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The Word "Refugees" Will AlwaysBe Stuck to Us: Music, Children,and Postmigration Experiences at theSimrishamn Kulturskola in SwedenCarrie Ann Danielson

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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF MUSIC

THE WORD “REFUGEES” WILL ALWAYS BE STUCK TO US:

MUSIC, CHILDREN, AND POSTMIGRATION EXPERIENCES AT THE SIMRISHAMN

KULTURSKOLA IN SWEDEN

By

CARRIE ANN DANIELSON

A Dissertation submitted to the College of Music

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

2021

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Carrie Danielson defended this dissertation on March 26, 2021.

The members of the supervisory committee were:

Michael B. Bakan

Professor Directing Dissertation

Sara Hart

University Representative

Frank Gunderson

Committee Member

Ayesha Khurshid

Committee Member

Panayotis League

Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and

certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

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To the children and young people of Simrishamn

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As any ethnographer knows, projects like this would not be possible without the trust, support,

time, energy, and patience of their collaborators. I am so lucky to have worked with the staff,

students, and teachers of Simrishamn’s Kulturskola—an organization that has embraced me with

open arms, allowed me to ask “the hard questions,” and has taught me so much throughout this

process. To Sylvia, Anna-Carin, Hanna, and Anna—I am especially grateful for all of the extra

work you have done to make this project happen. To the rest of the staff and students of the

kulturskola—Anja, Annika P., Annika I., Agneta A., Agneta P., Chanan, Charlotte, Christina,

Firas, Henrik, Jon, Karna, Katalin, Lars, Lina, Malin, Mariel, Mårten, Matilda, Matts, Monica,

Nina, Pelle, Per, PG, Rahaf, Sophie, Sylvia E., Sven, and the many brilliant, compassionate, and

dedicated young people I have met during this journey—thank you for everything. It is a

privilege to call you not only research collaborators, but friends, and I cannot wait to see you

again.

One of the most important factors in a graduate student’s success is their scholarly

community. I do not know where I would be without the guidance of my advisor Michael Bakan.

You have challenged me, supported me, and helped me grow into the scholar that I am today. I

cannot thank you enough. To my committee members—Frank Gunderson Sara Hart, Ayesha

Khurshid, and Panayotis League—I am beyond thankful for your perspectives and advice

throughout the course of my graduate career. I also owe a special thanks to Meg Jackson, who

played such a key role in the formative stages of this research, and whose insights have helped

shape so much of this dissertation. Thank you to the entire Florida State University Musicology

Area, and especially to my immediate graduate cohort Emily Allen, Drew Griffin, McKenna

Milici, Jason Mitchell, Holly Riley, Nikki Schommer, and Ryan Whittington for being such a

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strong support system over the years. An extra big thanks is reserved for Emily Allen, who has

been my go-to person since the very first day of graduate school. We have come so far since

then.

There are so many people who have contributed to this work, both within and beyond the

walls of FSU. I cannot possibly thank everyone properly, but I would like to acknowledge

Jennifer LaRue, Adriana di Lorenzo Tillborg, Cecilia Jeppsson, Talieh Mirsalehi, Eva Sæther,

Ben Teitelbaum, Anders Rønningen, and Torgny Sandgren for countless wonderful

conversations and collaborations. I would also like to express my gratitude to the Lund

University Department of Cultural Studies for their hospitality during my 2019-2020 fieldwork.

Special thanks to Tom O’Dell and Lizette Gradén for their unending support and insights, as well

as Mia Krokstäde for proofreading the Swedish excerpts of this dissertation. Thank you also to

the Presser Foundation, the Florida State University Graduate School, and the FSU Musicology

Area for their generous financial support of this project. I am eternally grateful.

Finally, I would like to thank my family. Mom, Dad, Kathy, and Connie—you have

believed in my every step of the way. I couldn’t have done it without you. Tack så mycket.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ ix Abstract ............................................................................................................................................x 1. INTRODUCTION ......................................................................................................................1 Context of the Study ...................................................................................................................2 The Simrishamn Kulturskola .......................................................................................................6 Telling Refugee Stories .............................................................................................................16 Refugees and Postmigration Considerations ............................................................................20 Children and their Cultural Networks .......................................................................................23 Emotional Formations and Frontiers ........................................................................................24 Doing Ethnography with Children and Young People .............................................................27 Love and Loss: The End of Summer 2016 ...............................................................................29 2. “LYSSNA TILL MUSIKEN” ...................................................................................................32 Arriving at the Sommarkulturskola ...........................................................................................33 Building Hospitable Spaces ......................................................................................................38 3. SOMMARKULTURSKOLAN 2018 .......................................................................................40 Chatting with Students ..............................................................................................................41 Creating Networks .....................................................................................................................43 4. GAITHA ...................................................................................................................................45 “Här kommer Pippi Långstrump” and “Idas sommarvisa” .......................................................46 “Shakhbat Shakhabit” ...............................................................................................................49 Gaitha’s Musicultural Engagement ..........................................................................................50 Reflexive Questions for Teachers and Facilitators ...................................................................52 5. SAM ..........................................................................................................................................54 “Syrien du vackra land” ............................................................................................................55 Reconnecting with Sam ............................................................................................................64 Self-Definition through Songwriting .........................................................................................65 6. A TRIP TO THE THEATER ....................................................................................................68 An Evening at Scen Österlen .....................................................................................................70 On Possibilities ..........................................................................................................................73 Building a Kulturskola of Care .................................................................................................76

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7. ORIENTALISK DANS CLASS ...............................................................................................78 Dancing Dabke ..........................................................................................................................79 “Homeland Musics” and their Complexities .............................................................................83 8. KULTURGARANTIN ..............................................................................................................86 Making Music in Simrislund .....................................................................................................86 Dancing in Borrby .....................................................................................................................88 The Right to Culture ..................................................................................................................90 9. ZAK ..........................................................................................................................................92 Interviewing Zak .......................................................................................................................94 Young Refugees and the Importance of “Being Good” ............................................................96 The Library Concert ..................................................................................................................97 “Sounding Arabic”: Markedness in Public Space and Performance .......................................101 “Ung och naiv” ........................................................................................................................102 Adultness and Individuality .....................................................................................................104 10. ON TEACHING REFUGEE STUDENTS ............................................................................106 Coffee with Henrik ..................................................................................................................108 The Folk Music Ensemble .......................................................................................................111 A Conversation with Sven .......................................................................................................112 Transformations in Teaching and Learning ............................................................................114 11. RETROSPECTIVES .............................................................................................................116 Nordic Dialogues: Samir and Yousef’s Reflections ................................................................117 Nour’s Reflections ...................................................................................................................121 The Kulturskola as a Transitional Space .................................................................................124 12. CONCLUSION ......................................................................................................................125 APPENDICES .............................................................................................................................129 A. HUMAN SUBJECTS COMMITTEE APPROVAL MEMORANDUM ...............................129 B. HUMAN SUBJECTS COMMITTEE RE-APPROVAL MEMORANDUM .........................131 C. GENERAL CONSENT FORM ..............................................................................................133 D. PARENTAL CONSENT FORM ............................................................................................136 E. VERBAL CHILD ASSENT FORM A ...................................................................................138 F. VERBAL CHILD ASSENT FORM B ...................................................................................139

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References ....................................................................................................................................140 Biographical Sketch .....................................................................................................................146

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: A map of Sweden's Skåne region, including Simrishamns kommun. Generated by the author via OpenStreetMap. January 16, 2021. .................................................................................6 Figure 2: Godsmagasinet is one of the main kulturskola buildings in Simrishamn. Photo by the author. July 10, 2018. .......................................................................................................................9 Figure 3: Rosa huset is located near the town's rose garden and is home to the kulturskola's art program, music classes, and Kulturgarantin offices. Photo by the author. July 10, 2018 .............10 Figure 4: Participants draw inspiration from photographs during a Sommarkulturskola dance class. Photo by the author. July 4, 2018. ........................................................................................16 Figure 5: The Sommarkulturskola uses different colored armbands to indicate a student’s choice of subject—red for dance, white for art, blue for circus, and brown (not pictured) for music. Photo by the author. June 19, 2017. ...............................................................................................34 Figure 6: The boys' handwritten lyrics for "Syrien du vackra land," including Anna's edits. Photo by the author. July 11, 2018. ..........................................................................................................60 Figure 7: Students form two dabke lines during a dance rehearsal in Simrishamn, Sweden. Still image from video captured by the author. November 6, 2019. ..............................................80 Figure 8: "Här kommer Lars och Anna." Photo by the author. November 19, 2019. ...................87 Figure 9: (From left to right) Samir, Yousef, and Jasmin watch footage of themselves in preparation for their interview with the Norwegian Cultural Council. Photo by the author. October 23, 2019. .........................................................................................................................118

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ABSTRACT This dissertation centers on the stories and perspectives of young refugees from Syria and

Afghanistan enrolled in Sweden’s municipal music-and-arts school, or kulturskola, programs.

Kulturskolor are voluntary music and arts programs regulated by Sweden’s local municipalities.

These music-and-arts schools were established in the 1930s and 1940s, corresponding with the

rise of Sweden’s welfare state system. There are schools in nearly every one of Sweden’s 290

municipalities, each serving to provide opportunities for its enrolled children to meet and

exchange ideas and cultural experiences through music and related arts activities.

Working under the premise that children are agents of their own musicultural identities,

this study aims to reveal not only how musical institutions such as the kulturskola create and

challenge discourses and practices surrounding integration, diversity, and social inclusion, but

also how children—the very people whom these programs are meant to serve—understand and

confront these issues through music and the arts. One of Sweden’s more progressive

kulturskolor, the Simrishamn Kulturskola, serves as both my central case study for exploring

these phenomena and as the basis for developing a broader theoretical conception of how music-

and-arts institutions contribute to larger processes of cultural friction, transfer, and exchange in

diversifying societies.

Drawing upon twelve months of ethnographic research at the kulturskola in Simrishamn,

Sweden, I investigate how these historically democratic institutions feed into young people’s

postmigration experiences and interactions through the following themes: 1) language learning,

2) relationship building, 2) care and hospitality, 3) learning about other people and customs, 4)

self-definition and borderwork, and 5) social mobility. These themes emerge through analysis of

several ethnographic narratives contained within this study and speak to some of the many ways

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that the young people define and negotiate “how [they] want to live together in societies

characterized by increasing heterogeneity” through their participation in the kulturskola

(Foroutan 2016, 248).

At the end of the day, this dissertation seeks to find a practical solution for creating more

inclusive music learning environments based on the lived experiences of young refugees and

former refugees participating in Simrishamn’s kulturskola programs. Discussion therefore

includes, but is not limited to, the following issues: how children see their own participation in

the school, how they encounter diverse musical repertoires, and how they musically navigate

new social and cultural networks. The results of this research show that while the young people

in this study have found their experiences at the kulturskola meaningful, there are also moments

of tension surrounding musical content and approach. These moments, however, have led to

further transformations in the program’s inclusion efforts and thus offer a compassionate model

for other individuals and institutions whose goals include reaching refugee children and young

people through music and the arts.

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Did you hear the story about the boy with the sticks? It’s so beautiful. There was an eight-year-old boy from Syria, and he was always so silent. He didn’t talk the first two weeks [he was here] at all. The only thing he said was in Arabic: “yes” or “no.” But then he started to get involved with [the circus teacher] Isak, who had all these diablo sticks. So this kid—he started to put the sticks into different patterns on the floor, and you could see by his body language that he was suddenly concentrating. Something was happening. Then, suddenly, he ran over to Isak and started talking really loud in Arabic. He was talking so fast, and everyone—the teachers, the kids—they were like, “WHAT? He TALKS!” The translators had a hard time keeping up, but we learned that he remembered a memory from Syria from when he was little. Because of his age, he’s been a refugee (he had been on the run for maybe three years in camps in other countries) for most of his childhood. But just then he remembered in the forest when he and his mom in Syria were playing with sticks from the tree making patterns and pictures on the ground, and he was so happy. When we talked about doing the Sommarkulturskola (Summer Culture School), we talked about wanting the kids to make new memories for childhood, but now we also realize that we open up old memories from childhood, and that was really big.

-Sylvia Carlsdotter, July 11, 2018.

The above story was told to me in July 2018 during an interview with Sylvia Carlsdotter, head of

the municipal music-and-arts-school, or kulturskola, in Simrishamn, Sweden. The “boy with the

sticks” has since left Simrishamn, yet his story speaks to one way that kulturskola leaders have

worked to meet the social, cultural, and psychological needs of children and young people in and

outside of the municipality.

This dissertation is an ethnomusicological study of young refugees’ sociocultural

engagement with music making at Swedish kulturskolor, or “culture schools.” Kulturskolor are

voluntary music and arts programs regulated by Sweden’s local municipalities. There is no

national curriculum for these programs. Rather, they are dependent on each municipality’s

concepts of local music and culture. Music teaching and learning in these schools thus varies,

ranging from training in western classical music to participation in Swedish folk and popular

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musics. There is, however, a general consensus that kulturskolor should: a) provide a flexible

and equal opportunity-directed approach toward fostering musical engagement, and b) reflect the

objectives of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, including the right

for children to be active creators of and participants in arts and culture. Kulturskolor in Sweden

have thus since their inception served as sites for children to meet and exchange ideas and

cultural experiences; today the scope of such exchange extends to encounters between Swedish-

born and refugee children as well.

Working under the premise that children are agents of their own musicultural identities,

this study aims to reveal not only how musical institutions such as the kulturskola create and

challenge discourses and practices surrounding integration, diversity, and social inclusion, but

also how children—the very people whom these programs are meant to serve—understand and

confront these issues through music and the arts. The Simrishamn Kulturskola, an institution

whose programs for refugee children I have studied since April of 2017, serves as both my

central case study for exploring these phenomena and as the basis for developing a broader

theoretical conception of how music-and-arts institutions contribute to larger processes of

cultural friction, transfer, and exchange in diversifying societies.

Context of the Study

Sweden has long prided itself on its reputation as a nation that champions humanitarian causes

and multicultural tolerance, acceptance, and inclusion. Within the past decade, however, the

Swedish proclivity for global citizenship has become stretched by the arrival of over 200,000

refugees—approximately two percent of the country’s population of ten million people—to

Sweden. Although these numbers are small in comparison to the millions of refugees now

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residing throughout Western Europe, Sweden’s acceptance rate for refugees and asylum seekers

remained one of the highest per capita on the continent from 2015 to 2016. The presence and

participation of these refugees thus has had a sizeable impact on Swedish conceptions of global

inclusivity, human rights, and cultural identity.

The number of refugee and asylum-seeking children arriving in Sweden during the 2015-

2016 influx pressed the nation’s citizens and government to find new and creative ways to

approach the influx of newly arrived and unaccompanied youth. While most policy attention has

justifiably been directed toward food and housing concerns, there is also a historical

understanding among Swedes that the arts and arts education provide meaningful pathways to

global citizenship, community, and selfhood. Affording newly arrived children with

opportunities in artistic and cultural expression has therefore become a priority among Swedish

communities. The kulturskola has long stood as an institution committed to the provision of such

experiences for children, and I have therefore chosen to make the efforts of kulturskolor to adapt

to the new sociocultural and political landscape of contemporary Sweden the focus of this study.

