Welcome to the APME Memphis 2025 conference. Here, you’ll be able to register for the conference and update your Sched profile. The conference schedule will be available in late spring 2025. At that time, you can view the schedule and select the presentations you’d like to attend. If you have any questions, please visit our conference website or contact us at conference@popularmusiceducation.org We look forward to coming together as a community June 4–7, 2025.
Social Justice in Popular Music Education requires more than learning to play songs from diverse genres of music, and developing this movement into a staple of the institution of Music Education. Social Justice requires honoring the ancestors and culture bearers from which Popular Music, the music of the people, came. Social justice is understanding and choosing to respect the difference between cultural appreciation and appropriation, and to invest in culture bearers. To be an agent of Social Justice is, at the minimum, a dual effort: 1) facilitating the learning of the artist’s stories and the history of popular music tied to socio-political history; and 2) empowering our students’ voices to use music to interpret and express their lived experiences. Many issues inherent to a postcolonial society working towards Social Justice—a society wrought with mass shootings, suicides, drug abuse, racism, divisive politics, and enslavement thinly vailed as a criminal justice system— complexify our students’ access to actively engaging in a musical life. Everyone deserves access to a music education embedded with social justice, and there needs to be a concerted effort to increase access in underserved and historically marginalized communities from which this music came.
