This panel brings together music education scholars from Ireland, Australia, Finland, and Canada to examine how music education intersects with, and is implicated in, contemporary social crises. Drawing on critical and post-structuralist theories, participants interrogate dominant narratives of music education as a unifying, redemptive, or healing force, seeking more nuanced understandings of researchers’ and educators’ roles and ethical responsibilities amid intensifying social division and global instability. Participant #1 opens the panel by interrogating how music and citizenship become entangled with crises of nationhood, bordering, statelessness, and exclusion. This is especially pertinent when considering asylum seeking and the status of ‘citizens’ and ‘non-citizens’. Geoff Baker’s (2021) critique of El Sistema continually questions an institution that regularly invokes the term citizenship while producing ‘loyal subjects, trained to obey authority, rather than good citizens, educated to participate in democratic processes’ (161). The term ‘artistic citizenship’ has also been heavily criticized, as a ‘discourse of privilege that recreates violence against vulnerable peoples, or fails to witness their pain’ (Bradley 2018, 73). This paper presents examples from ethnographic research with children and adults who have been forcibly displaced to illustrate how, through music, one can invent places from which to respond to vocal and spatial violence. Illustrations are proffered from both participatory performance and classroom practices of (non-)participation. The illustrations offer a redefinition of what it means to belong in the here and now of music making while living in very precarious ways. Thus, the discussion invites reflection on the ways in which citizenship can be practiced in music education and work against a designation of ‘non-citizen’. Participant #2 addresses one of the most urgent human rights crises in contemporary Australian society: the inequitable criminalisation and treatment of justice-involved youth (Australian Human Rights Commission 2024). While music programs aimed at ‘at-risk’ youth are often framed as therapeutic tools for rehabilitation or diversion, this paper critically examines how such initiatives may inadvertently reinforce carceral logics, positioning young people within systems of control, discipline, and moral reform, while obscuring the racialised, gendered, and classed dynamics that underpin youth criminalisation. Drawing upon observation and interview data with music program facilitators, the paper examines how institutional agendas often shape the aesthetics, outcomes, and narratives of these programs in ways that align with violent, colonial state structures. In response, the paper argues for a reorientation toward musicking as witness: not as a mechanism of correction, but as a relational and politicised activist practice capable of amplifying structural injustice while affirming youth subjectivities that are too often silenced, pathologised, or rendered disposable. Participant #3 discusses the crisis of the publics and its effects on music education scholarship as a democratic practice. For decades, critical educators have warned about the erosion of the public and the decline of democratic public spaces due to the indoctrination of political neutrality and the neoliberal privatization of public life. As a response, education must be reimagined as public pedagogy. The presentation draws on recent scholarship that considers the unarticulated potential of public pedagogy within music education. The public is not given, but must be constantly identified, communicated, and enacted as a prerequisite for democracy. For Hanna Arendt (1958), the public space — the realm where individuals appear through action and speech — is fragile. This notion of the public(s) helps music education scholars to see music’s power not only through social action or artistic citizenship but as an ongoing complex political and (public) pedagogical practice that enables people to experiment with, and enact, publicness and to defend music education as part of democratic life. Closing the panel, participant #4 engages with the risks of coercive hope in which our own field participates, in asking: how can we bring about radical and positive change that is not an imposition? Going against the promises of “worldly futuring” in music education, and drawing on theoretical insights from Derrida, Badiou, and others, this paper argues that institutional music education often constructs a deflated world, exhausted by critique yet resistant to transformation. Through a critical examination of “worldly futuring” from the perspectives of both the dispossessed and the milieu, the paper proposes “worldlessness” as a Badiouian Event: a refusal of prescribed futurity that opens a space for radical alterity. This stance, grounded in Derridean ethics, exposes music education’s reliance on what it systematically excludes. In imagining a radically different future, the paper argues for resisting the impulse toward commonality and instead embracing the frayed edges of the world’s limits. Engaging with Tadiar’s reflections on writing and defeat, the question is posed: Can music education mediate life without capturing it? Confronting our philosophical responsibility to refuse the domestication of time, this contribution suggests that we may better embrace the incommensurable possibilities that lie beyond the world of capture.