KEVIN SHORNER-JOHNSON
Kevin Shorner-Johnson is associate professor of music education at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. Kevin teaches general music methods, music education seminars, aural skills, and world musics. Prior to his time at Elizabethtown, he taught band in Iowa and Georgia, and completed his doctorate at the University of Georgia. A qualitative research study with Haitian research participants, love of philosophy and theology, and his College’s Anabaptist heritage developed a hunger for the work of justice and peacebuilding. Kevin’s research questions explore the intersection of philosophy, spirituality, lived experience, and curricular structures.
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Interrogating Violence within Formal and Practical Means-end Rationality: Musicking as Peacebuilding
Using Weber’s frameworks of means-end rationality, I will interrogate how institutionalized systems strip individual agency and values-driven decision-making. These processes are rooted in the objectification of humans and the natural world. Objectification increasingly constructs realities as places of capture and consumption. If I-it disconnection is at the root of violence, then I-You mutuality holds promise as restorative balance. Musicking can be both social praxis in the present and the act of engaging the self in the discernment of moral imagination. Such acts challenge “language of managed reality” and imagine new realities located in the authenticity of pathos, connection, and love.