Efforts to address music-related occupational health concerns in tertiary music institutions often take the form of supplementary education and resources. However, these concerns persist despite well-established evidence and repeated institutional initiatives, suggesting that responses remain largely single-loop interventions that add supports without critically examining underlying norms and assumptions. I argue that these concerns cannot be addressed through external efforts alone; they must be understood as internal to the music discipline, arising from tacit assumptions that shape professional meaning and sustain habitualized practices. Using a critical interpretive design with iterative question development and theory-driven sampling, I analyze music-related health literature to identify typifications of recurring occupational behaviors and response pathways as represented in research discourse. Drawing on organizational learning theory, Berger and Luckmann’s account of the social construction of reality, and identity theory, I interpret these typifications as four interrelated phenomena: documented high prevalence of music-related occupational health concerns; risky music-related behaviors; blurred professional boundaries; and emergent student-led epistemic inquiry. Together, these phenomena indicate a structural gap in professional meaning within tertiary music training, in which well-established evidence circulates without being translated into shared identity-relevant standards for practice. I propose a role identity framework that positions student-led epistemic inquiry as a prototype for professional realization. The framework treats occupational health as an internal role identity verification problem rather than a matter of external compliance, locating change within the discipline’s own processes of meaning-making.

Authors:
Nabeel Zuhdi, Johns Hopkins University, United States

About the Presenter(s)
Dr. Nabeel Zuhdi is a postdoctoral fellow at Peabody Institute (Johns Hopkins). He studies musician occupational health from a biopsycosocial prespective; current project: musician identity and of health in tertiary music training.

Connect on Linkedin
https://linkedin.com/in/nabeel-zuhdi-a2a40872

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

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