A Brief Overview of the Swedish Kulturskola

The formation of Sweden’s kulturskola system directly corresponds with the rise of the Swedish

Social Democratic Party beginning in the 1930s and 1940s. This party, which established the

folkhemmet, or “people’s home” concept now heavily associated with Sweden’s early welfare

state system, viewed music and arts as a major component of Swedish citizenship and

democratic “re-awakening.” Arthur Engberg, Minister of Education and Cultural Policy at that

time, believed in a cultural policy that would “create general participation in the spiritual

treasures represented by enlightening art, music, theater, and literature,” which would thus give

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each citizen “understanding, skill, and readiness to sacrifice his own good for the common good”

(Engberg 1938). Municipalities in Sweden thus began to promote the kulturskolor (previously

kommunala musikskolor, or “municipal music schools”) as a way to access the self-cultivation

and skillsets that exemplified their status as an open democratic society. The type of self-

cultivation, or bildning,1 for which Enberg advocated remains a prominent part of Sweden’s

national concept today through universal education and music and arts initiatives (Harding

2015).

Municipal music school models emphasized training in western classical music as a

means of cultivating high art and bourgeois values (Lilliedahl and Georgii-Hemming 2009).

Since then, these schools have evolved to include folk music, commercial music, and other art

forms, and include special programs aimed toward initiatives such as refugee inclusion, LGBTQ

advocacy, and disability rights. In other words, the kulturskola, in addition to being a site for

musical and artistic engagement, has become a site for the promotion of children’s rights and

culture.

Questions of inclusivity and diversity are at the forefront of discussion among kulturskola

researchers in the Nordic regions, who often consider Simrishamn the “exception” to the

standard kulturskola model. According to a study by Cecilia Jeppsson and Monica Lindgren,

The typical Swedish Community School of Music and Arts [kulturskola] student is a Swedish-born girl with well-educated parents. Children of parents who play an instrument or sing are more likely to find their way to the school, and the level of support that parents provide contributes to the children’s persistence in their studies. (2018)

1 Bildning is a Swedish term influenced by 19th-century German ideas of Bildung, which can be loosely translated as self-cultivation. The term is tied to ideas about education, particularly adult and extracurricular education. For more information, see Elias 2000; Spranger and Knoll 1986; and Harding 2015.

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This dissertation focuses on another side of this story—on a population of young people

whose identities contrast with those of the “typical” kulturskola student. It seeks to find a

practical solution for creating more inclusive music learning environments based on the lived

experiences of young refugees and former refugees participating in Simrishamn’s kulturskola

programs. In telling the stories of these young people and their experiences, I aim to fill a lacuna

in kulturskola research, outlined by Anders Rønningen, Cecilia Jepsson, Ariana Di Lorenzo

Tillborg, Hanna Backer Johnsen, and Finn Holst in their impressive survey of kulturskola

research in the Nordic countries (Rønningen, et al. 2019). In that work, they demonstrate that

while topics such as “democracy and inclusion” have attracted the attention of several

kulturskola researchers (Bergman, Lindgren, and Sæther 2016; Boeskov 2017; Di Lorenzo

Tillborg 2017; Karlsen 2017; Rønningen 2017), student perspectives on their own kulturskolor

experiences have received insufficient scholarly attention.2 My goal is to redress that lacuna

within the context of a study encompassing broader issues and discourses of democracy and

inclusion. In forming this bridge, it is hoped that the work will be of interest and practical value

not only to other scholars, but to teachers and policymakers working in the areas of kulturskolor,

arts education, and/or refugee inclusion as well.

I should note that compared to other kulturskolor in Sweden, Simrishamn’s program is

somewhat small, but arguably plays a more central part of community life than in cities where

students have access to a broader range of cultural activities. It is therefore necessary that I

provide a disclaimer here: the Simrishamn Kulturskola cannot, and should not, be understood to

represent kulturskolor in Sweden as a whole. However, by making its institutional approaches to

refugee inclusion explicit, I hope to create a space where the possibilities and pitfalls of such

2 Research in this area has been limited, but there are examples. See Bergman 2009, Jeppsson and Lindgren 2018, and Kuuse 2018.

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initiatives can be appropriately critiqued, understood, and potentially adapted for other people

and institutions whose goals include reaching refugee children and young people through music

and the arts.

The Simrishamn Kulturskola

The Simrishamn Kulturskola is located in a small tourist city on the southeastern coast of

Sweden’s Skåne province. A former fishing village in the country’s picturesque Österlen region,

Simrishamn has become a destination city for summer visitors from Stockholm, as well as from

Germany, Denmark, and other parts of Sweden. The area is home to several independent artists,

craftsmen, and restauranteurs, and is known for its natural beauty, idyllic farmlands, medieval

ruins and architecture, and warm, summer light.

Figure 1: A map of Sweden's Skåne region, including Simrishamns kommun. Generated by the author via OpenStreetMap. January 16, 2021.

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In 2015, Simrishamn received one of the highest number of refugees per capita in

Sweden, with over 1400 refugees and asylum seekers arriving in the municipality. This, in part,

had to do with the municipality’s ability to house and support a large number of new arrivals.3

During this time, volunteers in the community collected clothing and prepared the town’s old

hospital building as temporary housing. School headmasters strategized ways to accommodate

students who would be (re)starting their compulsory education in the upcoming days, and like

many communities throughout Sweden and the rest of Europe during that time, Simrishamn’s

residents found themselves acting quickly in order to welcome these families and individuals to

their municipality.

When Sylvia first described this time to me during an interview in 2018, she told me

that, “the community was just kind of expected to pitch in. It wasn’t spoken. It wasn’t written.

We didn’t get a directive for doing it. We didn’t get an email saying, ‘Ok, everyone has to work

for this.’” As she continued to describe the impact of the 2015 refugee influx on the

municipality, she explained that “there were, like, 1,050 volunteers or something, and it was

maybe—I don’t know—1300 refugees. People were emptying their houses and helping out in a

fantastic way…At that time, everything went so fast, so the state didn’t have time to inform the

communities that [the refugees] would come. It was actually through social media that we knew

they were coming in the night. The woman who worked at the refugee camp would get a call

[from the Migration Agency] at, say, 8:00 in the evening saying they were coming. The first

buses would then come at 2:00 in the night, maybe five or six hours later…So the schools didn’t

3 Per the Swedish Migration Agency, refugee placement in Sweden is based on several factors, including the total number of people in a municipality, the municipality’s labor market, the number of children and young people already in the municipality, and family reunification. Simrishamn had spaces to house residents and many volunteers early on, which is one reason that they have accepted a larger number of refugees than some of its neighboring municipalities. For more information on refugee placement and Swedish asylum law, see migrationsverket.se .

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know, but the next day, the kids would be standing there outside with their parents. And for the

headmasters—they just needed to solve this—to bring [the kids] into the warm school… it feels

like the community has just woken up from this kind of intense, practical problem solving. I still

get goosebumps because this time really was something beautiful. All these smaller communities

as ours, for example—we didn’t have the experience as Malmö or the other big cities. We only

had a few ‘foreigners’— refugees—here before. So this was something we all felt really deeply.”

The community’s efforts to accommodate its new residents continued throughout the fall

and well into the following year. Within three months, Simrishamn had set up a bustling

“integration house” where refugees and asylum-seekers of all ages could meet to practice writing

Swedish, print paperwork, craft CVs, join support groups, and receive help navigating Swedish

society. The municipality placed unaccompanied children into the care of temporary legal

guardians, found appropriate mother-tongue teachers for each of the area schools, and started

moving those residing in reception centers into more permanent housing. The municipality

eventually opened an additional grundskola (compulsory school) to accommodate the growing

number of young people in the community. This “period of intense problem solving” forced

individuals and municipal administrations to work together in new ways—to build networks

between each other, to find solutions for the immediate and long-term needs of refugees in

Simrishamn, and to come up with innovative approaches for connecting refugees to the larger

community. One result of these efforts was the kulturskola’s Sommarkulturskola, or Summer

Kulturskola, program. As the years have progressed, these efforts have extended to other areas of

the kulturskola, too.

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Overview of the Program

One only needs to walk a few feet from the train station in Simrishamn to hear the melodic

sounds of trumpets, clarinets, and guitars wafting through the windows of Godsmagasinet, the

kulturskola’s main music building. The large, former warehouse building features seven

soundproofed teaching studios, administrative offices, and a kitchen/staff room where many of

the music teachers gather between lessons.

Figure 2: Godsmagasinet is one of the main kulturskola buildings in Simrishamn. Photo by the author. July 10, 2018.

Godsmagasinet is one of four main buildings that comprise Simrishamn’s kulturskola.

The others, Rosa huset (“The Pink House”), Dansens hus (“The Dance House”), and Valfisken

Gallery, also host the school’s offices and activities. Rosahuset hosts the school’s art,

photography, and film clubs, as well as the violin and flute studios. It has a large kitchen and

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living room and a backyard garden full of fruits, vegetables, and flowers, lovingly maintained by

Jon, the school’s caretaker. Dansens hus and Valfisken host the school’s dance classes. The

latter, Valfisken, shares a building with the community library and one of the area high schools.

It is also home to some of the kulturskola’s circus activities, though most of those classes now

take place in the fieldhouse of a nearby grundskola, where there is more space to move.

Figure 3: Rosahuset is located near the town's rose garden and is home to the kulturskola's art

program, music classes, and Kulturgarantin offices. Photo by the author. July 10, 2018.

The program itself can be conceptualized as three parts of a unified whole: Kulturskolan

Simrishamn, Kulturgarantin, and the Sommarkulturskola.4 Kulturskolan Simrishamn, or the

Simrishamn Kulturskola, is the central hub for cultural education in the Simrishamn

municipality. At the time of this writing, over 450 of the area’s students are enrolled across the

4 In 2020, the municipality added the local nature school to the kulturskola’s existing programs. Since this merger did not go into effect until after my fieldwork concluded, however, I have chosen not include it in the present overview.

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kulturskola’s various program areas, which include music, dance, circus, art, film, and

photography. The Kulturgarantin program works to give children the right to arts and culture

through workshops and performances in the compulsory schools, while the Sommarkulturksola

reaches children in the community through free summer arts programming. In total, the school

employs twenty-two pedagogues: fifteen in music,5 three in dance, and one each in circus, art,

film, and literature (not to mention various administrators and summer workers). Administrators

Sylvia Carlsdotter and Anna-Carin Uggla oversee all three components of the program, which

are further outlined in the following paragraphs.

Kulturskolan Simrishamn

The majority of music learning at the kulturskola happens within the context of individual

lessons, either at the student’s compulsory school or in one of the designated kulturskola

buildings. Students up to 19 years of age can learn to play most orchestral woodwind, brass, and

string instruments, as well as piano, guitar, voice, and drum set with a private teacher. There are

also songwriting and music theory courses, two choirs, a folk music ensemble, and opportunities

to perform in smaller instrumental ensembles throughout the year (e.g., a clarinet and trumpet

group that meets every Monday night or small pop-up orchestras that meet before performances),

as well as a rhythm class for infants and toddlers. Throughout the semester, music teachers

collaborate on special projects such as rock bands and jazz combos, or, as was the case in Spring

2020, a group focused on learning klezmer music. Some of the school’s younger string students

also enroll in the Suzuki program, which focuses on more group learning, parental involvement,

note reading, and rote learning by repetition. Unlike the Sommarkulturskola and Kulturgarantin,

5 This includes teachers in: flute, piano, guitar and bass guitar, clarinet and saxophone, violin, drums, trumpet and trombone, cello, voice, and songwriting.

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Kulturskolan Simrishamn classes do have a fee of approximately 600 SEK (around 70 USD at

the time of this writing) per semester. There are scholarships available, however, to students who

demonstrate financial need.

In addition to music education, the school offers seventeen different dance classes

spanning multiple genres and age groups. Some of the styles included in the curriculum are jazz,

ballet, house, street, contemporary, and “oriental dance.”6 Students are also exposed to other

styles (e.g., Bollywood, Swedish folk dance) in the children’s dance (barndans) and dance mix

(dansmix) courses. Circus, art, film, and photography are also available to students, though they

have smaller enrollments compared to music and dance. All dance and non-music courses at the

kulturskola are taught as group lessons and meet weekly for 45-60 minutes, depending on the

class and the teacher.

The kulturskola usually uses local churches, Valfisken, or other venues such as schools,

libraries, or art galleries for their performances. Most of these places provide their facilities to

the kulturskola for free or little cost, though the school does have a small rental space budget.

The kulturskola also holds some special events and performances at area schools. For example,

the Tomteorkester (“Tomte,” or “Santa” Orchestra), comprised primarily of kulturskola teachers,

travels to all area schools during the Christmas season performing holiday tunes and leading

customary Swedish ring dances. Each spring, the kulturskola also holds a concert featuring the

Tvåornas kör (literally, “Choir of the Second Graders”) at the pavilion in one of the local parks.

Kulturskolan Simrishamn sonically and physically permeates the town, making sure, per its

motto, that “all children are seen and heard in Simrishamn.”

6 The kulturskola uses the term “oriental dance” to describe a wide array of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) dance styles. I discuss this class and use of the term “oriental dance” further in Chapter 7.

13

Kulturgarantin

The kulturskola has a reputation in the community as an institution working in the area of

children’s rights and expressions. Beyond its regular activities, its Kulturgarantin (Culture

Guarantee) program, which was established in 2005 in response to Article 31 of the United

Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child,7 works to give children the right to arts and

culture through workshops and performances in the compulsory schools. Students begin the

program in pre-school, accessing a different art form each year. Kulturskola teachers visit

classrooms in Simrishamn and neighboring villages throughout the semester, singing, dancing,

writing stories, or taking part in other artistic activities, depending on the curriculum. Because of

this program, which was the first of its kind among kulturskolor in Sweden, there is a strong

collaborative relationship between compulsory school headmasters, teachers, and kulturskola

workers in the municipality. It is therefore relatively easy for those in Simrishamn who are

invested in children and young people to work together on special projects such as refugee

accommodation and reception. One such project was the Sommarkulturskola.

The Simrishamn Sommarkulturskola

Following Sweden’s refugee influx of 2015 and 2016, Simrishamn’s kulturskola introduced its

Sommarkulturskola program with the guiding principle of devising new ways for children and

young people of all economic, cultural, ethnic, and racial backgrounds to meet. Now an annual

7 Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child states the following:

1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts.

2. States Parties shall respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic life and shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity. (UNCRC 1981)

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program, the Sommarkulturskola is free for all participants ages 6-19 (4-19 beginning in Summer

2019), and activities range from learning Arabic dances such as dabke and singing Swedish

songs, to spinning plates, juggling, songwriting, and painting. Young people who attend the

program—refugee and otherwise—have the choice between music, art, circus, and dance classes

each day and can attend as many or few classes as they would like during the summer months.

The Sommarkulturskola departs from other local integration and inclusion initiatives in

that it is derived, in part, from children’s perspectives. In the Fall of 2015, Simrishamn’s

municipal barnombudsman (children’s ombudsman) conducted an official “Children’s Impact

Assessment” to better understand the needs and perspectives of young people in the community.

They found that a major priority for young Syrian and Afghani refugees living in Simrishamn

was to meet other children in the community. Swedish-born children and young people similarly

asked for adults to create spaces to learn more from and about newly arrived and unaccompanied

children.

In response to the results of this assessment, Simrishamn’s Culture and Leisure (Kultur

och fritid), Social Services (Socialförvaltning), and Children and Education (Barn och

utbildning) administrations, under the direction of the barnombudsman, crafted an integration

action plan8 to describe how the municipality would “work around the newly arrived”

(Simrishamns kommun 2016). Representatives from the aforementioned administration divided

the plan into seven parts: reception, accommodation, finances, preschool, school, health, and

leisure, the latter of which identified Simrishamn’s kulturskola as an institution that “enables and

creates natural effects such as strengthened language learning, individual self-esteem, good

group dynamics, and the inclusion of all children” (Simrishamns kommun 2016). The municipal

8 At the time of this writing, this action plan can be accessed at: https://www.boiu.se/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Handlingsplan_flyktingbarn-Simrishamn.pdf

15

administrations distributed the plan in hopes that it would provide information about

Simrishamn’s programs and services to residents new to Sweden, as well as create incentive for

the municipality to find new ways of including and welcoming refugees on a systematic level.

