Anna Bull

The University of York · Department of Education

A new report into equality, diversity and inclusion in music is published this week. Its authors Anna Bull, Diljeet Bhachu and Amy Blier-Carruthers argue to tackle the inequalities it reveals, EDI must be embedded into the discipline.

The report provide an overview of the current equality and diversity within Music provision within higher education amongst students and staff. This report was made possible through generous funding from the following organisations: Royal Musical Association, Society for Music Analysis, International Association for the Study of Popular Music UK &...

The concept of ‘professional boundaries’ – widely used in sectors where professional relationships between adults are regulated – has not commonly been drawn on in higher education (HE) to understand and denote appropriate relationships between faculty or staff and students. Nevertheless, in recent years the question of how to regulate sexual and r...

This article maps and compares four universities’ policies and procedures for addressing faculty and staff sexual misconduct in higher education in the UK and US. While universities have engaged in significant work to grapple with student-student sexual misconduct, attention to misconduct perpetrated, and experienced, by higher education employees...

In the US, ‘campus climate surveys’ are an established measure of prevalence of, and students’ awareness of and attitudes to sexual and gender-based violence and harassment (SGBVH). They are regularly carried out by universities to assist SGBVH prevention and responses. Such surveys have only recently started to be carried out within UK higher educ...

Sexual misconduct perpetrated by academic staff affects tens of thousands of students in the UK, particularly women, LGBTQ+ students and postgraduate students. It can take a variety of forms including sexual or gender harassment, ‘grooming’, and/or sexual assault or rape. It can be difficult for those targeted to recognise sexual misconduct while i...

The overall goal of the ISEE Assessment is to pool multi-disciplinary expertise on educational systems and reforms from a range of stakeholders in an open and inclusive manner, and to undertake a scientifically robust and evidence based assessment that can inform education policy-making at all levels and on all scales. Its aim is not to be policy p...

This article maps and compares four universities’ policies and procedures for addressing faculty and staff sexual misconduct in higher education (FASSM) in the UK and US. While universities have engaged in significant work to grapple with student-student sexual misconduct, attention to misconduct perpetrated, and experienced, by higher education em...

This chapter examines rape, sexual violence and harassment, and other forms of gender-based violence within higher education (HE) by comparing students’ experiences and institutional responses across two countries: India and the UK. It suggests that the distinctiveness of higher education as a context for rape and sexual violence to occur can be an...

This article joins up evidence and policy relating to two linked concerns in higher education (HE) that are treated as unrelated: postgraduate research student (PGR) well-being, and staff sexual misconduct towards students. Against the standard methodology of systematic reviews, we build on feminist approaches to apply a ‘re-performance’ approach t...

This report introduces the concepts of power relations and hierarchies in higher music education institutions. It then explores how these intersect with social inequalities and are reproduced through invisible practices. Finally, it outlines challenges and ways forward for addressing them.

In music studies, genre theory has primarily been used to study popular music rather than classical music. This article demonstrates how genre theory can be applied to studying classical music production in order to understand how its value is negotiated and reproduced. Drawing on data from interviews with early-career female classical musicians in...

The majority of research on reporting of sexual violence and harassment has focused on reasons why women don’t report their experiences rather than examining why they do . This article takes this discussion into the higher education setting, drawing on interviews with 16 students and early career researchers in the UK who considered or attempted to...

Complaints processes and their governance in UK higher education (HE) have received little critical scrutiny, despite their expanded role under the increasing marketisation of HE. This article draws on interviews with students who attempted to make complaints of staff sexual misconduct to their HE institution. It outlines four groups among the inte...

Drawing on data from qualitative interviews with students who had attempted to report staff sexual misconduct to their higher education institutions in the UK, the article analyses interviewees’ experiences of ‘grooming’ and boundary-blurring behaviours from academic staff where the possibility for consent was affected by the power imbalances betwe...

