The Road Goes Ever On: Estelle Jorgensen’s Legacy in Music Education. Edited by Randall Everett Allsup & Cathy Benedict 209 Section IV – A Passage to Elsewhere Chapter 16 Re-discovering/Facilitating Intimacy in Borderscapes of Higher Music Education Eleni Lapidaki, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece lapidaki@mus.auth.gr Abstract The chapter explores intimacy as a critical site of power and resistance. More specifically, intimacy is considered as an arena in which social and political identities are negotiated, while inclusions and exclusions are continually established or disputed. I will argue for the adoption of a politics of intimacy that aims towards a more nuanced and less reductionist higher music education that can help us articulate the complexity of spaces of proximity as greatly as we live it. Such a reflection offers us opportunity to adopt a variable filter that sheds light on certain characteristics of borders, freedom, and the ways political power gives advantages to some people while failing others. The chapter concludes with a call to use research and practice in higher music education to understand intimacy between the self and the Other as a fresh approach to social transformation of educational borderscapes as it creates spaces in which people can express and deepen their interpersonal relations in ways that would not be possible merely through instituting rigid conventional music educational practices and policies. I am sick Of having to remind you To breathe Before you suffocate Your own fool self Forget it Stretch or drown Evolve or die