgently up-to-date.

The Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies is the only handbook to make connections regarding many of the perspectives of the "new" critical theorists and emerging indigenous methodologies.Built on the foundation of the landmark SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research, the Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies extends beyond the investigation of qualitative inquiry itself to explore the indigenous and nonindigenous voices that inform research, policy, politics, and social justice. Editors Norman K. Denzin, Yvonna S. Lincoln, and Linda Tuhiwai Smith explore in depth some of the newer formulations of critical theories and many indigenous perspectives, and seek to make transparent the linkages between the two. Key Features- Contains global examples including South African, Hawaiian, Maori, Central African and Islamic ones.. Includes a "Who's Who" of educators and researchers in critical methodologies. . Provides a comprehensive body of work that represents the state of the art for critical methodologies and indigenous discourses . Covers the history of critical and indigenous theory and how it came to inform and impact qualitative research . Offers an historical representation of critical theory, critical pedagogy, and indigenous discourse. . Explores critical theory and action theory, and their hybrid discourses: PAR, feminism, action research, social constructivism, ethnodrama, community action research, poetics.. Presents a candid conversation between indigenous and nonindigenous discourses. This Handbook serves as a guide to help Western researchers understand the new and reconfigured territories they might wish to explore.

What are Indigenous research methodologies, and how do they unfold? Indigenous methodologies flow from tribal knowledge, and while they are allied with several western qualitative approaches, they remain distinct. These are the focal considerations of Margaret Kovach's study, which offers guidance to those conducting research in the academy using Indigenous methodologies. Kovach includes topics such as Indigenous epistemologies, decolonizing theory, story as method, situating self and culture, Indigenous methods, protocol, meaning-making, and ethics. In exploring these elements, the book interweaves perspectives from six Indigenous researchers who share their stories, and also includes excerpts from the author's own journey into Indigenous methodologies. Indigenous Methodologies is an innovative and important contribution to the emergent discourse on Indigenous research approaches and will be of use to graduate students, professors, and community-based researchers of all backgrounds - both within the academy and beyond.

In the first book ever published on Indigenous quantitative methodologies, Maggie Walter and Chris Andersen open up a major new approach to research across the disciplines and applied fields. While qualitative methods have been rigorously critiqued and reformulated, the population statistics relied on by virtually all research on Indigenous peoples continue to be taken for granted as straightforward, transparent numbers. This book dismantles that persistent positivism with a forceful critique, then fills the void with a new paradigm for Indigenous quantitative methods, using concrete examples of research projects from First World Indigenous peoples in the United States, Australia, and Canada. Concise and accessible, it is an ideal supplementary text as well as a core component of the methodological toolkit for anyone conducting Indigenous research or using Indigenous population statistics.

The availability of research methodologies and frameworks to facilitate different ways of gathering knowledge and performing research is often a matter of concern for early career researchers as well as advanced research scholars. Positioning Research, while identifying this gap, provides avenues that encompass differing cultural backgrounds and disciplines to enable exploration of research frameworks and shifting paradigms, considering the impact of social media and new forms of knowledge that assist real-time, global distribution of research.  The book highlights the possibilities of transition into 'the third space', where negotiation and dialogue are central to positioning research. It upholds the principle that different research methodologies are equally valid and valued in contributing to new knowledge. The book focuses on the contexts in which research questions are conceptualised and designed, and highlights the implications of research for the various partners and communities that participate in the research. It thus provides a cutting-edge framework for conducting multidisciplinary research.

Narrative inquiry is based on the proposition that experience is the stories lived and told by individuals as they are embedded within cultural, social, institutional, familial, political, and linguistic narratives. It represents the phenomenon of experience but also constitutes a methodology for its study. At the heart of this methodology is relational ethics. However, until now the functioning of this key relationship in practice has remained largely undefined. In this book the authors take on the essential task of developing a conceptual framework for the application of relational ethics to narrative inquiry. Building on a corpus of more generalized research, this book is grounded in a multi-year study with indigenous youth and families. The authors describe their experiences of narrative inquiry, highlighting how relational ethics informed their negotiation of these research relationships. They also engage in a conversation with the work of philosophers who have guided their narrative inquiry to offer a more thorough understanding of relational ethics. Through this, and contributions from five further studies on a diverse range of subjects, a number of key points for successful relational ethics are isolated and expounded upon. This book is an invaluable tool for researchers and postgraduates engaged in qualitative research -- providing clear and practical guidance on ethical concerns. It also extends the work of the authors' two previous titles, Engaging in Narrative Inquiry and Engaging in Narrative Inquiries with Children and Youth.