“The Sommarkulturskola is something we had wanted to do for a while,” Anna-Carin,

Head of Children’s Cultural Development, told me the first time we met in 2017. “A lot of social

workers have come to us [at the kulturskola] over the years wondering if there could be

something for the kids to do in the summer, but we didn’t have the funds. And then we had all of

these new kids [in Simrishamn], and we knew that we could reach not just them, but all

children."

“Reaching all children” thus became the Sommarkulturskola’s main priority. With

assistance from state integration funds, the municipality set up the Sommarkulturskola to create a

structured and deliberate space for all children in the community to meet. The inaugural summer

welcomed over 285 children and young people, approximately 100 of whom were newly arrived

from Syria and Afghanistan. The program’s overall numbers have continued to grow each year,

with over 400 people participating in the Summer 2019 program.

It is worth mentioning that the majority of refugee participation in Simrishamn’s

kulturskola activities is currently relegated to the Sommarkulturskola and Kulturgarantin

programs. Moreover, all students with refugee backgrounds who are currently enrolled in the

kulturskola’s year-long subject courses (e.g., music or dance lessons) participated in the

Sommarkulturskola prior to enrolling in these classes. While this might, in part, be due to the

timing of the Sommarkulturskola relative to the arrival of some of these young people, there is

also some evidence that this program has helped to bring new populations of students to the

kulturskola as a whole. The unequal ratio of Swedish-born to immigrant students between the

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Sommarkulturskola and the more traditional, year-long kulturskola program demonstrates that

there are still areas where the kulturskola can grow in terms of refugee participation and

inclusion.

Figure 4: Participants draw inspiration from photographs during a Sommarkulturskola dance class. Photo by the author. July 4, 2018.

Telling Refugee Stories

“Let’s find somewhere to sit,” Sylvia says to me as we grab our soft-serve cones from a nearby

ice cream stand. We find a spot along Simrishamn’s harbor and take a moment to breathe in the

sweet, salty air of the Baltic Sea. A group of summer tourists congregate near the water’s edge,

taking photos of the ducks swimming near the shore. Directly behind them, two children dig in

the sand with their yellow plastic shovels. We watch them for a moment, chuckling as the

smallest boy struggles to pick up a large bucket of sand. Sylvia smiles and turns to me. “You

asked why I told you that story earlier, the one about the boy with the sticks.” I nod, carefully

17

maneuvering my ice cream cone to prevent it from melting down my hand. She continues,

“Stories are strong. This story is one I’ve told many times because people get so touched. It says

something that we can’t understand so easily by other words. All these stories about the kids here

make an impact on people, since we get so personal with them, and I really think that is one of

the big golden things.”

“Do you think it works—do these stories actually change anything?” I ask.

Sylvia leans back. “Yeah, I would like to think so,” she responds. “When you get

personal and you feel something and get the feeling of wanting to change something… well,

politics is a lot of that feeling… It’s making politicians feel safe and secure about putting their

money into this. It’s about every day— they should never be doubting that it’s right.”

Throughout the course of this research, I have grappled with my own storytelling, as well

as the way my [adult] collaborators use stories in their line of work. What, after all, are the ethics

of telling a story—of crafting a narrative—especially when the subject of that story is a child?

When we tell refugee children’s stories to raise awareness or inspire sympathy toward

humanitarian initiatives, how do we know if we are doing more good than harm?

“Empowering refugees,” writes Syrian activist Rifaie Tammas, “does not have to come

through emphasizing their heartbreaking stories” (2018). Refugees do not owe us their stories,

and we as “storytellers”—as researchers, advocates, teachers, policymakers, journalists—should

be careful not to curate these stories in such a way that further marginalizes or objectifies their

experiences. This is especially true for refugee children and young people, who are often at the

center of these “vulnerability” and “heartbreak” narratives.

The figure of the refugee child as an exceptional humanitarian category has become a

central topic in discussions surrounding the so-called European refugee ‘crisis’ (Lems, Oester,

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and Strasser 2020). Perhaps the most jarring example of this can be seen in the aftermath of

Nilüfer Demir’s now-iconic photo of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi’s drowned body, colloquially

referred to as “The Boy on the Beach.” When the photo of Kurdi lying against the waves of a

Turkish beach went viral in 2015, solidarity activists, humanitarian organizations, and

policymakers immediately called for political action surrounding the refugee influx. Donations

poured into relief organizations following the publication of the photograph, while depictions of

the young refugee became the subject of several art installations and calls for solidarity with

refugees and asylum seekers arriving to Europe (Adler-Nissen, Andersen, and Hansen 2020;

Dragostinova 2016; Olesen 2018; Sajir and Aouragh 2019; Sohlberg, Esaiasson, and Martinsson

2018). Variations of the phrase “that could have been my child” accompanied the photo in

headlines and on social media, compelling some advocates to “see themselves within the

narrative” (Fehrenbach and Rodogno 2015). As Human Rights Watch emergency director Perter

Bouckaert wrote in an online essay:

I thought long and hard before I retweeted the photo of three-year-old Alan Kurdi. … What struck me the most were his little sneakers, certainly lovingly put on by his parents that morning as they dressed him for their dangerous journey. One of my favorite moments of the morning is dressing my kids and helping them put on their shoes. They always manage to put something on backwards, to our mutual amusement. Staring at the image, I couldn’t help imagine that it was one of my own sons lying there drowned on the beach. … It is not an easy decision to share a brutal image of a drowned child. But I care about these children as much as my own. Maybe if Europe’s leaders did too, they would try to stem this ghastly spectacle. (Bouckaert 2015) Demir’s photo has since come under intense scrutiny as an object of “virtual voyeurism”

and “moral spectatorship” (Ibrahim 2018). The idea of childish innocence evoked in

Bouckaert’s statement is reminiscent of larger debates surrounding child refugees in Europe—

debates in which young refugees become symbolic, somehow uniquely “pure” (by virtue of their

innocence), victims of injustice. Such victimhood discourse, argue some scholars, ensures that

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these children are “seen, but not heard” (Antony and Thomas, 2018). Therefore it is vital that

those working with refugee populations find ways to address the very real, immediate needs of

young people transitioning into new social, cultural, and national environments without

committing further acts of epistemic violence in the process.

While I do at times include young people’s migration histories in this dissertation in order

to contextualize broader discussions surrounding their experiences with the kulturskola, my main

focus is on young refugees’ lives in a postmigration environment. Postmigration, as opposed to

premigration or transmigration, has historically emphasized the experiences that occur upon and

after arrival in the host country (Anderson et al. 2004). However, more current interpretations of

the term focus on dismantling inequalities associated with “migratization” in transforming

societies (Schramm et al. 2017). In the words of cultural studies scholar Roger Bromley,

postmigration is “linked in some ways with the concept of diaspora but also detached from it in

so far as the practices emphasize a present and future trajectory rather than anchorage in an

‘originary’ culture” (2017, 37).

Sociologist Erol Yildiz employs a postmigration lens to describe “the re-narration and re-

interpretation of the phenomenon ‘migration’ and its consequences” (2013, 177), while political

scientist Naika Foroutan uses the term as a way to think about “how we want to live together in

societies characterized by increasing heterogeneity” (2016, 248). Focusing on the postmigration

aspect of these young peoples’ lives thus provides an opportunity to look beyond standard

trauma or victimization discourses—to look beyond “originary” or “roots” narratives often

associated with young refugees who are “on the move” and instead allows for an understanding

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of how children, when placed in new social situations, endeavor, through diverse strategies and

with varied degrees of success, to adapt to and transform their local environments.9

In the chapters following this introduction, I tell the story of the kulturskola through this

postmigration lens, and specifically through the lens of the young refugees and asylum seekers

who have chosen to invest their time and interest into its programs. Yet it is also important to

recognize that these young people are part of a larger ecosystem of community actors and

institutions. Their story, then, must be integrated with that of other people working to create the

spaces of safety and trust in which these young people do or do not invest: the teachers,

organizers, and larger institutional powers that be. Through the combination of these different

perspectives, I aim to demonstrate how the kulturskola acts as a type of emotional frontier where

ideas and emotions surrounding refugee inclusion and belonging are articulated and confronted

on institutional and individual levels, and where new frameworks of musicultural transmission

emerge, old ones are challenged, and myriad transformations occur.

Refugees and Postmigration Considerations

At its core, this dissertation is about belonging and how the kulturskola facilitates this. Yet any

conversation about belonging must also include discussion of non-belonging—of exclusion—and

perhaps the most excluding terminology within this context is the term “refugee” itself.

The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as “any person who, owing to a well-

founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a

particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his/her nationality and is

9 For discussion of victimization discourse in refugee literature, see Dahlgren 2016; Ensor 2010; Kaukko, Dunwoodie, and Riggs 2017; Marlowe 2010; Marshall 2014; Parker, Aaheim Naper, and Goodman 2018; Steimel 2010; and Wehbe 2018.

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unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself/herself of the protection of that

country” (United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 1951). However, as

many scholars have pointed out, this definition has become outdated and does not necessarily

account for the fact that many people applying for refugee status are doing so to escape general

violence, environmental disasters, or other emergencies (McAdam 2017). There is also

increasing concern among those working with refugee populations that the term itself introduces

additional presumptions and stereotypes surrounding refugee experiences (Georgiou and

Zaborowski 2017). There are multiple instances in the present study, for example, where students

discuss how the label “refugee” has had a profoundly negative impact on their autonomy and

livelihood. Other students, however, have embraced the term as part of their identity and see it as

a marker of resilience.

The identity of “refugee” is fraught with complexities, requiring those given this label to

navigate an equally complex social space. This means making several decisions about

negotiating and adapting to the cultural norms of a particular society and its institutions.

Typically, the onus of adaptation or “integration” has been placed upon those newly arrived in a

particular place. However, a postmigration framework involves all people, refugee or otherwise,

learning to live together in a given society. Any decisions and interactions between those

people—including musical interactions—shape the shared future of that society.

Huib Schippers, in his book Facing the Music, notes that “numerous conscious and

subconscious decisions regarding content and approach lie at the basis of any situation of music

transmission. These, in turn, dictate (or at least steer) the interaction among learners, teachers (or

facilitators), and their environments” (2009, 119). Young refugees participating in Sweden’s

kulturskolor make several choices regarding their musical and non-musical participation each

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day. In navigating diverse music-and-dance spaces, they might choose to: a) shed their pasts and

move into a more typically “Swedish” musical and cultural space, b) use music and dance as a

way to keep in touch with or access the culture of her homeland, or c) combine these options in a

way that allows them to engage in a more synergistic approach to culture and childhood.

Similarly, teachers, facilitators, and other students make choices regarding content and

approach that impact how young refugees navigate their musicultural environments. While these

decisions often promote spaces for self-definition and belonging among students, there are also

(generally well-intentioned) moments where such decisions might contribute to further

exclusion. Sidsel Karlsen, in her writings on music education in the Nordics, uses the term

“inclusion complexities” to describe these phenomena. She explains:

The concept of musical roots certainly has meaning for today’s students, also in the customary sense, these may both be ambiguous and conflicting as well as totally different from the ones traditional ascribed…. it may no longer be the best solution to pinpoint, construct, or recognize students’ cultural roots. Rather than having their cultural identities falsely assumed or exposed in unwanted ways, or their learner agency or right to self-definition overridden, children and adolescents need to learn ‘how to sail and anchor musically, and how to interact interculturally and ethically at the most local, everyday level of diversity.’ (2017, 224) I argue that a postmigration-focused approach to young people’s musical learning and

engagement focuses on the aforementioned areas where children and adolescents “sail and

anchor musically,” as well as moments of cultural friction and transfer that emerge in the

process. It emphasizes “emergent spaces of plurality” (Bromley 2017, 39), whereby there is no

single refugee experience, and where individuals define the outcomes of a musicultural space

through their interactions and experiences.

The chapters in this dissertation characterize these interactions and experiences through

one or more of the following interrelated themes: 1) language learning, 2) relationship building,

2) care and hospitality, 3) learning about other people and customs, 4) self-definition and

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borderwork, and 5) social mobility. These themes emerge through analysis of several

ethnographic narratives contained within this study and provide a foundation for broader

discussions surrounding the kulturskola and postmigration conditions. They are not in any way

meant to be comprehensive, but their power lies in the fact that they are a product of young

people’s stories and experiences.

Children and their Cultural Networks

There is a growing body of scholarship in music education and ethnomusicology that focuses on

the multiple contexts in which children and young people use, create, access, and transmit music

in their daily lives (Bickford 2017; Campbell 2010; Campbell and Wiggins 2013; Emberly 2014;

Gaunt 2006; Marsh 2008, 2017; Minks 2013; Sæther 2008; Schippers 2009). Patricia Shehan

Campbell writes:

In a consideration of children’s musical worlds, the full extent of their social networks is worthy of examination. All children live in multiple contexts, and an understanding of children in all of their dimensions necessitates an examination of these varied contexts… Educators are increasingly challenged to understand the knowledge children bring to school. They seek to integrate children’s in-school and out-of-school experiences, to validate the various learning settings, and to transfer and convert knowledge from one context to another. (Campbell 2011, 62)

Campbell’s understanding of children’s musical contexts draws upon larger ecological

models of children’s learning and development, as well as an established body of

ethnomusicological scholarship focusing on the “routes and routes” of global music making.10

Campbell points out two such frameworks in her work: 1) Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems

theory, which conceptualizes children’s environments as a nested series of systems that help to

10 See Clifford 1997, Lundberg, Malm, and Ronstrom 2000, Rice 2003, and Slobin 1993

24

create a complex and functioning whole (Bronfenbrenner 1979),11 and 2) Appadurai’s concept of

-scapes, whereby global cultural flow is characterized by movement across ethnoscapes,

technoscapes, finacescapes, mediascapes, and ideascapes (Appadurai 1996). Each of these

frameworks gives broader insight into the social and cultural networks that comprise children’s

musical environments. However, on their own, they do not necessarily account for the emotional

and individualized interactions that are at the center of some of these broader cultural

transmission practices, nor do they explicitly promote the ways that children themselves shape

culture (a point that Campbell and others working in the area of children’s musical cultures have

dedicated significant scholarly attention to rectifying). It is therefore important to consider

additional models that center more on the day-to-day interactions and exchanges that shape

young people’s lives to provide a clearer, more accurate picture of refugee children growing up

musically in their local environments. One emerging model within childhood studies is that of

“emotional formations” and “emotional frontiers” (Olsen 2017).

Emotional Formations and Frontiers

Within the last five years, the field of childhood studies has started to move away from purely

agency-driven analyses of children’s lives and towards concepts of emotional formations and

frontiers. These concepts, developed by historian Stephanie Olsen (2017), are applied to new

ways of understanding how children are tasked with adapting to changing political, social, and

11 According to Bronfenbrenner, the structure of a child’s environment is divided into five systems: the microsystem, which includes the child’s immediate environment (e.g., parents and individuals), the mesosystem, which encompasses connections between a child’s immediate settings (e. .g, home, school, daycare), the exosystem, which includes systems that affect, but do not include the child (e.g., extended family, community health services), the macrosystem, which includes the customs, laws, and beliefs pertaining to culture and interactions, and finally the chronosystem, which refers to time and the changing nature of one’s environment. In this system, children and their environment are interdependent and exist within a complex framework of time and social space.

