Although many music education policies outline an explicit agenda for diversity,little attention has been paid to the complex situations that arise when negotiatingdiversity in practice.The Politics of Diversity in Music Educationaims to remedythis knowledge gap by critically attending to the ways in which difference ispromoted, represented, negotiated, navigated, contained, or challenged in variousmusic education practice, policy, and research contexts. Diversity, here, is not a labelapplied to certain individuals or musical sounds and repertoires per se but is ratherunderstood as socially organized difference, produced, and manifested in variousways as part of complex relations and interactions between people and social groups.Thus, the aim of this book is not to fortify the categorization of people and theirmusics but to focus on the power relations that are“inherent in the constitutiveconditions of differences and constantly (re-)produced, shifted and thereby poten-tially transformed by every act of differentiation”(Dobusch2017, p. 1648). Thepoliticsat hand are thus not those concerning politicians actingforthe people orthose relating to the political functions and roles of musics as part of public protest,for example (see Hesmondhalgh2013). Rather, the politics of diversity here refers tothe everyday processes by which we all exercise agency, negotiate power andidentity, and assign meaning to difference.This book builds upon a legacy of scholarship and practice that has positionededucation as an important arena for social change, cultural change, and ethicalpractice. One of the most well-established and enduring developments towardssocial transformation through education ismulticultural education.As JamesA. Banks wrote already in1993,“[m]ulticultural education...is a movementdesigned to empower all students to become knowledgeable, caring, and activecitizens in a deeply troubled and ethnically polarized...world”(p. 23). In musiceducation, the late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed an important shift in terms ofwhat repertoires were taught in school and university classrooms and what for.Music education was seen as an arena whereinalllearners could be engaged as acommunity, by both bringing people together through musical practice and height-ening their intercultural sensitivities. For example, Keith Swanwick (1988)suggested an intercultural approach that holds the potential to“reduce the powerof [cultural] stereotypes”(p. 4) through cultivating an awareness of the“universalityof musical practice”(p. 8) and the unique sonic beauty of different musical traditionsthrough the creation of“new values and transcending both self and social culture”(p. 6). Comparing music to language, Swanwick (1994) argued that“it is nonsense tosay that we cannot understand music without understanding the culture from which itcame. The musicisthe culture”(p. 222). In this sense, teachers were directed toapproach music as a universal phenomenon that in itself holds the potential to existdistinct from sociocultural context or social ties and rise above the power relationsrelating to the politics of diversity that arise in any given education context. Scholars working at the intersection of music education and ethnomusicology challenged thisunderstanding, as Anthony Palmer (1992) argued,“artistic expression weakenswhen it becomes generalized. One thing that we must learn about art is its undeniableand crucial need for specificity”(p. 35). Accordingly, while musicwasseen as a“pan-human”experience, it was also positioned as a“culture-specific”practice(Campbell2017, p. 16; Volk 1998) warranting particular considerations whentransferred from original settings to education contexts. Some scholars advisedteachers to work to preserve the authenticity of musical expressions (Elliott 1995),while others emphasized the inevitability of“recontextualization”(e.g. Schippers 2010; Määttänen and Westerlund 2001).