Orchestrating Diversity: How Parents Navigate Status Distinction and Racial Learning through Music Education

Education programs that use the arts in service of a social mission have become an increasingly popular means of combating systemic inequality and strengthening communities. Providing a cultural analysis of such educational interventions and how they are interpreted and manipulated by their participants, this case study examines the dynamics within a racially diverse orchestral music educational organization with a social mission. In this dissertation, I focus on how parents use this unique space to efficiently facilitate multiple (often competing) goals they have around parenting and educating their children. Based on a qualitative examination of this program and its participants, including in-depth interviews with 34 parents, 6 program facilitators, and 3 students, and two years of observation, I reveal how organizationally embedded actors navigate various dilemmas that both parents and organizations face, including how to balance commitments to individual achievement and socioemotional wellbeing, as well as community-minded social justice. I find that both parents’ and educators’ goals and intentions include fostering traditional academic and extracurricular success, as well as promoting individual socioemotional well-being and resilience, and cultivating community-minded, responsible citizens, through teaching them about social concepts and issues like diversity, race, and racism. Bridging theories of symbolic capital, colorblind and color-conscious racism, parenting, emotions, organizations, this research has implications for the evolution of distinction-based parenting practices under new racialized logics of concerted cultivation and cultural capital and how privileged families strive to maintain their structural advantages. It also provides insights into how an educational program constructs organizational structures and strategies to promote effectiveness and flourishing within a diverse community. Understanding the relationship between organizational practices, parenting practices, cultural capital and racial socialization in these spaces have implications for the effort to redress stratification and structural racism through arts education.