25

cultural situations, and how they must learn to negotiate their own feelings and responses in the

process. Olsen writes:

Children learn what is expected of them – what they should or should not feel or what they should or should not display – by doing, and by learning what works and what does not within the various emotional communities in which they operate. Emotional formations are produced and reproduced by doing, learning and articulating, in order to produce specific habits of feeling in the self or in others. (Olsen 2017, 6)

Emotional frontiers, in turn, are the points of intersection where different emotional formations

converge. They are essentially “in-between spaces,” or borderwork spaces—spaces where

children learn how to feel and navigate social norms. These are the locations where children’s

individual and communal formations (their upbringings, identities, senses of self) meet those of

their peers, and where relationships of power and childhood experiences thus have the potential

to be reconfigured. Emotional frontiers, then, are spaces where borders are negotiated and

transformed (Olsen 2015; Olsen, Vallgårde, and Alexander 2015).

As Sarah Ahmed has famously pointed out in her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion,

emotions “work to align some subjects with some others and against other others” (2013, 42).

Similarly, Olsen notes that:

Children are sites of political struggle concerning emotional formation, but also have their own agency in the power dynamics in play. This is not to say, necessarily, that theirs is a politics of intention, but nor is a child a tabula rasa, ready to be inscribed by the ascendant institutions and individuals who wish to fertilize their influence in youth. (Olsen 2017, 28).

In this sense, it is important to understand that children’s—and particularly refugee children’s—

participation in institutions such as the kulturskola is not a top-down, one-way process. Olsen,

Vallgårde, and Alexander, through their work, recognize children as agents of change and as

being at the heart of nation-building projects. Just as the kulturskola has had an impact on these

young people, they have had an impact on the kulturskola, influencing the school’s approaches to

26

teaching and learning and impacting its sociocultural impact on both the town of Simrishamn

itself and the Nordic cultural field more broadly. Thus, as the kulturskola works to create spaces

of encounter—spaces “to align some subjects with some others” (Ahmed 2013, 42)—it is, in

effect, becoming a type of emotional frontier where participants and affiliates negotiate broader

moral and ideological concepts surrounding children, refugees, and other inclusion-oriented

efforts.

This dissertation draws Olsen and other scholars working within an emotional studies

framework to illuminate further the types of relationships and interactions that are negotiated

within and through the kulturskola as a historically democratic arts institution. By applying the

emotional frontier concept to existing ecological and transmission frameworks, I demonstrate

how the cultural friction and transfer that arise within the diversity-and-inclusion-driven

approach of the kulturskola function relative to the postmigration experiences of young people

participating in the program. Discussion includes, but is not limited to, the following issues: how

children see their own participation in the school, how they encounter diverse musical

repertoires, and how they musically navigate new social and cultural networks. Moreover, it

includes considering how emotions related to children’s happiness and wellbeing dictate the

kulturskola’s general approach to these matters, while also specifically highlighting the trauma,

racism, and xenophobia that often characterize discourses surrounding refugee children in

Europe and abroad.

27

Doing Ethnography with Children and Young People

The present dissertation is based on three years of ethnomusicological research focused on the

postmigration experiences of children and young people12 from Syria and Afghanistan at the

Simrishamn kulturskola. Proceeding from a definition of ethnomusicology as “the study of how

people make and experience music, and of why it matters to them that they do” (Bakan 2015,

116), I examine how this particular group of young people and others associated with them make

and experience music (and other art forms) at the kulturskola, and why it matters to them that

they do. Children’s voices are thus at the center of this research, with special attention given to

how they understand larger concepts of cultural inclusion and exclusion, integration, and

belonging relative to their participation in the local kulturskola. Accordingly, I have adapted the

methodologies of other ethnomusicologists working in the area of children’s musical expressions

(Bickford 2017; Campbell 2010; Emberly 2014; Gaunt 2006; Minks 2002). Andrea Emberly

writes:

A fundamental process of my research has become allowing children to dictate the research agenda, to film events they deem important, to ask the questions they are interested in asking each other and to tell me all about it from their own perspectives. By asking children to document and analyze the role of music in their own lives, the children have become an integral and central part of the project—as filmmakers, collaborators, and investigators. (Emberly 2014)

My work similarly asks children to document and analyze the role of music and the arts

in their own lives. At various points throughout my ethnographic fieldwork, I have distributed

Flip camcorders among the kulturskola’s participants so that they could capture the program

from their own perspectives. My field research in the summer of 2018, for example, yielded over

700 short video clips, which, along with the participants’ explanations about what they captured,

12 I use the term “young people” throughout this dissertation to denote the transition from childhood to adulthood. There is no specific age range associated with this term, but I generally use it in reference to adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19.

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I had hoped would serve as my primary form of documentation of the school’s activities. As my

fieldwork progressed, however, I realized that integrating this data set with that generated by my

own observations of the children’s participation in their documented activities—as well as the

larger contextual realm of those activities—would also be essential. I have therefore conducted

over one hundred formal and informal interviews with students, administrators, parents, and

teachers in Simrishamn over the course of three years in order to gather additional information

about the program’s background, pedagogical strategies, and other information not captured

through the Flip camcorders. These interviews, accompanied by the children’s research

contributions and more traditional participant-observation, occurred during extended research

trips to Sweden in the summers of 2017 and 2018, and from August 2019 to June 2020,13

respectively.

A Note on Ethics

Any case study involving children, and particularly children with refugee backgrounds poses a

series of ethical challenges. Filming, photography, and other forms of documentation followed

the guidelines of kulturskola, in which students and their legal guardians could “opt in” or “opt

out” of having their likeness recorded for research or publicity purposes at the beginning of each

kulturskola session. During the Sommarkulturskola-oriented portion of this research, those who

consented to having their likeness recorded wore green dots on their name badges to indicate that

the other students, staff, and I could film their activities. Those without green dots were not

filmed or recorded in any capacity. All young people involved in this study both received and

13 Following the guidelines of Florida State University’s Office for Human Subjects Protection, no in-person research activities took place between March 24, 2020 and the remainder of my time in Sweden due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

29

were instructed in informed consent practices, per the guidelines of Florida State University’s

Institutional Review Board (IRB).

Due to their age and the often sensitive nature of our discussions, I use pseudonyms for

children and young people under the age of 18 in this study. Any interviews or conversations

originally conducted in Swedish have been translated into English by the author, sometimes with

additional assistance from kulturskola teachers and staff members. No students or parents in the

present study elected to conduct interviews in Arabic, Dari, or any other language.

Finally, I should note that it is impossible to be a full participant-observer as an adult

researcher studying young people. Though my intent with the Flip cameras was to give

additional opportunities for children to capture the kulturskola on their own terms, the final

interpretations are still ultimately mine. This speaks to larger issues surrounding the power

dynamics between adult researchers and child participants, which I have addressed in previous

projects (Danielson 2016). However, I believe the benefits of this approach, which strives for a

dialogical relationship with my younger research participants, ultimately outweigh its limitations.

My hope is that this work might encourage further discussion of how to better include children’s

perspectives in ethnographic research, while also emphasizing the role of young people in

creating and transforming their musicultural environments.

Love and Loss: The End of Summer 2016 And then it happened, at the end of the first Sommarkulturskola. A lot of kids and families that we had built relationships with—that started to feel safe and calm down—they were just suddenly moved. It happens sometimes that the decision comes [from the state] on Friday and then they have to leave on Monday morning, so they don’t have time to try to, well…And no one knew where they went. You know [our art teacher] Mariel? She just sat there and cried because all of these strong connections. When you see these kids be more and more calm and feel more safe, it’s just...it’s hard. For everybody. You’re worried. You wonder, ‘Where are you?’

-Sylvia Carlsdotter, July 11, 2018

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Just before the end of Sommarkulturskola 2016, the Swedish Migration Board made the decision

to close some of the reception centers and camps in the Simrishamn municipality. With this came

the mass movement of nearly 100 children and family members who had settled into the

community and started feeling comfortable there over the past year and a half. The final days of

the program weighed heavy on the staff and participants, who had spent so much time together

over the summer and the previous school year. “The last day [of the Sommarkulturskola] was

really special,” Sylvia said. “We had cake and a little party, but I don’t think we really realized

that this was truly the end… All these communities who invested so much time and feelings into

this… perhaps there was some miscommunication between the communities and the state. It’s

sad, because the people [in the community] think ‘oh…well, then…I guess we’ll get someone

new…but they [the refugees] never came.”

For the most part, we don’t know where many of the families who left Simrishamn are

now. Likely, they were moved to another municipality or have settled elsewhere in Europe. A

few have kept in touch on social media and now reside in Germany, Turkey, or other areas of

Sweden. Those who could afford it were able to stay in Simrishamn, often in shared-family

apartments. Private citizens helped raise funds to help them to the extent they could, but there

was not enough to keep everyone in the community.

This study follows the children who remained in Simrishamn—those who continued

attending the kulturskola and Sommarkulturskola, and who have been able to call Simrishamn

“home” for the past five years. Some have since been granted citizenship or been reunited with

their families. However, the impact of the children who have left Simrishamn cannot be

overstated. Their individual stories might not be told in this dissertation, but their former

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presence and involvement in the program has shaped the views and experiences of the teachers,

administrators, and young people who are at the center of this work.

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CHAPTER 2

“LYSSNA TILL MUSIKEN”

In June 2017, I traveled to Simrishamn for the first time to conduct a week of pilot research at

the Sommarkulturskola. My route took me to Copenhagen, Denmark, where I then took the train

across Öresund (the Sound) to Malmö, Sweden, and continued eastward. The train from

Copenhagen was already quite full by the time I boarded, but I found a spot in the bicycle car

next to a father and two of his children. We sat calmly, watching the boats pass underneath the

Öresund Bridge. As we approached the Sweden-Denmark border, I overheard the father telling

his children that we were approaching Hyllie, the first station on the Swedish side of the Sound,

and that they should have their passports ready. “We never had to do this before, but about two

years ago, this place was full of people who were coming here because their countries weren’t

safe for them anymore,” he told them. “Some of them were just kids like you. There would be

buses and buses just waiting to take them [to the reception centers], but then Sweden said they

couldn’t come anymore. Or not as many can come. They closed the borders.”

When we arrived at Hyllie, I noticed that the station was nearly empty, almost eerily so.

It bore no resemblance to the bustling scene the father had described to his kids. I exited the

train. The border control agent casually glanced at my passport, asked me a few questions about

my destination, and allowed me to proceed. As I stuffed my documents back into my backpack, I

thought about how much Sweden’s asylum policies had changed in the years following the peak

of Europe’s refugee influx. The country had shifted from having one of the most generous

asylum policies in Europe to one of the most restrictive; permanent residency and family

reunification suddenly became much more difficult to obtain, and anti-immigration rhetoric

continued to gain traction in the Swedish political sphere. I would soon learn, however, that there

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were many families in Simrishamn and other areas still navigating these policies and Swedish

life in general. The need for welcoming and hospitable environments was not gone simply

because the number of refugees and asylum seekers entering the country had dropped. In fact,

creating long-term, sustainable spaces of development and belonging, rather than short-term

“integration” projects, was perhaps even more necessary now that there was a greater sense of

permeance among those who had applied for and received residency. And while Simrishamn’s

kulturskola did not explicitly label itself a “refugee program,” an understanding that such spaces

were important not only for children with refugee backgrounds but also for other children in the

community continued to fuel the school’s larger inclusion efforts. The following ethnographic

excerpt speaks to these efforts, outlining my first visit to the Sommarkulturskola, which

incidentally was also the first day there for two cousins from Syria named Iman and Jamal.

Arriving at the Sommarkulturskola

Today is my first day at the Sommarkulturskola in Simrishamn. Sylvia has invited me to observe

the day’s two sessions: one in the morning for the younger students starting at 10:30 and one

later this afternoon at 1:00 for the older students. She greets me in the lobby near Valfisken and

introduces me to Christina, one of the area’s social workers working with the program.

“Welcome,” Christina says with a warm smile. I introduce myself and tell her that I am

interested in the work the program has been doing with kids from Syria and Afghanistan.

She nods and gestures toward the registration desk, where three Syrian children are

checking in and selecting their subjects for the day. “These three are cousins,” she whispers.

“The youngest two just arrived here yesterday from Syria. They don’t speak any Swedish yet.

The older boy has been here for a while.” We watch as the children select their color-coded

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armbands—brown to indicate that they have chosen to do music today—and receive nametags to

stick on their shirts. They all have red dots next to their names, which means they are allowed to

leave the kulturskola after class without having an adult sign them out. Not on their nametags, I

notice, is a green dot, which allows them to be photographed. I make note of this for my own

research and documentation purposes.

Figure 5: The Sommarkulturskola uses different colored armbands to indicate a student’s choice

of subject—red for dance, white for art, blue for circus, and brown (not pictured) for music. Photo by the author. June 19, 2017.

After the cousins check in, Christina leads them into the larger room where four staff

members—Hanna, Anna, Lina, and one of the youth workers—have gathered the participants

into a circle. Lina, a young Syrian woman who works as a “culture organizer” for the

kulturskola, positions herself next to the two new students, ready to help translate as needed.

“Let’s all go around the circle and say your name and one thing that you like,” instructs Hanna,

the program leader and dance teacher. “I’ll start. Jag heter Hanna och jag gillar dans (My name is

Hanna, and I like dance).” Each student introduces themselves using the same template.

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Eventually, it is the younger cousin’s turn. She looks up to Lina, who whispers the instructions to

her in Arabic. Carefully, she starts to speak:

“Jag heter Iman och jag gillar musik (My name is Iman and I like music),” she says,

pointing to her armband. Hanna smiles and points to the older cousin, Jamal, who follows Iman’s

lead. He says that that he, too, likes musik—a word they both presumably learned today.

“Very good,” Hanna responds in both Swedish and Arabic. I am impressed with how

naturally the group flows between languages, though can’t help but notice that Jamal seems a bit

skeptical. He sits cross-legged, his chin resting on both hands. Iman seems more comfortable in

the group and has already struck up a side conversation with an Arabic-speaking dance student.

After the introductions, Hanna releases each group to their respective teachers, who lead

them to their designated activity rooms. I follow Anna (the music teacher), along with Matilda

(another social worker and kulturskola parent) across the street to Rosahuset with the music and

art groups. Mariel, the art teacher, greets us at the door. About two-thirds of the students stay

downstairs with her, where the floor is covered in protective paper, ready for whatever paint

splatters, glue gun accidents, or marker leakages await it. Mariel gathers the group and gives

them a three-minute presentation about Shamsia Hassani, one of Afghanistan’s first recognized

female street artists, before releasing them to work on their own graffiti-inspired projects.

The other third of the group, including the three cousins, head upstairs with Anna and

Lina to the music room, a small area with a piano, a few faux plants, and a Victorian-style couch

that I can’t help notice looks a bit out of place. The students grab folding chairs from the closet

and arrange themselves in a circle, after which Anna pulls out her guitar and tells everyone that

they will be singing the song “Lyssna till musiken” (“Listen to the Music”). “Repeat after me,”

she says as she begins to sing an eight-bar phrase: “aj aj aj.” The group follows her, repeating the

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phrase until they settle into a groove. “Good,” she says. Anna switches the phrase, “Tom kar-

tong, tom tom kartong (empty carton, empty empty carton).” The group repeats after her again

until everyone catches on. “Keep going,” she grins as she instructs half of the group to go back to

singing “aj aj aj,” consequently layering the two melodies. The cousins have kept up so far, their

voices audible from the other side of the circle.

