ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on institutional policies around equality, diversity, and ethics in higher classical music education, what they say about ideas of nation and gender in higher music education (HME) in Europe today, and how institutional belonging is constructed within them. Using a “what's the problem represented to be?” approach to discourse analysis of institutional policy, the chapter analyses three written policies from three higher classical music education institutions. All the written policies are concerned with promoting equality, ethical conduct, and good behaviour, or preventing sexual harassment and discrimination. Using the policies as a starting point, the chapter analyses and discusses both how gender equality, anti-racism, and LGBTQ+ rights are constructed in the institutions studied, and how binary gender norms and ideas about “us and them” are enforced and challenged within the documents that steer the teaching and learning in higher classical music education. In the analysis, the problem of sexual harassment, discrimination, or bad behaviour is concluded to be described as a problem located in individuals entering the institutions, not in the institutions themselves. This is discussed as a way for HME institutions to place problems outside of themselves. Further, the analysis discusses how belonging and the identity of “we” is conveyed through the form and the tone of the policies and how reporting and investigating are presented as the main solution to problems of equality, diversity, and ethics. Finally, the policies’ regulation of what is not accepted in the institutions is compared with the public portrayal of each institution as analysed in Chapter 2.
