Clare Hall (PhD) is Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts in the Faculty of Education, Monash University, Australia. She is a descendant of settler-colonisers with English, Scottish and Irish ancestry that motivates her commitment as a social scientist and musician-educator to be a good ancestor. Her practice-based research is underpinned by aims for social justice, equity and cultural diversity through inclusive creative arts engagements across cultures and the lifespan. Working at the intersection of music, sound and sociology, her interdisciplinary research and teaching brings together 30 years of experience as a musician, performer, and educator. Her qualitative scholarship is inspired by feminist and queer gender theory, Bourdieu’s sociology, Indigenous praxis, and critical disabilities studies. She applies an assemblage of ethnographic, narrative and arts-based methods to examine the various intersections of gender, class, ethnicity, race, age and diverse abilities in education and the arts. 

Her first book, Masculinity, Class and Music Education: Choirboys Performing Middle-class Masculinities, (2018, Palgrave), is based on her multi award-winning doctoral study. This research received the prized Australian Association of Research in Education for its excellence in educational research by an early career researcher. Her current gender research is funded by the ARC for Diversifying Music in Australia: Gender Equity in Jazz and Improvisation. Clare has co-convened the International Symposium on the Sociology of Music Education in London 2017 and Texas 2019, which led to co-editing the organisation’s first book publication Sociological Thinking in Music Education: International Intersections (2021, Oxford University Press).

Clare is a founding co-leader of the Decolonising and Indigenising Music Education Special Interest Group of the International Society for Music Education and is co-editor of the first volume of Decolonising and Indigenising Music Education: First Nations Leading Research and Practice (Routledge, 2024). In 2023 she formed the Singing Indigenous Languages Collective (SILC), a cross-institutional advocacy group supporting First Language revitalisation through song creation in Australia.

As a neurodivergent educator, Clare initiated the Faculty of Education’s Neurocomplexity Collaboratory in 2023, a network for teachers interested in neurodiversity in the education profession.

Throughout her career as a school and community-based educator, Clare taught music and movement in Australia from Preschool-Year 12. She specialised in early childhood and primary arts education, with a focus on children’s singing, choral conducting and string education. She maintains her passion for teaching in her work with pre-service teachers that promotes transdisciplinary pedagogies and critical and creative ways of being, with a focus on the performing arts across the curriculum. She continues learning and teaching in schools by facilitating creative projects that support First Nation communities in their work to pass on Indigenous languages through song.

Clare is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts with a BA in music performance, majoring in Viola. She maintains her string playing with interests in Greek and Celtic folk traditions, and various improvised musical practices.

You'll find Clare, in her spare time, swimming in the bay, in the bush whistling with the birds, or tearing up the dance floor.

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