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By examining degree plans and conducting interviews with faculty and students at various national and international institutions, the authors of this chapter have generated four curricular models that suggest how existing degree plans and/or core music courses might be productively modified. The enhanced core model (1) aims to broaden the scope of existing curricula by emphasizing more diverse, cross-disciplinary content. The pluralist model (2) requires students to diversify their focus during their first two years of study in order to incorporate a greater degree of critical thinking, creative engagement, and broad skill sets into the major. The integrated model (3) emphasizes music making as the primary mode of learning basic skills and reduces overall requirements by combining courses such as ear training, music theory, and keyboard skills into a single class. Finally, the capstone model (4) demonstrates how self-directed and highly individualized projects can be incorporated into degree plans.

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Few academic studies have focused on how Latin American governments operate online. Political communication studies focused on social media interactions have overwhelmingly dedicated efforts to understand how regular citizens interact and behave online. Through the analysis of hashtags and other online strategies that were used during Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto’s (EPN) term to critique or manifest unconformity regarding part of the government’s performance, this study observes how members of a Latin American democratic regime weaponized a social media platform to dissipate criticism. More specifically, it proposes that the manipulation of social media affordances can debilitate essential democratic attributes like freedom of expression. Using a qualitative approach, consisting of observation, textual analysis, and online ethnography, findings show that some Mexican government’s manipulation of inconvenient Twitter conversations could impact or even disrupt potential offline crises. Another objective of the presented research is to set a baseline for future efforts focused on how Latin American democratic regimes behave and generate digital communication on social media platforms.

While music as an artistic form is well studied, the individuals behind the art receive relatively less attention. In this article, we provide evidence of celebrity advocacy with a systematic examination of musicians’ political engagement on Twitter. This study estimates the extent to which musicians use Twitter for political purposes, with particular attention to whether such engagement varies across music genres. Through a computational-assisted analysis of 2,286,434 tweets, we group 881 musicians into three categories of political engagement on Twitter: not engaged (comprising the majority of artists), circumstantial engagement, and active political engagement. We examine the latter categories in detail with two qualitative case studies. The findings indicate that musicians from different genres have distinct patterns of political engagement. The Christian music genre shows the most engagement as a whole, especially in philanthropy. On the contrary, the most active accounts are rock and hip-hop artists, some of whom discuss political issues and call for mobilization. We conclude with suggestions for future research.