Narrative Soundings: 10th International Conference on Narrative Inquiry in Music Education (NIME10)

Call for papers & submissions

Future Stories and Stories for the Future: Narrative Inquiry Transforming Music Education

Amidst intensifying political, ecological, and public turmoil amplified by (social) media and AI technologies, narrative inquiry in music education can no longer remain content with documenting individual experience, identity, or professional life. While narrative inquiry has made a significant contribution to the field by elevating marginalised voices, exploring diversity, and deepening understanding of music teachers’ work and practices, it can now maximise its potential to critically interrogate past narrative regimes and renarrate imaginative professional territories and systems in changing societal landscapes.

The suggested reflexive, transformative turn towards the future prompts us to ask: how can we move from telling professional stories to unsettling the conditions under which some stories become authoritative and others ignored? How might we re-story music education professionalism as relational, interdependent, collective, and ethico-politically responsible? How do institutions of music and music education renarrate their traditions and values, and how can future visions be co-created through collective and collaborative storytelling?

This call for papers invites narrative inquiries into how professional and institutional futures in music education are re-storied, re-imagined, and contested in times of decreasing possibilities for collective transformation. The conference seeks to both diagnose the current state of narrative inquiry in our field and explore its heuristic future possibilities. We seek methodological approaches that treat narrative inquiry not only as interpretative or critical but as relational, transformative, decolonizing, experimental, and future-making. The call distinguishes between stories about the future and stories that work for the future – from challenging, for instance, dominant understandings of professionalism, expertise, and institutional legitimacy in music education to narrating alternative futures towards possible ways of (re-)organising music education.

We invite abstracts for consideration that align with the following topics related to music education:

• Re-storying professional practices
• Systems stories, stories of systems, and collective re-storying
• Narrativity and change in and through music performance
• Arts-based and multimodal narrative competence for navigating alternative futures
• Storytelling catalysing change in the public sphere
• Intervening in, transforming, and decolonizing institutional stories and narrative regimes
• Children’s and young people’s stories informing professional practices
• Research impact stories catalysing change
• Futures narratology, future narratives, future scenarios

Submission information

The conference accepts only one presentation format: single- or co-authored full-paper presentations. The format supports sustained scholarly engagement, collective reflection, and methodological discussion. Each accepted paper will be allocated 20 mins of presentation time.

Submissions are reviewed by a conference board comprised of international scholars in narrative inquiry, music, the arts, and education. Criteria for acceptance include the use of narrative in the conduct and reporting of inquiry, a clear theoretical framework, and relevance to the conference theme.

The authors are invited to submit:

1. an abstract (approximately 400 words) including 3-5 keywords
2. a title page including: author name(s), affiliation(s), contact details; and a short biography of each author (approximately 100 words);

Abstract submission deadline: January 10, 2027
Notification of acceptance: February 1, 2027

Submissions and any other queries may be emailed to the conference secretary Hanna Backer Johnsen (hanna.backer.johnsen@uniarts.fi)

Please send the two required attachments in Word file format.

Following the conference, authors may submit their accepted paper for consideration for publication (the publisher will be announced later). Papers will be subject to review by the editors of the volume.

Conference conveners

• Margaret S. Barrett (Monash University, Australia),
• Alexis Kallio (Griffith University, Australia),
• Tuulikki Laes (Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki, Finland),
• Sandra Stauffer (Arizona State University, USA),
• Danielle Treacy (Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki, Finland), and
• Heidi Westerlund (Sibelius Academy, Uniarts Helsinki, Finland).

Conference supporters

The conference is supported by the Research Council of Finland funded projects “Performing the Political: Public Pedagogy in Higher Music Education” (project no. 355247) and “Transition pathways towards gender inclusion in the changing musical landscapes of Nepal” (amplifyHer), (project no. 358072).