Anna starts to sing over the students:“Lyssna till musiken, hör hur den blir din…”

Eventually, she sets down her guitar and sings through the rest of “Lyssna till musiken” with the

group, this time adding actions to go along with the words.

Lyssna till musiken,

hör hur den blir din.

Kommer till ditt öra,

kryper sakta in.

Smyger runt i kroppen,

ner i varje tå,

upp i alla fingrarna,

ut i minsta vrå…

Listen to the music,

hear how it becomes yours.

Comes into your ears,

creeps slowly in.

Sneaks around the body,

down to each toe,

up into all the fingers,

into every little corner.

(Mecka Lind, “Lyssna till musiken”)

Once the group becomes comfortable with the actions, Anna gets the “aj aj aj’s” and

“tom kartong’s” going once again. The cousins mirror Anna the other children’s’ gestures by

cupping their hands to their ears on the words such as hör (“hear”) or pointing downwards when

singing tå (“toe”). Despite not knowing very little if any Swedish, Iman and Jamal are able to

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follow along with the activity with minimum additional instruction from Lina or the other

Arabic-speaking staff members.

Music activities that assist in language learning, but are also accessible and interesting to

native speakers, are a significant part of Anna’s pedagogy, and she uses them deliberately.

“There is a lot of really interesting stuff out there on music and language learning,” Anna tells

me a few years after this session. “I have a degree in music therapy and used to work with

Eritrean refugees up in Orsa, Sweden… I’ve used the work of Olle Kjellin, who talks a lot about

prosody—you know, how words and language sound… their inflection and [cadences] and the

melody [of the language]. Music is really helpful for learning those aspects.”14

Anna resumes the session, ending the class, as always, with a simple song she wrote

called “Tack för idag” (“Thanks for Today”). Each time she sings it, she adds the names of the

students to the song, making sure each child is included. When she gets to Iman and Jamal’s

names, they look over and smile at her, happy to be acknowledged as part of the group.

The song concludes and we lead the group back to Valfisken for checkout. Firas, the

program’s coordinator and translator, hands the students their attendance sheets so that they can

pick out a sticker to mark that they were present today. Ten stickers for the summer will earn

them a bright yellow “Sommarkulturskola” t-shirt, which Sylvia later explains is “a way to

visibly connect the kids and to have something that physically said that they belonged to

something.” The cousins check out and wave goodbye. According to Sylvia, they come back

several more times throughout the summer, and eventually claim their coveted yellow shirts.

When I return to Sommarkulturskola the following summer, I look for the cousins. They

never come back. Like many of their peers, they had moved away from Simrishamn and onto

14 See Kjellin 1992.

38

other areas of Sweden, but not before having become a part of the kulturskola’s program and

meeting many of the people associated with it.

Building Hospitable Spaces

Lee Higgins, in his work on community music making, uses the phrase “acts of hospitality” to

describe how host communities strive to create spaces of unconditional welcoming for all people

involved in community music contexts (Higgins 2012). The Sommarkulturskola is not explicitly

a community music program; in fact, Higgins would likely consider it a “formal” music

institution. However, the flexibility of its curriculum and emphasis on facilitating accessible

music-and-art experiences for all children in the community indicates that the program might lie

somewhere in the middle of community music-formal music education spectrum.

The story about Iman and Jamal’s first day at the kulturskola demonstrates one way the

kulturskola works to create a hospitable environment for those newly arrived in Sweden. As

Higgins points out, however, hospitality also implies that there is a paradoxical threshold or limit

that must be transgressed by “guests” in these spaces (Higgins 2012). In other words, the

participation of new arrivals cannot be truly unconditional; Iman and Jamal, for example, were

asked to introduce themselves in their non-native language (though translators were available), to

follow certain rules and guidelines pertaining to the Sommarkulturskola, and to participate in

pre-determined activities. These conditions could be (and likely are) exclusionary for some

children. Yet, for Jamal and Iman, these very conditions are what helped to facilitate encounters

and participation. In embracing this paradox of hospitality, the Sommarkulturskola has

ultimately created a space where new participants can transgress a threshold and become part of

a group, whether that be through language learning or building relationships with one another.

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And as the dynamics of the kulturskola have transformed to include these young people, so too

have the thresholds that participants must transgress. The idea of “guest” starts to break down,

creating more accessible places of musical and artistic expression for some children in

Simrishamn, while at the same time maintaining the general ethos of the kulturskola as an

institution of artistic learning and development.

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CHAPTER 3

SOMMARKULTURSKOLAN 2018

By the time I returned to Simrishamn in Summer 2018 for more extensive fieldwork, it had been

three years since many of the program’s refugee participants had first arrived in Sweden, and two

years since the first Sommarkulturskola program. Most of the children and young people who

had stuck around Simrishamn seemed to be doing well; they were progressing in school, had

built friendships with their peers, and often expressed feelings of joy or relief in our

conversations. Some of the children who had arrived as ensamkommande barn (unaccompanied

children) had reunited with their families since I last saw them. Yet the continued conflicts in

Syria, Afghanistan, and surrounding areas meant that Sweden would accept additional refugees

in 2018, some of whom would move to the Simrishamn municipality, where memories and

emotions surrounding the first summer still lingered.

About a week into the Summer 2018 program, I was sitting by the registration table with

Firas. We had been talking about how chatty the kids at the Sommarkulturskola had been that

morning when his face suddenly became quite plaintive. “When I remember the children—the

first time I met them. It was just… Death. War,” he said, lowering his voice, “but when we

started meeting them here—now, they start talking about their dreams—that they want to be an

engineer. I see a big change between the old times and now. And they talk about the

Sommarkulturskola and wanting to come back here. They go to school and tell their friends…”

Firas continued reflecting upon the first summer. “I remember this one kid—Ahmed. He

was alone here in Sweden. His mama was in Turkey. He was just sitting here [by the registration

desk] one day and was very sad and crying. He said ‘I miss my family,’ but I couldn’t do

anything, so we just cried together. Now, I think has come together with his family, but when I

41

see him in the street or library or wherever, we just connect again right away. He always tells me

things are going well.”

I was grateful for Firas’s reflections; they were no doubt deep and full of care and

emotion toward these young people. But I wondered about some of the kids he spoke about. Do

they remember the first summer the same way that Firas does? When they “talk about the

Sommarkulturskola,” what do they say? I decided that I would make a point to ask some of the

students for their reflections during the next class. The following section recounts portions of

that conversation. It touches specifically upon themes of relationship-building and self-definition

and features perspectives of children born in Sweden, Syria, and Egypt.

Chatting with Students

I am hanging out in Valfisken with a group of Sommarkulturskola students. It is our fika break,

where we eat fruit, drink water, and converse together before resuming our activities. We chat a

bit about some of the dance activities they just completed and their plans for the afternoon. One

of the younger boys, about seven or eight, asks if he can film the conversation with one of my

Flip cameras. Everyone in the group says it’s okay. “What do you want to ask us?” he says,

motioning in my direction.

“Maybe you have a question for us,” I say, trying to encourage him to direct the project.

“Umm… no, that’s okay. You ask us,” he says, quite firmly.

“Ok, then,” I laugh. “Well, how about this—what do you think other kids should know

about the Sommarkulturskola? What would you tell them?”

Zach, a 13-year-old from Sweden, takes a bite of his apple. “It’s fun,” he says. “There are

so many things that you can do. I am creating a soccer pitch in art. In circus, I did the tightrope.

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In dance, even if you think you can’t you can just, you know, do it. Music is fun because it’s so

easy to learn.”

Sam, a 9-year-old Syrian boy nods in agreement. “ I think other children should come to

Sommarkulturskola… There is so much you can learn, and the teachers are nice.”

A 10-year old from Syria named John pipes in: “I think [the Sommarkulturskola] is good

because you can do things that you like. I like to draw. I like art. I like to be with my friends or

be myself. You can show other people about yourself and who you are [here].” The group

pauses. I see some of the students looking around, figuring out where to go from here.

“That’s great!” I say. “Can you tell us about a time you were able to ‘show other people

about yourself’ at the Sommarkulturskola?”

Zach interjects. “Like when you meet other people you didn’t know before?”

“Sure!” I say, perhaps too enthusiastically.

Zach continues. “Well, last week I was in art and walked into the room to get materials. I

saw two kids and I asked them what they were building. They were building a car, so I asked

what they were going to do and they asked if I had any ideas, so we started talking.”

Seven-year old Amara, a young girl from Egypt, enters the conversation. “Yesterday I

brought a friend here. My mom knows her mom and we went to dance.”

“Yeah!” Zach agrees. “And sometimes you can help out with the younger kids, too. For

example, these two girls—Jasmin and Agnes—help with dance and circus and sometimes I help

the younger kids with art or music in the first part of the day. I can tell them, ‘oh, you can fix this

with the eyes’ or ‘can I get you more water?’ and things. It’s nice.”

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Creating Networks

Within the Sommarkulturskola, children form networks among one another in several ways.

They might collaborate on songwriting, create an improvised dance routine, help a friend balance

on a tightrope, or work together on an art project. Throughout my fieldwork, children have

pointed out such moments on their Flip cameras. A Swedish-born girl named Lycka captured on

film a group of four children—two from Syria and two from Sweden—choreographing a dance

routine using colorful scarves. Two young Afghan-born girls showed me their popsicle-stick

houses built alongside a young boy visiting from Stockholm, while a mixed group of young boys

recorded their peers beat-boxing into a loop machine with one of the staff members. Students

were excited to share videos of their friends trying out the aerial scarves in their circus lessons,

songs they wrote in music class, or videos of a new dance technique they learned that day.

In the above conversation, the program’s participants described the Sommarkulturskola

as “fun,” a place for meeting new people, and a place for learning and mentorship. They

mentioned several important actors—teachers, friends, parents, and the children themselves—

who work together on a daily basis to learn and perform together in an artistic capacity. Students

such as Zach and Jasmin took on “unofficial” mentorship roles (which, for Jasmin, turned into an

“official” role when she was hired as a student assistant in 2019), and children such as Sam,

John, and Amara encourage others to become a part of the program. Young people sustain the

Sommarkulturskola community by bringing in new people, by collaborating on art projects, and

by working their way into official staff positions. Through these relationships, they become part

of a community working not only toward musical and artistic expression, but toward goals of

inclusion as well.

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The conversation accounted for here was a relatively brief one, but it is representative of

several other exchanges I had with young people throughout the summer. Students placed value

in self-definition and being able to “show people about yourself” at the Sommarkulturskola. Still,

each moment of self-definition and self-expression was contained within larger interactive forces

and encounters. In other words, the main draw of the Sommarkulturskola for many of its students

was that there were other people to whom they could define and share about themselves through

music, dance, circus, or visual art. The ways that young people define themselves, however,

varies, and is not only relegated to topics such as race, ethnicity, gender, refugee status.

Sometimes, age (e.g., mentorship between older and younger students) or shared interests (e.g.,

building cars) takes precedence. At the same time, ideas concerning race and refugee status are

not fully absent from kulturskola activities and must therefore be taken into account when

analyzing the nature of relationships and encounters in this artistic space. This is especially

pertinent as teachers and students make decisions about the content and approach of teaching

certain ideas and repertoires at the school, and as further opportunities for musicultural

encounters develop.

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CHAPTER 4

GAITHA

As the summer of 2018 progressed, I met more students, many of whom had been around since

the first Sommarkulturskola. One of these students was Gaitha, a seven-year-old girl who came

to Sweden from Syria in 2015. Born in the same year that the Syrian Civil War began, her early

life was one of chronic precarity; she had not lived in a world without war in her home country.

At the age of three, Gaitha began her journey to Sweden with her father and three of her siblings,

leaving her mother and three other siblings behind in Syria. By the time she was four years old,

Gaitha had traveled through several different countries and refugee camps before finally settling

in the Simrishamn municipality.

When I met Gaitha, she had lived in Simrishamn for almost three years. She and her

family were in a situation of relative safety and stability; she went to school, lived in semi-

permanent housing, and “hung out” at the beach with her family and friends during the summer

months.15 This stability became challenged, however, by: 1) the fact that part of Gaitha’s family

remained in Syria, and 2) anti-immigrant rhetoric she faced when in contact with select members

of the community. “She is Swedish, though,” her father once said. “This is important.”

Gaitha’s age also put her in a unique situation of transition. Because she was so young

when she left Syria, she did not remember much about the war, whereas some of her older

siblings and peers remembered it quite vividly. Her identity, however, remained inextricably

linked to the conflict in Syria, as her ability to obtain asylum was contingent upon becoming

15 When I returned to Simrishamn for fieldwork in 2019, I learned that Gaitha and her family have now left Sweden. To my knowledge, they currently reside in Turkey, though I have been unable to confirm this. I hope they are safe and well, and that we can meet again one day.

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deemed “a person in need of subsidiary protection” (Swedish Migration Agency 2019). Gaitha

has thus spent most of her life navigating between her “Swedish” and “Syrian” identities, and it

is within this space of navigation and code switching—of moving between these spaces—that

the kulturskola becomes important.

The following vignettes speak to Gaitha’s navigation of these identities, shedding a

critical light on the musical lives of young refugee children in Simrishamn. Addressed here are

themes of self-definition and borderwork, as well as learning about other people and cultures.

Through Gaitha’s experiences, one can potentially develop further questions and strategies for

engaging diverse populations of students in their programs, which are outlined later in this

chapter.

“Här kommer Pippi Långstrump” and “Idas sommarvisa”

It’s mid-July in Simrishamn, and I am sitting in the music room of the Rosahuset with Anna

(the Sommarkulturskola’s music teacher), Gaitha, and eleven other children.

“What shall we sing?” asks Anna.

“Pippi Långstrump!” Gaitha exclaims without hesitation, calling for a song based on

the popular Swedish children’s stories featuring the famed character “Pippi Longstocking.”

She bursts into song, and Anna quickly follows. As the two of them sing the popular melody

from the beloved Swedish television series of the same name, the other children join in.

Gaitha continues to sing and begins to strum a ukulele, immersing herself fully in the song’s

chorus: “Här kommer Pippi Långstrump tjolahopp tjolahej tjolahoppsansa!” Gaitha utters the

song in perfect Swedish, bobbing her head, and giggles along with her friends as they

exclaim the onomatopoeic words.

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The song ends, and I ask Emma, one of the Swedish girls sitting next to me, to

describe Pippi. “Pippiiiii!” she exclaims.

“Yes! You like her?” I ask, reminiscing about my own experiences watching the

mischievous young girl with the red braids on TV during my own childhood.

“Uh huh,” Emma says. “Pippi goes on lots of adventures…and she has a monkey and it’s

so funny and her dad is a pirate and she is like…wow…but everybody in Sweden knows

Pippi…” As her words trail off, she turns to Anna. “Can we sing ‘Idas sommarvisa?’ I can sing

all of the verses.” At this point, about three other children had joined us in the music room.

“I can also sing all the words,” another Swedish boy proudly states. “We sing it at the end

of every school year.”

“Idas sommarvisa” (“Ida’s Summer Song”), like “Här kommer Pippi Långstrump”

(“Here Comes Pippi Longstocking”), is included in Astrid Lindgren’s songbook collection—

an anthology of Swedish children’s songs written by the celebrated author to accompany her

works. The songbook is frequently used during kulturskola music sessions, though many

children also sing these songs at home and at their compulsory school.

Anna asks Gaitha if she is okay singing the song.

