ABSTRACT
In the final chapter of the book, the authors consider radical imagination, freedom dreaming, and possibility within a music education drawn from the margins. The chapter begins with an illustration of an Empowering Song encounter at a refugee shelter for trans migrants in Tijuana before exploring a wide range of theoretical work that grounds the Empowering Song approach. The authors challenge the epistemological foundations of Eurocentric music pedagogy that confine music and other arts, as well as practitioners, to discrete categories, isolating and separating ideas and people from one another, arguing that Empowering Song is a type of paradigmatic approach to multi-modal creativity that is both borderless and rooted in the social. Later in the chapter, the authors explore the utopian imaginary of Afrofuturists, abolitionists, and radical thinkers from the Global Majority. Throughout the chapter, the authors argue for the Empowering Song approach as a political stance, resistant to the systems and structures upholding the status quo and full of hope for a more just and compassionate future.
