Arts-Based Research, Autoethnography, and Music Education

Book excerpt: Arts-Based Research, Autoethnography, and Music Education: Singing Through a Culture of Marginalization invites readers into miroslav pavle manovski’s journey into quest of how he found his voice—literally and figuratively—by reflecting and storying from his fluid identity and roles as an artist, singer, learner, music teacher, researcher... while empowering others to find their own voice. This book is also an arts-based autoethnographic rendering of the author’s experience being tormented, harassed, and called “gay” as a means to negatively target and marginalize him. Further, this work contributes to the literature of those mercilessly harassed for perceived effeminate characteristics and to the canon of ways we may be able to rescue ourselves—to positively transform—from prior wreckage a part of our lives. It makes significant contributions to the literature on qualitative inquiry, arts-based research, autoethnography, music education, and vocal pedagogy as a means of re-presenting a rich tapestry of life experience. While this text can be read entirely for pleasure or personal growth, it will make an outstanding springboard for conversation in courses across the disciplines that deal with teacher education, music education, gender and sexual identity/orientation, intimacy, relationships and relational communication, prejudice, bullying and more. This award-wining book will additionally be of great value in courses on autoethnography, life writing, narrative inquiry, arts-based research, and music education. “Of all the recent examples of textual experiments in the social sciences that aim to create a dialectical intertwining of the autobiographical and the theoretical, this book is among the very best. Manovski’s work is at once artful, poignant, bravely self-revelatory, while simultaneously informed by the scholarship of an impressive array of academics from diverse academic fields. What awaits the reader is nothing less than a full-fledged educational experience that dazzles the mind and stirs the heart as it opens up the future.” – Tom Barone, Emeritus Professor, Arizona State University.