This forward-looking resource offers readers a modern contextual framework for conducting social science research with indigenous peoples. Foundational chapters summarize current UN-based standards for indigenous rights and autonomy, with their implications for research practice. Coverage goes on to detail minimally-invasive data-gathering methods, survey current training and competency issues, and consider the scientist's role in research, particularly as a product of his/her own cultural background. From these guidelines and findings, students and professionals have a robust base for carrying out indigenous research that is valid and reliable as well as respectful and ethical. Among the topics covered: ·         Cultural theories and cultural dominance. ·         The legal framework of research in indigenous contexts. ·         The role of language within indigenous peoples' cultural rights. ·         Methodology: how to optimally collect data in the field. ·         Researchers' influence and philosophy of science. ·         Learning how to prepare research in indigenous contexts. Research Methods in Indigenous Contexts is an important reference benefitting a wide audience, including students and researchers in the social sciences, humanities, and psychology; decision-makers of NGOs and GOs that act with regard to humanitarian aid, for tourism projects, or any other contingency with indigenous contexts; and policymakers interested in the aspects of human activity upon which indigenous cultural concerns are based.

Research Through, With and As Storying explores how Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars can engage with storying as a tool that disassembles conventions of research. The authors explore the concept of storying across different cultures, times and places, and discuss principles of storying and storying research, considering Indigenous, feminist and critical theory standpoints. Through the book, Phillips and Bunda provide an invitation to locate storying as a valuable ontological, epistemological and methodological contribution to the academy across disciplines, arguing that storying research gives voice to the marginalised in the academy. Providing rich and interesting coverage of the approaches to the field of storying research from Aboriginal and white Australian perspectives, this text seeks to enable a profound understanding of the significance of stories and storying. This book will prove valuable for scholars, students and practitioners who seek to develop alternate and creative contributions to the production of knowledge.

Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies is a synthesis of changes and innovations in methodologies in Indigenous Studies, focusing on sources over a broad chronological and geographical range. Written by a group of highly respected Indigenous Studies scholars from across an array of disciplines, this collection offers insight into the methodological approaches contributors take to research, and how these methods have developed in recent years. The book has a two-part structure that looks, firstly, at the theoretical and disciplinary movement of Indigenous Studies within history, literature, anthropology, and the social sciences. Chapters in this section reveal that, while engaging with other disciplines, Indigenous Studies has forged its own intellectual path by borrowing and innovating from other fields. In part two, the book examines the many different areas with which sources for indigenous history have been engaged, including the importance of family, gender, feminism, and sexuality, as well as various elements of expressive culture such as material culture, literature, and museums. Together, the chapters offer readers an overview of the dynamic state of the field in Indigenous Studies. This book shines a spotlight on the ways in which scholarship is transforming Indigenous Studies in methodologically innovative and exciting ways, and will be essential reading for students and scholars in the field.  

Ethnography acknowledges the complexity of human experience and the need to research it by close and sustained observation of human behaviour. Karen O'Reilly introduces the reader to the technical, practical and philosophical issues that arise when employing traditional and innovative research methods in relation to human agents. She invites the reader to engage in reflexive and creative research that draws critically and creatively from the full range of qualitative methods. The second edition includes new discussions of emerging practices such as reflexive ethnography and autoethnographic accounts as well as new directions in the field, including virtual, mobile, multi-sited and global ethnography.

The author's main research method is ethnography using long-term ecological fieldwork to better understand music as a form of environmental communication, ecological art, and advocacy.
Can musicians really make the world more sustainable? Anthropologist Mark Pedelty, joined an eco-oriented band, the Hypoxic Punks, to find out. In his timely and exciting book, Ecomusicology, Pedelty explores the political ecology of rock, from local bands to global superstars.

