As is in the title of Juliet Hess’ book, cultivation may be understood as a process of growth and care, rooted in histories of knowledge and practice. This labour and care may be understood as an ongoing process, reckoning with histories and contemporary conditions of violence and colonisation that reveal themselves through listening and learning, through mistakes, and through working and living in relation to other people, the more-than-human, and place. Hess’ ‘loving critique of music education’ (p. 21) offered in Cultivating Epistemic Justice in Music Education: Honoring Minoritized Knowers reflects a courageous and ‘profound love for the world and for people’ (Freire, Reference FREIRE1970, 89), that invites the reader to move beyond simply identifying social injustices and reorient our work from established and deeply cherished traditions and practices to a more open-ended search for truth and enactment of justice. The book takes shape as an introduction and eight chapters examining how epistemic injustice is manifest in and through music education in the United States of America and Canada, concluding with practical first-, second- and third-order changes (Dotson, Reference DOTSON2014) to be implemented in reorienting these systems toward epistemic justice. Each chapter begins with vignettes, often deeply personal, that bring the concept of epistemic injustice into focus. Grounding her analysis in concrete encounters and reflections on lived experience, these invite music educators and music scholars to reflect on their own intersectional positionalities and practices, recognising that we are all, in different ways, implicated in the reproduction and disruption of epistemic injustice. The chapters each attend to a different facet of epistemic injustice before examining possible remedies and presenting ‘positive’ vignettes that illustrate how epistemic justice may be enacted, balancing the need for us to notice ‘[w]ho, in music education, is having their humanity, their contributions, and their knowing hammered’ (p. 258–9) with clear strategies and opportunities for change.
Situating epistemic injustice
We begin our review at the end of Hess’ book, at her suggestion, in considering her statement that ‘[a]ll music counts as music and is therefore worthy of study and attention on its own terms. And everyone is a musician and a knower’ (p. 262). Particularly within the current educational climate of ‘anti-intellectualism, censorship, corporatisation, and political interference’ (Kallio, Reference KALLIO2025, 141), such a claim warrants nuance. If we recognise that ‘music education is not only about music but deals with ideals of human character and society’ (Allsup & Westerlund, Reference ALLSUP and WESTERLUND2012, 134), it is clear that not all musics warrant a place in the classroom, and not all knowledge or knowing is (or ought to be) valued as ‘worthy of study’ (Hess, Reference HESS2026, 262). It is hardly contentious to argue that genres such as White Power (or Rebel) Country, Hatecore, Fashwave or National Socialist Black Metal may well count as music but have no place in school curricula. Yet, the boundaries of moral propriety in the classroom are often less clear, and increasingly obfuscated by polarising contemporary politics.
This is where Hess’ engagement with epistemic justice opens new avenues by highlighting questions of ‘credibility, authority, situatedness, silencing, prejudice and exploitation’ (p. 2) as factors that influence how a person is valued (or not) as a knower. She applies Miranda Fricker’s (Reference FRICKER2007) framework of epistemic injustice, while acknowledging the feminist and decolonial scholarship that underlies this body of work. While Fricker’s framework is valuable, and the insights shared by Hess into how this theory applies to the daily practices of music educators are tangible, the cultural, historical, educational and sociopolitical contexts of epistemic injustices remain largely assumed and unarticulated throughout the book. As two scholars and music educators with experiences in a number of countries across the world, but not North America, this raised an important question: How did ‘we’ get here? This question is not merely situating epistemic injustice in context but has very real implications for how and where we intervene. The rich and complex connections between music education, history and sociocultural politics are absent here when, arguably, they shape our own professional identities and ideas as well as those of our students and the communities we work together with. Hess is not alone in this close focuse upon the interpersonal relations between teachers, students and communities at the expense of how these relate to broader sociopolitical movements. Indeed, despite the numerous (and at times obvious) examples we have on hand, from Villa-Lobos’ Canto Orfeônico indoctrinating children with a homogenous ideal of Brazilian patriotism (e.g., Ferraz, Reference FERRAZ2013) to the contested politics of Carl Orff in relation to National Socialism and the Third Reich in Germany (e.g., Kertz-Welzel, Reference KERTZ-WELZEL2023), music education scholarship rarely engages with broader historical and social politics. Particularly now, and particularly in the North American context where social polarisation is increasingly explicit, there is a risk in attending so closely to the interpersonal that we overlook the contemporary fascist formations that are proliferating not outside of but ‘within democracy’ itself (also not new, see Adorno, Reference ADORNO2005/Reference ADORNO1963, p. 90). Such attentions are surely imperative to counter epistemic injustice in music education and beyond.
Flipping the system
Hierarchies have long characterised school music education in numerous contexts, assigning an excess of credibility to western classical music, and reproducing patriarchal and white supremacist ways of musicking, knowing, and learning. This argumentation is well worn, yet still frustratingly necessary. However, how we engage with such problematic conceptualisations of music, education and the categorisation of individuals and social groups to create such hierarchies matters. In challenging the established hierarchies of music education, Hess argues that ‘[e]ducators can further reconstitute what counts as genius’ (p. 46, emphasis added), directing teachers to take the lead in reordering the hierarchy. Language matters here too. In flipping the system (Freire, Reference FREIRE1970) to unsettle established hierarchies and redistribute epistemic authority, the argumentation is easily seduced by the very processes and structures of categorisation and ranking that Hess makes a claim against. Andre de Quadros and Emilie Amrein (Reference DE QUADROS and AMREIN2022) articulate this challenge well, as they explain:
Our vocabulary for resistance is formed within oppressive practices that date back centuries. It is unsurprising, therefore, how challenging it is for us as music educators to build resistance-based work when the vocabulary we use is colonial. (p. 106).
As such, positioning music educators, and indeed Hess, as ‘epistemic authority’ (p. 49) needs to be read carefully to avoid succumbing to the same conditions that fuel injustice in the first place, reifying logics of categorisation and ranking, and focusing on solutions over struggle; recognition over relation.
Relationality and co-creation
Audre Lorde’s oft-quoted provocation as to whether the ‘master’s tools will [ever be able to] dismantle the master’s house’ (Lorde, Reference LORDE2018, 19) will always be asked of justice-engaged scholarship, and Hess’ book is no exception. Hess’s statement that her book aims to disrupt firm ideas of teaching by promoting critical thinking (Michigan State University, 2025) emphasises that the goal is not to settle questions of change in music education, ‘but rather to sharpen our sense of what is at stake as we continue to ask them and explore how we might ask these questions differently’ (Kallio & Ballantyne, Reference KALLIO and BALLANTYNE2026, 131). Understanding the historical roots that led to our ‘comfort… with exploitation and oppression’ (Bohrer, Reference BOHRER2019, 258), while ‘[a]ccepting and embracing our incompleteness’ (Medrado & Rega, Reference MEDRADO and REGA2023, 27), and ‘creat[ing] a spirit in which we are certain by not being certain of our certainties’ (Freire, Reference FREIRE1985, 17) allow us to enter openly into music education spaces to better understand and respond to epistemic injustices. Hess’ book may well be productively disorienting for readers, though it also requires the courage to think beyond her carefully structured guidance and directives (see Kenny & Christophersen, Reference KENNY and CHRISTOPHERSEN2026, p. 10). As a mammoth task of asking our field to think and become otherwise, Cultivating Epistemic Justice in Music Education certainly has limitations. However, as an invitation to exploration, ongoing dialogue and reflection, and dwelling in the frictions and disorientations of relational work, it provides a welcome resource through which we might concretely re-imagine music education as a process and site of co-creation, and take some important steps in honouring minoritised knowers, together.
