Pop Academy professor completes European working group on diversity

"In this important project, I was able to gather different approaches to diversity and inclusivity at European music academies with colleagues from Europe and thus develop suggestions for improvement. I am glad that we as Pop Academy were part of the discussion" said Prof. Dr. David-Emil Wickström.

The working group was part of the "Strengthening Music in Society" project, which ran from 2018 to 2021. It was hosted by the Association Européenne des Conservatoires, Académies de Musique et Musikhochschulen (AEC). The AEC is the European network of conservatoires. The project explored in different working groups how to strengthen music education in Europe and what it means to be an:e artist:in today.

The issues around diversity, identity and inclusion in higher music education today were central questions in the working group led by Prof. Dr. David-Emil Wickström. It addressed the questions of how European higher education institutions can open up to groups of people who are not yet represented there. Among other things, his working group collected various examples and approaches to opening processes and created a self-diagnosis tool to evaluate study programs. Prof. Dr. Wickström was also able to draw on the experience of the Pop Academy with regard to students in the world music degree program as well as the projects in the area of teaching popular music.

Members of the working group were Clara Barbera (Berklee College of Music, Valencia Campus), Joshua Dickson (Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), Baptiste Grangirard (Pôle Aliénor, Poitiers), Stefan Heckel (University of Music and Performing Arts Graz), Katja Thomson (University of the Arts Helsinki), Mojca Piškor (Academy of Music Zagreb) and Alfonso Guerra (AEC Brussels). The results can be read in the free E-Book.

Prof. Dr. David-Emil Wickström studied musicology, ethnomusicology and Scandinavian studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin and the University of Bergen (Norway). After field research in St. Petersburg, he was employed at the University of Copenhagen. In 2009, he received his PhD from the University of Copenhagen for his research on popular music in St. Petersburg and the German-Austrian Russian disco scene. His research interests include popular music in the post-Soviet space, traditional Norwegian vocal music, and the reception of country and bluegrass in Scandinavia. He is concerned with issues of fieldwork methodology and music in relation to locality, identity, and migration, as well as power relations in music academies.