This volume is the first sustained examination of the complex perspectives that comprise ecomusicology--the study of the intersections of music/sound, culture/society, and nature/environment. Twenty-two authors provide a range of theoretical, methodological, and empirical chapters representing disciplines such as anthropology, biology, ecology, environmental studies, ethnomusicology, history, literature, musicology, performance studies, and psychology. Emerging from the whole is a view of ecomusicology as a field, a place where many disciplines come together. The topics addressed in this volume--contemporary composers and traditional musics, acoustic ecology and politicized soundscapes, material sustainability and environmental crisis, familiar and unfamiliar sounds, local places and global warming, birds and mice, hearing and listening, biomusic and soundscape ecology, and more--engage with conversations in the various realms of music study as well as in environmental studies and cultural studies. Some chapters also provide further materials on a companion website: http://www.ecomusicology.info/cde/.

Whilst exploring the ethics of ethnography, this book illustrates the relevance of performance ethnography across disciplinary boundaries. The productive links between theory and method are explored. Theoretical concepts range from queer theory, feminist theory and critical race theory to Marxism and phenomenology. The methodological techniques range from designing and asking in-depth interview questions and developing rapport to coding and interpreting data. A print copy of the second edition is available in the library at 305.8 M182C 2012

In Performance Ethnography, one of the world's most distinguished authorities on qualitative research establishes the connection of performance narratives with performance ethnography and autoethnography, the linkage of these formations to critical pedagogy and critical race theory, and the histories of these formations. He then shows how they may be connected. Performance Ethnography is divided into three parts. Part I covers pedagogy, ethnography, performance, and theory as the foundation for a performative social science. Part II addresses the worlds of family, nature, praxis, and action, employing a structure that is equal parts memoir, essay, short story, and literary autoethnography. Part III examines the ethics and practical politics of performance autoethnography, anchored in the post-9/11 discourse in the United States.

Music has been a vital part of leisure activity across time and cultures. Contemporary commodification, commercialization, and consumerism, however, have created a chasm between conceptualizations of music making and numerous realities in our world. From a broad range of perspectives and approaches, this handbook explores avocational involvement with music as an integral part of the human condition. The chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Music Making and Leisure present myriad ways for reconsidering and refocusing attention back on the rich, exciting, and emotionally charged ways in which people of all ages make time for making music. The contexts discussed are broadly Western, including an eclectic variety of voices from scholars across fields and disciplines, framing complex and multifaceted phenomena that may be helpfully, enlighteningly, and perhaps provocatively framed as music making and leisure. This volume may be viewed as an attempt to reclaim music making and leisure as a serious concern for, amongst others, policy makers, scholars, and educators who perhaps risk eliding some or even most of the ways in which music - a vital part of human existence - is integrated into the everyday lives of people. As such, this handbook looks beyond the obvious, asking readers to consider anew, "What might we see when we think of music making as leisure?"

Qualitative research has become increasingly popular in music education over the last decade, yet there is no source that explains the terms, approaches and issues associated with this approach. In The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research in American Music Education, editor Colleen Conway and the contributing music educators provide that clarification, as well as models of qualitative studies within various music education disciplines. The handbook outlines the history of qualitative research in American music education and explores the contemporary use of qualitative approaches in examining issues related to music teaching and learning. It includes 32 chapters that address a range of topics, from ways of approaching qualitative research and ways of collecting and analyzing data, to the various music teaching and learning contexts that have been studied using qualitative approaches. The final section of the book tackles permission to conduct research, teaching qualitative research, publishing qualitative research, and provides direction for the future. An ambitious and much-needed volume, this handbook will stand as a key resource for drawing meaning from the experiences of students and teachers in music classrooms and communities both in America and in other countries.

The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music cultivates a return to the fundamental premises of cultural history in the cutting-edge work of musicologists concerned with cultural history and historians who deal with music. It helps to define its origins, current directions and methodologies. Noted academics from both of these disciplines illustrate the continuing endeavor of cultural history to grasp the realms of human experience, understanding, and communication as they are manifest or expressed symbolically through various layers of culture and in many forms of art. The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History of Music fosters and reflects a sustained dialogue about their shared goals and techniques, rejuvenating their work with new insights into the field itself.