ABSTRACT
In this conclusion, I consider what music education can learn from attending to the voices of 15 music educators with lived experiences of Madness and distress. I seek to construct a Mad-affirming music education for students, teachers, and scholars. I begin by considering how disability studies models can serve people with experiences of Madness and distress, and how teachers could mobilize these models in pedagogy. Then I explore how music educators might benefit from understanding the conceptualizations these 15 music educators held about experiences of Madness and distress and explicate how the Universal Design for Learning may support different conceptualizations. I turn subsequently to visibility (being “out”) in music education, examining the complexities of such decisions. I further consider the intersections of visibility with shame and empathy. In alignment with an anti-carceral approach to surveillance of mental health, I advocate for an abolitionist approach to mental health in music education. Next, I explore the help/harm dichotomy of musicking and explicate implications for music education. I then consider the importance of recognizing assets as contextual and reflect upon participants-identified benefits of their neurodivergence. Ultimately, I explicate Walker’s (2021) neurocosmopolitanism as a way forward and then return to the contrapuntal methodology.