“Ja, visst (yeah, sure),” Gaitha responds, and the children chime in:

Jag gör så att blommorna blommar

Jag gör hela kohagen grön

Och nu så har sommaren kommit

För jag har just tagit bort snön

I make the flowers bloom

I make the entire cow pen green

And now the summer has come

Because I have just gotten rid of the snow

(Astrid Lindgren and Georg Riedel, “Idas sommarvisa,” 1973.)

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As they sing, Gaitha closely watches Anna’s mouth and tries to follow along with the

lyrics. About halfway through, Gaitha stops singing, instead letting her body sway back and forth

to the beat of the music. “Did you like that song?” I ask her afterwards.

“Ja (yes),” she shrugs her shoulders and runs down the stairs to grab a snack and catch up

with her friends during a short break. Later, I find Gaitha again and ask her about music class.

“I noticed you stopped singing at one point,” I mention during our conversation about

“Idas sommarvisa.”

She scrunches her face. “Yeah… I don’t really know that song.”

“Well, that’s okay, neither do I!” I laugh.

“You don’t? But you’re a teacher.”

“Nej (no)! I am not from Sweden.” I tell her. “I just learned it!”

“My brother and I are from Syria,” she says. “But I do know Swedish. I’ve heard that

song at school, you know.”

“Is that also where you learned Pippi Långstrump?” I ask.

“No, I learned that one from Anna…and the other kids here. We sing it a lot. It’s fun.”

“Do you sing it anywhere besides the kulturskola?”

“No… well, sometimes I sing at home. Pippi is also Arabic.”

“Oh yeah?” I inquire.

“Yeah, but her name is Jinān ḏāt al-Jawrab aṭ-Ṭawīl.”

“Ah, so do you have the same song, but just in Arabic, then?”

“No, it’s different. It’s a cartoon song,” Gaitha informs me.

“Neat. Have you ever thought about teaching that version to the other kids here?” I ask.

Gaitha raises her eyebrows. “No, that’s ok. Can I go play now?”

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“Shakhbat Shakhabit”

The dance class is scheduled to begin in five minutes. Gaitha and her friends Hiba and Kala are

playing a game of tag in the large room of Valfisken, where most of the Sommarkulturskola’s

dance and circus classes take place. Hanna, the school’s dance teacher, hooks her iPad up to the

room’s sound system and selects Lebanese pop star Nancy Ajram’s “Shakhbat Shakhabit”

(“Scribbled Doodles”) from Ajram’s children’s album of the same name. As the room fills with

the familiar sound of the tabla and violin, the three children abruptly stop running and start to

dance and sing along to the music track. Moments later, several of the other children and

teenagers join, many of them recalling choreography Hanna had taught them last year for this

particular song. Gaitha continues dancing and mouthing the words to “Shakhbat Shakhabit”

before eventually joining the older girls near the front of the room and mirroring their

movements. “It seems that they all know the music,” I later say to Hanna.

“Yeah, everyone knows this album,” she replied. “[Ajram is] very popular among

grownups as well, but she has a few of these kids’ albums. The videos are so cheesy, but they’re

very fun to watch. You understand a lot of the Arabic culture if you look at the videos.”

Sung from the point of view of an adult narrator, “Shakhbat Shakhabit” features lyrics

that remind children “don’t scribble on the walls” and to “draw on the blackboard instead.” It is

one of many songs from Ajram’s album that delivers a moral message by projecting the image of

a creative, but well-behaved child. “One day you’ll be a famous artist,” Ajram sings, “but please

don’t scribble on the walls.”

As Gaitha and Hiba dance to the Arabic pop hit, I ask them what they think of the music.

“It’s great!” Gaitha and Hiba reply.

“What do you like about it?”

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“It is nice,” says Hiba.

“Yes,” Gaitha agrees.

“You like the song?”

“Yes! It is the best song. It’s funny,” notes Gaitha.

“What’s funny about it?”

“The boy is so naughty!” she giggles.

They continue to dance and resume their game of tag shortly after. I turn to some of the

Swedish girls and ask what they think of the music. “We learned this song last year,” a girl

named Effie states. “Hanna taught us a dance.” She begins to mouth some of the Arabic words

and demonstrates the choreography from the year before.

“Do you know what the song means?” I ask.

“Not really, but it’s really fun,” she replies, continuing to walk through the routine.

“Do you dance to a lot of Arabic songs here?”

“Yes, a lot of us take Oriental dance lessons from Hanna during the school year. We’ve

learned a lot.”

Gaitha’s Musicultural Engagement

Arabic-language songs are common in Sommarkulturskola dance classes due to Hanna’s

background as a professional “oriental dancer”—a term she uses to describe the wide array of

Middle Eastern and North African dance styles she teaches and performs. “I spent some time in

Damascus before the war,” Hanna once told me. “I learned Arabic there, which has been really

important for involving some of the [refugee] children in the Sommarkulturskola.” When I asked

her about teaching the songs to the children at the school, she responded, “Sometimes we talk

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about the contexts,” she notes, “but other times we just want the kids to dance and be creative. It

doesn’t really matter that ‘oh, this song is in Arabic’ or ‘this song is in Swedish.’ It’s more about

the quality.”

The context does matter for Gaitha, however. Her reaction to the “Shakhbat Shakhabit”

sound clip is quite different than that of her non-Arabic speaking peers. Whereas many children

such as Effie associate the music with a structured routine, Gaitha chooses to float freely

between her own improvisation and Hanna and Effie’s choreography. Her knowledge of the

language, moreover, means that she can access the child-directed and “funny” lyrics of Ajram in

a way inaccessible to some of the Swedish children – almost the opposite experience of what she

had with “Idas Sommarvisa.” Hearing a familiar Arabic pop song within the context of the

kulturskola gives Gaitha an opportunity to express aspects of her “Syrian” identity in what is, for

her, an otherwise “Swedish” music-and-dance space.

That being said, Gaitha is also able to express aspects of her “Swedishness” through

performance of songs such as “Pippi Longstocking.” It is worth noting that she was in almost

complete control of that encounter; she led the verse before Anna was even able to join in. She

did give up some of that control when the other children asked to sing “Idas sommarvisa,” but

she was still able to engage with the song in her own way by swaying back and forth to the beat

of the music.

In creating spaces for refugee children to not only learn “Swedish” music, dance, and

language traditions, but for Swedish-born children to learn aspects of “Arabic” music, dance, and

language as well, the Sommarkulturskola is working toward a multidirectional concept of

integration and exchange among its students that emphasizes a more multicultural and tolerant

sense of being in the world. However, even this approach is unbalanced, especially when it

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comes to expectations surrounding language learning. For one, it is expected that Gaitha should

learn Swedish, while there is no expectation that Effie will learn Arabic. Additionally, the

amount of Swedish-based repertoire far outweighs Arabic-based or other music traditions

performed at the school. The emphasis on the cultural values of the dominant (in this case,

Swedish) group thus presents an opportunity for reflection on how the school can better reach its

young refugee populations as they transition into new spaces of music learning and development.

Reflexive Questions for Teachers and Facilitators

Although these vignettes only account for a small facet of Gaitha’s engagement at the

kulturskola, they introduce several questions and opportunities to reflect upon how the

Sommarkulturskola’s content and approach. Some questions might include:

1. How comfortable does the child feel initiating musical activities? What types of activities

or songs do they request or introduce?

2. With whom does the child interact in a musical space? How well does the chosen

repertoire facilitate meeting and collaboration?

3. How does the child respond to repertoire presented by instructors? How do these

responses vary among the participating children?

4. How accessible is the language of the song choices? Does language hinder individual or

collective musical engagement?

5. How much does engagement with the chosen repertoire rely on prior cultural knowledge?

Are cultural contexts provided for different musical repertoires? How are these different

contexts discussed or taught?

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6. Are there existing musical interests or repertoires already shared by the children? How

often are children able to engage with these repertoires?

7. Are there any conflicts or moment of tension among the students regarding song

repertoire? How are these tensions articulated by the children?

This list is by no means exhaustive, but it provides an example of how one might draw

upon young people’s perspectives and experiences to make choices surrounding diverse musical

repertoires. Gaitha’s engagement with the Swedish song “Här kommer Pippi Långstrump” and

the Arabic song “Shakhbat Shakhabit,” for example, demonstrate moments where she feels more

comfortable initiating musical activities or responds positively to their inclusion in the

curriculum. Her experience with the Swedish song “Idas sommarvisa,” on the other hand,

situates her in a place where language and/or prior cultural knowledge have a larger impact on

Gaitha than on other students in the room. That is not to say that songs such as “Idas

sommarvisa” should not be included in these music-and-dance spaces—in fact, its inclusion

might help Gaitha feel more confident singing or engaging with it the next time she encounters it

at her school. Asking questions such as those listed above, however, is an opportunity to think

critically about how songs are presented, how they are balanced with other repertoires, and how

young people ultimately engage with these songs either individually or within a group. This

enables teachers, in collaboration with their students, to devise additional strategies for creating

inclusive and welcoming musical environments, thus embracing a pedagogy where cultural

friction and transfer lead to new transformative moments of musical learning and engagement.

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CHAPTER 5

SAM

Syrien du vackra land

Vi kommer aldrig aldrig

nånsin nånsin glömma dig

Ändå om jag reser långt

Du kommer alltid finn[a]s

Kvar i hela [mitt] hjärta

Syria, you beautiful country

We will never, never,

Ever, ever forget you.

Even if I travel far away,

You will always be there,

still in [my] whole heart

“Syrien du vackra land” is a song written by a 9-year-old boy from Syria named Sam and three

of his friends—Mohammad, Muhammad, and Zak—during a 2018 Sommarkulturskola

songwriting session. The song, set to the melody of the 2017 Swedish pop hit “Sommar sommar

sol” (“Summer Summer Sun”), came to life after Firas suggested that the boys “write about

something they love.” Its lyrics offer insight into the complex lives of Sam and his friends, while

also providing an example of the boys’ collective songwriting interests and abilities.

The following paragraphs outline the process of creating “Syrien du vackra land” and

Sam’s broader engagement with the kulturskola. They speak to themes of self-definition,

borderwork, and individual agency, while also touching on how songwriting facilitates moments

of collective expression and knowledge creation for young refugees. Through this song, Sam’s

own perceptions of his experience and journey to Sweden come to light, as do key factors

contributing to Sam’s participation (and non-participation) in kulturskola activities.

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“Syrien du vackra land”

“I thought it might be fun to work on some of our own songs today,” Anna announces as she

repositions her guitar on her lap. In front of her sit six students: Sam, his three friends, and two

ten-year-old girls named Lily and Greta. Firas leans against the wall in the corner of the room

watching the class, his arms gently folded across his chest. Anna continues. “We can write the

songs all together, or individually, or maybe in separate groups…what do you think?”

“I want to write a song with Greta,” says Lily. This is unsurprising. The two girls grew up

together in Simrishamn and are close friends from school. They almost always pick the same

activities so that they can be together during the Sommarkulturskola.

“Of course!” says Anna. “Then maybe the four of you can work together?” She motions

toward the boys. “Firas can help, too. Do you want to make your own melodies, or should we

pick something we already know?”

“We should do something we already know,” says Sam. “That will be easier.” The others

nod in agreement.

“That’s good,” Anna responds. “How about we pick something we are all familiar with?

Then we can learn the chords together. Is there a song that you all like? It shouldn’t be too hard,

so that we can play it…maybe something kind of repetitive?”

Lily is the first to chime in. “Sommar sommar sol!” she exclaims. Greta and Zak laugh.

The song is a typical Swedish sommarplåga16 (“summer torment”) that had been popular on

YouTube the previous summer. “We have to watch the video first, though!” Lily insists.

16 Sommarplåga (“summer plague” or “summer torment”) is a term used in Sweden to describe a song that is, in general, extremely popular for one summer before slowly disappearing from the pop charts and collective memory. Many Eurovision songs and YouTube hits fall under this category.

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Anna pulls the song up on her iPad. The group watches as the three members of JLC,

decked out in Hawaiian shirts and colorful leis, sing and dance with Swedish flags, pink

flamingos, and a giant, inflatable pizza:

Sommar, sommar sol igen

Det kommer aldrig kännas

bättre än det känns just nu…

Summer, summer sun again

It will never feel

better than it feels right now…

(JLC, “Sommar sommar sol,” 2017)

The video ends. “Yeah, I like that song. That’s a good one,” Mohammad declares. Zak and Sam

laugh once again, Sam discreetly raising his middle finger toward Zak—the same gesture made

by an elementary aged girl at the beginning of JLC’s video. Firas shoots the two of them a

disapproving glance. They smirk and redirect their attention toward Anna, who has picked up her

guitar and is strumming the chorus’s four-chord structure.

“Ok, yeah that’ll work… we can just use the chorus” she says. “How about we get some

paper and some markers—something that we can use to write lyrics. Then we should pick a

theme. We can write about anything you want, really.” The group decides that their theme should

be “love.”

Sam and his friends get together with Firas, while Anna joins the other two girls in the

other corner of the room. “What do you want to write about?” Firas asks. The four think for a

moment.

“Football?” suggests Mohammad.

“Sure, you can do that,” says Firas.

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“I don’t know,” Sam shrugs.

“Well, what is something that you all love?” Firas asks. The group thinks for a moment.

“We could write about Syria,” suggests Mohammad. “We all love that?” Sam and the

others nod in agreement. All four of the boys in the group had arrived in Sweden from Syria in

2015. Two of them—Muhammad and Mohammad are brothers and live in a small village outside

of Simrishamn named Borrby. Zak and Sam know each other from school in Simrishamn and

sometimes hang out together around town.

“I think that’s a great idea,” says Firas. The group converses, switching back and forth

between Swedish and Arabic. After a few minutes of deliberation, Zak picks up a marker writes

the words “Syrien du vackra land” on the top of a piece of paper. Anna comes over to check on

their progress.

“Oh, I like that!” Anna exclaims. “That’s very nice.” She grabs her guitar and strums the

“Sommar sommar sol” chords. “Syrien du vackra land…” she sings. “What comes next?”

Sam whispers something to Firas in Arabic. “See what the others think—go ahead and

write it down,” Firas responds. Sam repeats his idea to the group.

“How do you write that in Swedish?” Zak asks. Firas encourages him to try translating it

on his own—they can fix it after if needed. Zak mouths some words, trying to figure out how to

fit the syllables with the melody.

“Nån…nån…?” He quickly scratches it out, his brow furrowed as he looks up at Anna.

She reassures him. “That’s a great start! Is there something specific that you want it to

say?”

“Like, something about how we will always remember… but we can’t get it to fit with

the song,” Zak remarks, frustrated.

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“Well, what about something like this?” Anna asks. She grabs a different marker and

begins writing the words “vi kommer aldrig aldrig” (“we will never, never”), riffing on the

original “det kommer aldrig” lyric from “Sommer sommar sol.” Sam interrupts.

“Nånsin nånsin glömma dig!” (“ever, ever forget you!”) he exclaims, filling in the rest of

the line.

“Yeah, that’s good. Give me the marker,” says Zak. He writes down the new lyrics as

Anna picks up her guitar and sings through the entire verse:

Syrien du vackra land

Vi kommer aldrig aldrig

nånsin nånsin glömma dig

Syria, you beautiful country

We will never, never,

Ever, ever forget you.

The boys give her a nod of approval. “There’s four of you, so you could each play a chord if you

want to,” Anna suggests. “Here.” She hands Sam and Muhammad each a ukulele. “You can play

the D and A chords. So, Sam, every time we sing ‘vackra,’ you can play a D, and then on ‘land,’

Muhammad, you can play an A.” She shows them how to position their fingers. “Let’s give that

a try. Just the first line.” They sing through it a few times. “Good.” She turns to Zak. “Do you

want to play guitar?” You can play the G chord. Just play on the first word—on ‘Syrien’—so it

goes G, D, then A. Let’s try that.” The boys give the first line a try. Around the third attempt,

they get the hang of their parts.

