Struggling for integration: universalist and separatist discourses within El Sistema Sweden

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the El Sistema programme, which started up in Sweden in 2010 with the objective to deal with segregation problems typical for Swedish urban areas. The purpose of the article is to examine how promoting integration through music and music education is constructed within El Sistema as a way to help children growing up in multi-ethnic suburbs participate in Swedish society. The empirical material used derives from two different ethnographic research studies conducted in Gothenburg and Malmö. The results show that integration is constructed through two antagonistic discourses competing for hegemony. In the first, the idea of integration is based on a rhetoric of similarities between people playing music together, a rhetoric drawing on the modernist idea of humans as universal and alike. In the second, integration is articulated through a rhetoric of differences related to cultural affiliation.

KEYWORDS:

• El Sistema Sweden
• integration
• postcolonial theory
• ethnography
• discourse analysis

Notes on contributors

Åsa Bergman holds a Ph.D. in musicology and is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the Department of Cultural Sciences, University of Gothenburg. In 2009, she defended her thesis “Growing Up with Music. Young People's Use of Music in School and during Leisure Time”, an ethnographic study of adolescent identity formation in relation to music. Her research moves in the borderlands between musicology, music pedagogy and cultural studies, and her research interest lies in issues of identity, learning and power in relation to various types of music practitioners.

Monica Lindgren, Ph.D., is Professor in Music Education at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. She earned her doctorate in 2006 at the University of Gothenburg with the thesis “Bringing Order to the Aesthetic in School. Discursive Positioning in Discussions with Teachers and Head teachers”. Since then she has worked as a teacher and researcher at the Academy of Music and Drama. Her research interest is directed towards aesthetic/artistic learning in relation to issues of power, identity and control in various types of teaching contexts.

Eva Sæther is a Professor in music education at Lund University, Malmö Academy of Music (MAM) and the Reader at University of the Arts Helsinki. Her research interests include social inclusion in music education, intercultural perspectives, creativity and sustainability. She was one of the initiators of the Nordic joint masters programme GLOMAS. Her doctoral dissertation “The Oral University” (2003) contributes to the discussion on intercultural music education and the dichotomy of formal–informal learning.