This article introduces our Sector Guidance to Address Staff Sexual Misconduct in UK Higher Education. The problem that the guidance seeks to address is that existing student complaints and staff disciplinary procedures relating to student complaints in this area fail to offer similar protections and privileges to the student complainant and the re...

This article examines activism to address staff-to-student sexual misconduct in higher education in the United Kingdom from our perspective as founders and members of the research and lobby organization The 1752 Group. We argue that in order to tackle staff sexual misconduct in higher education, the problem has first to be made visible. We theorize...

This chapter examines the contrasting ideas of musical standards of ability revealed by this study to explore how classical music is used to draw boundaries around social groups. Using close ethnographic description, it shows how musical ability is produced and recognized in and between musicians. This reveals a tension between the accepted idea am...

This chapter draws on the musical biographies of the young people in this study to map out the ‘institutional ecology’ of youth classical music in England. Music conservatoires and exam boards, many established during the late Victorian period, were influential in consecrating classical music as more valuable than other genres by institutionalizing...

This chapter describes how young people in this study recognized an emotional depth in classical music that they stated they did not get from other musics, and that was particularly linked to the Romantic repertoire they preferred. The participants’ recognition of a deep interiority both in themselves and in this music constitutes a form of interpe...

In a close analysis of rehearsal processes in the youth choir and two youth orchestras in this study, this chapter describes in detail the gendered interaction between conductor and musicians. The charismatic authoritative leadership of their male conductors was appreciated and enjoyed by the young musicians. The chapter focuses particularly on the...

This chapter reframes existing research on classical music by putting it into dialogue with sociological understandings of class and gender to outline what a social analysis of classical music should look like. This also lays the foundations for theorizing more widely how music might be analysed in relation to class, an urgent theoretical intervent...

This chapter assesses the encounter between a youth opera group and Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute . Singing opera gave the young women in this group a sense of control and embodied confidence, negating the body image issues that several of them described. Against this, the strongly gendered institutional and cultural context of classical music, in...

The conclusion lays out four ways in which the tradition and practices of classical music form an ‘articulation’ with the middle classes: the formal modes of social organization that it requires; its modes of embodiment; its imaginative dimension; and the aesthetic of detail, precision, and ‘getting it right’. It argues that the aesthetic of classi...

Through an ethnographic study of young people playing and singing in classical music ensembles in the south of England, this book analyses why classical music in England is predominantly practiced by white middle-class people. It describes four ‘articulations’ or associations between the middle classes and classical music. Firstly, its repertoire r...

This chapter analyses the structure of the rehearsal process to reveal norms of bodily practice that can be linked to theorizations of how white identities are embodied. This analysis also reveals a contradiction: the body is required to be present in order to create sound but is at the same time effaced or transcended. The mechanisms through which...

This chapter examines rehearsal practices in the youth music groups in this study to analyse the practices that were required to attain ideals of aesthetic beauty. It introduces the idea of ‘getting it right’ as an important component of classical music education as observed in this study. Getting it right necessitated ongoing correction of the you...

Within the growing field of publications on El Sistema and Sistema-inspired programmes around the world, a marked divide can be observed between the findings of critical academic studies and commissioned evaluations. Using evaluations of El Sistema in Venezuela and Aotearoa New Zealand as our principal case studies, we argue that this gulf can be e...

Over the past 15 years, there has been a growing interest and investment in ‘character’ education across the UK political landscape. Alongside the activities of central government, character education has been promoted by a range of non-government actors in the UK and beyond, including philanthropic foundations, think tanks, education entrepreneurs...

This article draws on two empirical studies on contemporary engagements with classical music in the United Kingdom to shed light on the ways in which class inequalities are reproduced in practices of production and consumption. It discusses three ways in which this occurs. First, classical music was ‘naturally’ practiced and listened to in middle-c...

While many accounts of gendered embodiment focus on transformation, this article examines how normative gendered identifications are reinforced among middle-class young people playing classical music. Drawing on an ethnographic study of young people in youth orchestras and a youth choir in the south of England, it examines how the authority of the...