Living with liminality: reconceptualising music careers education and research

One of the many lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the nature of it: it has been, and still is, an evolving situation in which there are many questions, but not always immediate or easy answers. Some of the pandemic experience has been shared, as almost 1.6 billion learners’ educations have been disrupted and teachers have reported increased work-related stress, anxiety, and burnout. Billions of dollars in music industry income have been lost and patterns of music engagement and consumer spending appear to be significantly altered. Other aspects of the pandemic have highlighted deep inequalities. The vulnerability of creative workers at a policy level, for example, reflects the precarity of a specific group of people, and the enormous complexity and uncertainty that shapes their personal and professional circumstances. Although some musicians have reveled in the opportunity to reinvent themselves through new sites for their work, for many, work in music has gone from challenging to untenable resulting in altered priorities. In this paper, I explore the pandemic experience through the concept of liminality and offer three approaches for framing a paradigm shift in music careers education and research: things to think about, things to leave behind, and things to do differently.