“Now, Mohammad,” continues Anna. “The other chord is a bit tricky for guitar and

ukulele, so we can have you play that on the piano.” She shows Mohammad the three notes of a

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b minor chord. “This is for the next line, when we get to ‘aldrig.’ And if you don’t want to play

all the notes, you can always just play a B… Should we try it all together now?”

The boys sing their song, intently watching Anna for their instrumental cues. Once they

play it a few times, Anna starts playing a soft accompaniment on her guitar. The five of them

repeat the verse a few times, stopping once satisfied with their parts. “That’s great! I’m going to

go check on the girls,” Anna says. “Why don’t you write another verse while I am gone. We can

play it the same way after.”

Firas comes back over and sits down next to the group. “So, should we keep going with

this idea?”

“Yeah,” nods Sam. The boys talk among each other for a minute or so. Mohammad looks

over toward Firas.

“We don’t know what to say next,” he reports.

“Well… you’re in Sweden now…Is there anything you want to say about that? Do you

miss Syria?”

“Yeah, we could maybe say that… maybe something about how we’re not there

anymore…” Sam responds.

“Yeah, but we still remember it…” Mohammad reflects.

“So something like… even if I travel away, you are always with me?” suggests Firas.

“Yeah—always in our hearts,” Sam adds.

“Aw, that’s good. Ok, how about this?” Firas says. The session is coming to a close, so

Firas quickly jots down his proposed verse.

“Yeah…” Zak trails off. He takes the paper and begins to copy Firas’s writing:

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Ändå om jag reser långt

Du kommer alltid finn[a]s

Kvar i hela [mitt] hjärta

Even if I travel far away,

You will always be there,

still in [my] whole heart

The boys, under Firas’s direction, start to play individually through the second verse with their

instruments, working out which chords lined up with their new lyrics. Just as they gets ready to

try it as a group, Anna calls everyone together.

Figure 6: The boys' handwritten lyrics for "Syrien du vackra land," including Anna's edits.

Photo by the author. July 11, 2018.

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“I thought it might be nice to sing the songs for each other,” says Anna. “Who wants to

go first?” Lily and Greta happily volunteer. They sit near the front of the room, their fingers

resting in the appropriate positions for G and D chords on their ukuleles. Anna picks up her

guitar to accompany them, filling in the rest of the harmonies as they sing their song, “Kärlek”

(“Love”). They begin:

Hjärtat hjärtat dunkar nu

Det kommer alltid vara

Vi två vi två här och nu…

The heart the heart beats now

It will always be

The two of us the two of us here and now…

The boys listen intently as Lily and Greta perform, applauding once they finish. The girls take a

bow. It’s time for the boys to play their song.

“I don’t know if I want to play it,” Sam nervously whispers.

“It’s ok – we’re all friends here,” says Firas. “It’s just for fun.” The boys take their places

at their respective instruments. Anna counts them off and they began to quietly sing. The group

finishes the first verse and looked at each other.

“Uh, we haven’t really had much time to practice the second part,” says Mohammad.

“That’s okay. We can give it a try now if you want,” Anna replies. She pulls the music

stand toward her and begins to sight-read their verse. The boys quietly sing and play their

instruments behind her, their voices only somewhat audible. When they finish, Firas, Lily, and

Greta applaud. “That was excellent!” Anna comments. “Maybe we can give it another try if you

are here tomorrow?”

“Sure,” Sam shrugs.

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The group of boys don’t come back to music the next day. A few days later, however,

Anna and I are sitting in the music room with Sam, who decides that he wants to revisit the song.

The rest of the group is not present, so he asks Anna to sing and play along with him as I

videotape the event. Sam methodically strums his ukulele while Anna accompanies him on her

guitar and sings along. They stick to the first verse, Sam gently singing as he focuses on playing

in the “correct” places. When they finish the song, Sam pauses. I expect him to make a comment

about his singing or what he wants to play next. Instead, he starts to tell us about his life before

coming to Sweden.

“It took about a year to reach Sweden,” he reflects, recalling the numerous boat and bus

trips from Syria. He tells us that he lived in several Swedish villages before coming to

Simrishamn such as Hammenhög and Sankt Olof. “Simrishamn is my favorite, though,” he

assures us. We continue to chat and learn that Sam had been coming to the kulturskola for three

years, that he enjoys soccer and dance, and that he lives with several other Syrian families in an

apartment complex near the southern end of town.

We also learn that Sam is the only boy in his family. “That means I have to protect my

sisters,” he explains. He also tells us about his love of Simrishamn and his hopes of returning to

Syria one day. During this conversation, I ask Sam what he wishes others knew about him. “My

country is still at war,” he says. “Can I ask you questions, too?”

“Såklart—of course” I nod.

“Good, because I have a LOT of questions, like a thousand…Where do you live? Do you

live by yourself? Is it scary living by yourself? I don’t think you should live by yourself. Do you

like cats? My dad says I can have an African cat if we move back to Syria. They’re super rare.

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What’s the United States like? Does your country have a king? Syria doesn’t have a king

either…”

We continue our conversation for the next fifteen minutes or so. “Why are there only bad

guys on the news?” he asks. Anna and I remind him that even if the good things are not always

shown on television, it does not mean that they are not there.

Later that day, Anna, some of the other teachers, and I start to talk about this

conversation and Sam’s song, and I find myself a bit taken aback by the sheer excitement they

exhibit surrounding our exchange. For them, the fact that Sam could: 1) focus on and find joy in

strumming a D chord on the ukulele, and 2) talk to me and feel comfortable asking questions, is

important; it fits within the child-centered approach of the program and reflects their goal of

having a place for children to meet and feel safe. One of the staff members tells me that Sam

often spends his time watching YouTube footage of the war in Syria and that he has struggled to

build relationships with his peers in the past. Although I am skeptical of what seems to be the

victimization discourse surrounding Sam, I recognize that I, too, feel that the exchange between

Sam, Anna, and I was important. Later, when reflecting upon the interplay between the song

lyrics, the interview, and my own observations and fieldnotes, I realize that in this moment of

vulnerability Sam was actually able to articulate his own discourse about refugee experiences in

Sweden and his participation in the culture school more broadly. Musicking lent itself to this

process—to these conversations—which is important not only to the ethnographic project, but to

Sam’s individual borderwork and development as well.

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Reconnecting with Sam

I see Sam nearly every day during the Summer 2018 Sommarkulturskola sessions. He typically

chooses dance or circus classes, but every once in a while he makes his way over to music and

art—the latter two during which we chat the most. I do not see him again, however, until I return

to the kulturskola in August 2019. I run into Sam sitting on the couch waiting for a group of his

friends in Rosa huset—the same building where we had recorded his song over a year

beforehand.

He looks at me, surprised. “You’re back!” he says.

“Yes! Hur är det—how are you?” I ask him.

“Bra—good,” he replies. “Your Swedish is better,” he jokes. I notice he looks almost a

foot taller than he had the last time I saw him.

“Det kommer—it’s coming,” I laugh. “You know, I’ve been writing about your song,” I

continue in Swedish.

“Really?” he responds. “Wait, which song?”

“The one you wrote with Mohammad and Muhammad and Zak…” I begin.

“Oh yeah, the one about Syria,” he interjects. “Huh, I forgot about that. We wrote songs

this summer too, so I wasn’t sure what one you were talking about.”

“Oh cool. I would love to hear them sometime,” I respond. How was Sommarkulturskola

this year?”

“It was good. I’ve moved since last year.”

“Oh yeah?” I inquire.

“Yeah, to a different apartment in town.”

“Do you like it?” I ask.

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“Yeah, it’s bigger,” he tells me. We pause for a moment.

“Hey, I noticed you only do Sommarkulturskola,” I say. “Why don’t you come to the

kulturskola during the school year?”

He sighs. “I don’t know...school, I guess. I still see Anna sometimes when she comes to

our school, though.”

“Oh, nice—what do you do with her there?”

“She comes and sings with us and stuff.”

“That must be fun,” I comment.

“Yeah,” he says. “Well, I gotta go.”

“It was great seeing you,” I say.

“You too,” he waves as he goes to meet a friend who had just finished with the

kulturskola’s photography course. I think for a bit about Sam—how he seemed so comfortable in

Rosahuset compared to the year before, how he readily shared information about his living

situation with me. I wonder what other factors besides school have kept him from participating in

the year-long kulturskola. Is it the cost of the program? The time? General interest? I make a

note to myself to follow up on this later.

Self-Definition through Songwriting

Music education researcher Sidsel Karlsen notes that for immigrant students in Nordic countries,

“the work of identity and agency-related negotiations is accentuated because they have to

perform extensive border work in order to connect previous and new socio-cultural contexts”

(2013, 164). She also notes that a pedagogical framework that emphasizes already existing

musical negotiations between students “may be responsive towards students’ identities and

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capacities without compromising their right to self-definition and to expressing their own

complexity” (ibid., 173). “Syrien du vackra land” exhibits all of these characteristics; it expresses

the language and popular musics of the boys’ current lives in Sweden while allowing them to

hold onto their common experience as refugees, their memories of Syria, and a general longing

for their home country. Yet, it does all of these things without defaulting to the standard

approach one often sees in diversity-driven music education practices, which is to draw upon

folk songs or other musics that respond directly to students’ geographical backgrounds. That is

not to say that such practices are unwelcome (in fact, they are common at the kulturskola), but as

Patricia Shehan Campbell, Huib Schippers, and many other ethnomusicologists working in this

area have pointed out, it is important to include strategies beyond this in order to promote

intercultural understanding and awareness (Schippers and Campbell 2012).

“Song lyrics,” writes singer and scholar Martha E. Gonzalez, “can transmit ways of

knowing and theorizing about life. [They] can also be viewed as alternative ways of creating

knowledge. When practiced in community, songwriting can be a powerful exercise in consensus

building and collective knowledge production” (2015, 131). “Syrien du vackra land” features

lyrics written by young people from Syria about Syria, set to the tune of a Swedish pop song, and

sung in Swedish. The song represents a particular time in Sam and his friends’ lives—not a time

before coming to Sweden, not a time when first arriving in Sweden, but now, three years after

relocating to the country, learning the language, and calling Simrishamn “home.” It is, in a way,

a collective statement of advocacy that gives rise to larger themes of displacement and the

conflict in Syria from the point of view of the children whose lives have been impacted by these

events. “Even if I travel far away, you will always be there, still in my whole heart” presents an

alternative narrative of Syria that goes beyond the trauma of war, lending itself to a nostalgic

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view of the country and some of the more positive memories associated with it. To some extent,

these young people, in singing about “something they love,” are reclaiming Syria’s narrative as

their own by presenting it as “beautiful” and something they will “never forget.” They are, to cite

Gonzalez, “creating knowledge” about their home country through their lyrics (ibid)—

knowledge that they then shared with a small audience of two young Swedish girls, two

kulturskola staff members, and an ethnographer.

Although the boys had some help from Anna and Firas with the words and phrasing, the

sentiments and ideas expressed in “Syrien du vackra land” are entirely theirs. Sam and his

friends, through their lyrical parody of this “sommarplåga,” are able to articulate their

subjectivity in a way that recognizes the complex and nuanced nature of their lives as once

newly-arrived children and young people who, on one hand, are no longer “newly arrived,” yet

on the other still do not necessarily have the same rights and recognition as many of their

Swedish-born friends at the kulturskola. They are able to tap into multiple cultural and language

systems in order negotiate their own concepts of selfhood and agency, choosing what does and

does not constitute “their music” and “their lives”—their “Syrianness,” their “Swedishness”—

through deliberation with their teachers and peers. These types of creative, democratic moments,

to some degree, give rise to the processes of participation and belonging that are central to the

mission of the Sommarkulturskola. Additionally, these moments allow for the type of self-

definition for which Karlsen advocates by emphasizing the children’s own negotiations of

identity, language, and emotion surrounding Syria and displacement. They thus serve as an area

where ideas and experiences of childhood meet, acting as a “frontier” for further musical and

extramusical transmission and exchange.

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CHAPTER 6

A TRIP TO THE THEATER

A few weeks prior to my arrival in Sweden for fieldwork in 2019, and before I had reconnected

with Sam, I received a Facebook message from one of my contacts at Österlens stödförening för

flyktingar (Österlen’s Support Organization for Refugees). The message contained a link to a

post on their Facebook page, which read:

Last night, a house in Ö Hoby with three apartments burned to the ground. The fire reportedly started in the middle apartment. In the other two apartments lived two refugee families: seven children with their parents. They have now lost all of the little they owned. Clothes, furniture, bedding, household utensils, and so on. They couldn’t bring anything out with them. With their small incomes, there was no way to have any home insurance. Help us help them. It is urgent. There is no indication of arson or that someone was careless. Fortunately, no one was injured.17 (Österlens stödförening för flyktingar, 29 August 2019, translation my own).

Another blip sounded on my screen. My contact sent a follow-up message. “One of the families

was Padma and Salma’s—from the Sommarkulturskola,” she wrote. My heart sank. I had spent

some time getting to know Padma, her older sister Salma, and their mother in 2018. They arrived

in Sweden from Afghanistan about a year prior to our meeting. At the time, they were living in

group accommodation in Borrby They moved to an apartment in Östra Hoby (a village just a few

kilometers up the road) after I returned to the United States for the Fall 2018 semester.

I finished reading the message and exhaled. I was happy to know that the families in the

apartment were physically okay, but I was worried about them. Where would they go next? How

17I natt brann ett hus i Ö Hoby med tre lägenheter ner till grunden. Branden startade enligt i uppgift i mellanlägenheten. I de två övriga lägenheterna bodde två flyktingfamiljer: sju barn med sina föräldrar. De har nu förlorat allt av det lilla de ägde. Kläder, möbler, sängkläder, husgeråd och så vidare. Ingenting fick de med sig ut. Med deras små inkomster fanns ingen möjlighet att ha någon hemförsäkring. Hjälp oss att hjälpa dem. Det är akut. Ingenting tyder på att branden var anlagd eller att någon varit vårdslös. Lyckligtvis skadades ingen.

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were they dealing with this? I looked back at my computer screen. Within minutes, I received a

few more notifications, this time from kulturskola staff and other community members

forwarding the message and alerting me to the situation. Those who knew the family mobilized

quickly to raise funds on their behalf. And while I had been following this community for some

time, it was perhaps the first time I had witnessed firsthand the type of “intense problem solving”

that so many of my (adult) informants described in their conversations about 2015 and 2016.

There was a certain sense of care and urgency surrounding the two girls; I saw it the

previous summer, too, when staff members would make sure they had an extra piece of crisp

bread with cheese to snack on, check to make sure they had a ride home from the activities, or

sneak a quick hug before they would depart for the day. Their relationship entailed more than

one might expect of that between teachers and their students; there was, rather, a full-scale

commitment to these girls’ safety and wellbeing. I reflected on my own memories of the girls

form the previous summer, and as I reflected on our times together, I became fixated on a trip we

had taken to the local theater, where Padma and Salma became acquainted with another young

girl named Aleela. I was not sure why at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized

that this event marked the moment when I first really got to know and care for these girls in the

same way that I had witnessed the school staff caring for them just weeks ago. These reflections

made me realize something important, namely, that some of the most important bonding between

members of the kulturskola staff and its students happened not in the contexts of formal teaching

and learning, but rather outside of such environments. The following account provides a

poignant illustration.

