Listening Otherwise: Re-imagining Self-Care and Wellbeing in Music Education Through Critical Posthumanism and Indigenous Relationality

Dominant discourses of teacher wellbeing and self-care in music education frequently reflect neoliberal logics that position wellbeing as individual responsibility and self-optimisation. This article challenges these anthropocentric framings by re-imagining self-care as a relational, ecological, and more-than-human practice. The purpose is to expand understandings of wellbeing beyond the autonomous human subject towards interconnected modes of knowing and being that acknowledge the entanglement of teachers, students, instruments, technologies, spaces, and lands in the co-creation of care. This conceptual article weaves critical posthumanism with Indigenous Australian relational ontologies, particularly Noongar understandings of Boodja (Country) as a living system of reciprocal relationships. Drawing on Braidotti’s posthuman condition, Barad’s agential realism, and Indigenous scholarship by Martin and Yunkaporta, the article translates Lemon’s five-dimensional model of self-care awareness, self-compassion, empowerment, time, and habits—through relational and posthuman lenses. These dimensions become attunement, reciprocity, co-agency, rhythm, and pattern. The discussion integrates theoretical dialogue with reflective vignettes drawn from music teacher experiences to speculate on new forms of practice. The article articulates a conceptual framework that positions wellbeing not as an internal state but as an emergent vibration co-created across human and more-than-human assemblages. It proposes that music educators develop sonic, ecological, and collective literacies as forms of wellbeing literacy, enabling them to tune into the relational ecologies that sustain teaching and learning. The work demonstrates how sound’s inherent relationality offers a productive site for reimagining care in education. This article contributes to music education scholarship by bringing critical posthumanism into dialogue with Indigenous relationality to theorise teacher wellbeing. It challenges individualistic self-care frameworks and offers conceptual resources for understanding wellbeing as co-composition. The work opens pathways for ethics and practices that position sound, place, and relationship as co-teachers, treating wellbeing as a shared rhythm rather than a private achievement.