For higher education, the terms “accessibility” and “accommodation” are often presented in a narrow framework that mandates institutional compliance to legal statutes, which has limited Instructors’ and students’ understanding of the concepts. This especially pertains to musicology, a discipline that has privileged hearing-centric engagement with sound and has presented the white, heterosexual, able-bodied, able-minded, and cis-male experience as normative. Indeed, music studies count among the most fraught humanities fields for disability because of inherent expectations of fully abled bodyminds, coupled with an ableist culture that equates accessibility with compliance.
This panel will address the barriers faced in teaching music and offer alternatives through disability-informed pedagogy. Building on Jay Dolmage’s formulation “academic ableism,” we propose “musical ableism” as a conceptual space in which to come to grips with assumptions expressed through music. Critical pedagogy assumes language to be the medium for analyzing how education perpetuates restrictive notions about whose knowledge is worthy. But what if critical pedagogy takes place instead through music as a communicative and educative medium?
The panel aims to provide strategies for implementing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and other disability-oriented approaches in musicological curricula and course design in terms of course construction, learning outcomes, listening exercises, classroom challenges, and accessibility support. Ultimately, we argue that music instructors play a crucial role in expanding accessibility measures by engendering inclusion as an essential facet of classroom culture.
Our panel will present contributions from music(ology) instructors who wish to challenge the narratives that mandate adherence to established normativity and who intend to create accessible environments in their music classrooms.
The session will feature a series of 10-minute talks. Please email abstracts of 250 words to AMSDisMus@gmail.com. The submission deadline is Tuesday, April 30, 2024, with acceptances sent out by May 15. Panelists will be expected to participate in person at the AMS Annual Meeting in Chicago, Illinois (November 14-17, 2024). For a full version of the CFP, please go to