Competency nomads, resilience and agency: music education (activism) in a time of neoliberalism

The article seeks to find ways to re-imagine music-educator professional self-understanding beyond tendencies and constraints created and imposed by neoliberal politics. This involves exploring the conditions for music-teacher professionalism in the Nordic countries today through the position of competency nomads, as well as searching for theoretical frameworks through which the current circumstances can be understood and unpacked, by looking into the relationships between resilience, subjectivity, agency and neoliberalism. Given that the current professional situation for music teachers might potentially be understood as characterised by instability and uprootedness, the article proposes an activist approach as one possible way of keeping professional agency and imagination intact and alive. Such an approach requires both the embracement of individual and collective vulnerability and an acknowledgment of our fundamental and mutual interdependency, locally and globally. Towards the end of the article, examples of what this might mean in music-education practice and research are discussed.