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An Evening at Scen Österlen

Tonight, we are taking some of the kids to see Scen Österlen’s Swedish-language production of

Sweeny Todd. Some of the area’s teenagers, including Viktor (one of the Sommarkulturskola’s

youth workers) and Nikita (Anna-Carin’s daughter), are involved in the two-week community

production. Anna, Hanna, Mariel, Anna-Carin, and I are tasked with bringing the students to the

theater—a quaint, repurposed farmstead nestled against the sea in the neighboring village of

Skillinge. My role tonight is more that of chaperone and caregiver than ethnographer (though as

any ethnographer knows, such lines are frequently blurred).

We arrive at the theater and gather outside near the café, where the staff has ice cream

and sparkling cider set up for us prior to the performance. Most of the kids hop in the ice cream

line, and I chat a bit in Swedish with Aleela, a newly arrived 14-year-old Muslim girl from

Somalia. We drink our cider and joke about our mutual struggle to pronounce the Swedish “sj”

sound (/ɧ/).

“I am excited for the show,” she says. “It will be good for my Swedish, I think.”

One of the theater staff members calls out across the lawn, signaling that the

performance will start in ten minutes. The two of us make our way toward the entrance, where

we run into Padma, Salma, and Anna. Salma grabs my arm. “I want to sit with you!” she

exclaims, dragging me toward the door. Aleela, Anna, and Padma follow closely behind. We

find a spot on the bleachers, about twenty feet from the stage. Padma and Salma snuggle between

Anna and I, Aleela positioning herself directly behind us.

“I’ve never been to the theater before,” Salma tells Anna. “Will it be scary?” Anna and I

look at each other, unsure how to respond given the premise of the show. I contemplate whether

Sweeny Todd is the best choice for a first theater outing.

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“There might be a few scary parts,” Anna responds. “But I think you will be okay.”

Padma jokingly buries her face into Anna’s side, hiding. I wonder how much the girls will

understand from the show. Their language is quite a bit further along that Aleela’s, but they still

are not fluent (nor am I).

“Ok,” Salma says, unfazed as she pulls a roll of digestive cookies from her backpack.

“Kaka—cookie?” she asks, holding the roll toward me. I politely decline. Padma reaches for a

cookie, and Salma slaps her hand away. Her sister carries on, grabbing a cookie anyway.

The musical begins, and Salma and Padma’s eyes quickly become fixated on the cast

members. After a few numbers, they begin to shift in their seats a bit, their attention fading. I see

Padma’s eyes starting to droop. She curls up against her sister and watches the remainder of the

act from Salma’s shoulder.

At intermission, I turn to the girls. “Vad tycker du—What do you think?” I ask.

“It is a little confusing, but I like it,” says Salma. “Do you see [the Sommarkulturskola

helper] Viktor?”

“Yes! He’s doing great job, isn’t he?” I respond. Aleela leaned forward.

“They are very good…Padma, were you sleeping?”

“NEJ. I was NOT sleeping,” Padma yawns.

“I think that maybe you were sleeping,” Aleela grins. Padma says nothing.

After a while, the lights dim, signaling it is time to take our seats for Act II. Padma

decides to go sit with Hannah a few rows above us. With her departure, Aleela moves down to sit

with Salma, Anna, and I. We watch as character after character met their fate in Sweeny Todd’s

barber chair, his famed ballad ringing through the theater in the final scenes.

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After the performance, Padma, Salma, and Aleela decide to ride with Anna and I back to

Simrishamn. The girls ask questions about the show during the entire ride home—How come the

barber kept killing all of those people? EWWWW they put WHAT in the pies?! Can somebody

please explain what happened at the end? Who was that woman? Most of our conversation,

however, is dedicated to the extramusical elements of the event. I really liked the ice cream. Do

the people on stage have to practice a lot? How long does it take to learn to sing like that? I’m

really glad I got to go to the show. I didn’t really like all of the killing, though. Next time, they

shouldn’t have the killing. Has this theater always been here? Does it always look like that? Do

other people know that this is here?

Song lyrics are interspersed throughout the conversation. At one point, Padma takes it

upon herself to create her own: SWEEEEENY. SWEENY TODD. Jag är Sweeny Todd, Todd,

Todd, Todd (SWEEEEENY. SWEENY TODD. I am Sweeny Todd, Todd, Todd, Todd). Her

melody slightly resembled that of the original Sondheim. The girls giggle and chat about other

things, too—mainly Viktor, at which point the conversation turns into inaudible whispers in the

backseat. When the girls don’t know how to say a word or what a word means, they ask Anna,

who patiently helps them express their thoughts.

We drop Aleela off at her apartment in town. Padma and Salma give her a hug. “How

long have you all been friends?” I ask the girls as we pulled away from the complex.

“We just know her from Sommarkulturskola,” Salma says. “She’s older than us and goes

to a different school.”

“So she’s a new friend, then?” I inquire.

“Yes!” Salma smiles.

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“Neat!” I say. My stop is next. I say goodbye to the girls and head toward the attic of the

farmhouse where I am staying for the summer. I think about how happy the girls seemed, and

how inquisitive they had been following the performance. Padma had always been a bit feisty,

but this was the most I had heard Salma talk in a while. I also think about Aleela, and her

experience. In the next year, Aleela will go on to work for the Sommarkulturskola as a summer

youth worker, and Padma will join Lars’s after-school guitar group in Borrby. Salma will not

participate in other kulturskola activities, which she says is primarily due to her age and a

general need to focus on school. However, she does tell Anna that she is interested in learning

guitar with her and might do that in the future.

On Possibilities

After the visit to the theater, I began to see Padma and Salma at the Sommarkulturskola on a

more regular basis. It is unclear whether the outing had played a role in this or if this just

happened to be the way their summer schedule worked out. In any case, they often spoke of the

show and made sure that the performers knew that they had seen them whenever they

encountered them in passing. They did not hang out with Aleela much during the actual

Sommarkulturskola sessions, as she tended to favor dance, while the two sisters gravitated more

toward art classes. However, on the day of the final Sommarkulturskola celebration in the

Rosahuset garden, I noticed that the three of them had found a shady spot under a tree to eat their

cinnamon rolls and drink elderflower juice together. The relationship dynamic between the girls,

of course, changed the following year when Aleela took on a staff role within the kulturskola and

developed additional relationships with some of the older dance girls. When I asked Aleela about

Padma and Salma when I saw her again in October 2019, she had forgotten about the trip to the

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theater. “Oh yeah! I remember that now – that was so much fun!” She also explained that her

mother is not allowing her to participate in the kulturskola at the moment. “I have grown too old

[to dance], and I also need to do better in school,” she frowned.

I had hoped to follow up with Padma and Salma more during my extended fieldwork in

2019-2020. However, our planned meetings in the Spring of 2020 were never realized due to the

COVID-19 pandemic. I did run into them a few times near the library earlier in the year, and I

saw Padma while touring the local schools with the kulturskola’s Tomteorkester (Tomte

Orchestra) during the Christmas season. We caught up briefly, but I sensed that the deeper

relationship we had developed during the Summer of 2018 was no longer present. This was

expected; adults come and go in so many of these young people’s lives, and leaving and coming

back “to the field” does not exactly make one a stable adult figure.

The fact that the “space” of the kulturskola for Padma and Salma was not one of the

central kulturskola buildings such as Godsmagasinet or Rosa huset, but rather Padma’s

elementary school, also had a bearing on our relationship. In the summers, they traveled to

Simrishamn, where it was easy to catch them after a class and converse with them. During the

school year, there was not really a reason for them to make the 30-mintue bus trip to the

kulturskola if they were not already planning to go to town. The very fact that I did not see

Padma and Salma in these spaces, however, speaks to the importance of the kulturskola’s

relationships to the surrounding schools and villages; there is a question here of access and

availability, and of how to reach children where they are already located.

I once asked the teachers and administrators of the kulturskola what an inclusive

kulturskola meant to them. Most reiterated the need to “meet all children,” emphasizing those

with immigrant backgrounds, older students, or those in the rural villages surrounding

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Simrishamn. Hanna also added an important point: “to me, it’s not necessarily that all children

come to the kulturskola or join the kulturskola, but that everyone knows that this exists and is an

option for them.” She also re-emphasized the importance of building safety and trust with the

students, and for them to feel that the kulturskola was a place that a place they would come and

work hard, but also feel confident and that they were in a non-judgmental and stable

environment. “There is a Swedish word we have called lust,” she explained, “it’s like a hunger or

desire or a spark, but it’s more than that. It’s closer to passion, maybe. That’s what I want [our

students] to develop.”

For students such as Padma, Salma, and Aleela, the kulturskola provided this type of

stability and lust, if even only for a year or two. Activities such as going to the theater gave them

the option of ‘knowing what exists,’ while also solidifying their relationship and interest in other

kulturskola people and activities. Later, direct access to the guitar group in Borrby ensured that

Padma could participate in the kulturskola without necessarily needing to seek out information

about how to join the queue for private lessons at Godmagasinet or travel to Simrishamn each

week. However, for Salma and Aleela, this relationship has broken down over time as they have

grown older and discontinued some, if not all, of their activities due to their location, family’s

religious beliefs, struggles in school, or pursuit of other interests beyond the kulturskola. Their

non-participation raises a critical question: what is, or what could be, the relationship between

the kulturskola and its older students (and particularly, its older female students of immigrant

backgrounds)? How can this organization continue to foster a culture of care from a capacity-

building standpoint? This is a question that kulturskola in Simrishamn continues to confront, and

an issue that they plan to focus on in future projects and initiatives.

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Building a Kulturskola of Care

As noted in Chapter 2, Simrishamn’s kulturskola does not identify as a “refugee” or

“integration” organization. Yet, there is a close bond between Simrishamn’s refugee community

and this organization, which results in a mutual culture of care between them, one in which the

well-being of the whole child takes precedence over everything else. Each person affiliated with

the kulturskola who contacted me about Padma and Salma on the day of the apartment fire did so

privately, outside of official kulturskola business. Their recognition of and concern for the girls

as “one of their own,” however, prompted them to respond in an almost ritualistic way. Such

responses, which I call ritualized solidarity, come from an established set of care practices

among like-minded individuals within a community, and among whom interpersonal interactions

are relatively strong.

According to a study by Thomas Cavanagh and his colleagues, four themes are central to

a culture of care in educational settings: building relationships, building an environment of

holistic caring, building capacity, and building trust, with the latter two themes subsumed by the

former two (ibid). The Simrishamn Kulturskola builds upon the culture of care framework

through these themes, particularly in that it: 1) has historically espoused relationship building

and building trust as key elements of its programs, 2) builds capacity by adapting its structures

and programs to better reach children and young people in the community (e.g., creating the

Sommarkulturskola), and 3) focuses on the holistic well-being of its students through its

programming and solidarity actions.

Going to events such as Sweeny Todd, while not necessarily a routine part of the

kulturskola and Sommarkulturskola’s curriculum, garnered further personal interaction between

the girls, other students, and staff members from the kulturskola, and in doing so opened doors to

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their participation in other areas of the program (e.g., guitar group). It also built a foundation for

creating shared memories between the girls, for strengthening relationships, and for “knowing

what exists” in the larger community. In allowing moments and spaces for young people to be

together—to enjoy a treat together or have a conversation about a show—the kulturskola is

building a culture that not only cares for its students and staff but teaches them to care for one

another. This, in turn, has an impact on moments of solidarity, shifting the frame of thinking

away from a type of empathy that focuses on helping “others” and toward an alternative one built

on mutual respect and care. To quote Juho Saari and Anne Birgitta Pessi, “solidarity promotes

further solidarity” (2015, 258), and it is at this level that the Simrishamn kulturskola—a

kulturskola of care—might be seen to model possibilities that would translate well to application

in other areas of society.

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CHAPTER 7

ORIENTALISK DANS CLASS

My return to Simrishamn in August 2019 brought with it the opportunity to explore aspects of

the kulturskola beyond its summer programs. An affiliate of Lund University’s Ethnology

department, I would spend the next nine months diving deeper into these young people’s lives,

the kulturskola program, and Swedish life in general. Wanting to ensure that I could easily

access both the University and my field site, I decided early on that I, like many of the younger

kulturskola teachers in Simrishamn, would live in Malmö and commute via train each day to

Simrishamn. This meant that I would have access not only to Simrishamn, but to Malmö’s

booming Arabic arts and culture scene as well.

When not in Simrishamn, I spent time exploring events such as the Malmö Arabic Film

Festival (the largest Arabic Film Festival in Northern Europe), attending a monthly concert series

called “The Baghdad Sessions” at the city’s Moriska Pavijongen (Moorish Pavillion), or

experiencing the electrifying vocals of Syrian-Armenian singer Lena Chamamyan at the Malmö

Opera House. I was also able to attend several performances by Hanan Oriental Dance Group, an

internationally renowned troupe that performs a wide variety of Middle Eastern and North

African (MENA) dance styles, including but not limited to: modern bellydance, dabke, shaabi,

baladi, saidi, haggala, ghawazi, khalegee, nubian, mowashahat, kawleeya, shamadan, and other

folkloric dances from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and the Gulf countries. This group was founded by

Hanna Thorstensen, who in addition to her role at the Sommarkulturskola and other kulturskola

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dance courses, leads the orientalisk dans, or “oriental dance”18 class at Kulturskolan Simrishamn.

The class features the same dance styles as Hanna’s professional group and meets every

Wednesday night in Valfisken. The following ethnographic excerpt focuses on students learning

a dabke routine in the context of this class and considers how that experience feeds into their

understandings of Arabic musics and cultures writ large.

Dancing Dabke

Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap. Lebanese singer Assi El Hallani’s voice permeates through Valfisken

Gallery. The students in Hanna’s class move toward their places, clapping in time to the

beginning of Hallani’s contemporary dabke song “Al Ein.” The choreography for this song

comes from Awne Mawed, who fled to Sweden from Syria in 2015 and now runs a folk dance

group for newly arrived children and young people in Malmö, Sweden.

Dabke is a traditional Levantine dance often performed at weddings and celebrations

throughout Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan, though it has increasingly become a symbol of

resistance in political contexts.19 Hanna started teaching dabke to students during the first

Sommarkulturskola in 2016, including newly arrived children and young people who had not

encountered the dance before. As one of the Syrian participants noted, “it was kind of cool,

because when you see someone dancing to that kind of music here [in Sweden], that’s not

something you would expect. And then when you start to learn the dance, everyone is starting

together at the beginning. There are no expectations that you have to be good at [dabke] because

18 The term “orientalisk dans,” or “oriental dance” is used by the larger MENA dance community in Sweden in the same way that American practitioners might use the term “bellydance.” Though both terms are problematic in their lack of precision and their historical associations with exoticism, I use the term “orientalisk dans” here to connect the way my interviewees conceptualize the ideas and practices surrounding these dance styles. 19 See, for example, David McDonald’s discussion of dabke as a form of Palestinian resistance (McDonald 2013).

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it’s Arabic. It’s just fun and you get to learn something new that you wouldn’t get to anywhere

else.”

The class continues. I notice that the group comprises mostly of Swedish-born girls from

the kulturskola’s show group, Culture in Motion (CIM), who have been taking lessons with

Hanna since they were in grundskola. Samir and Yousef, two older teenagers from Syria, lurk in

the back of the class. They are just visiting today, but performed with CIM for a couple of years

after moving to Sweden. Both of them left the kulturskola and the group about a year ago when

they grew older and moved further away from Simrishamn for gymnasium.

Figure 7: Students form two dabke lines during a dance rehearsal in Simrishamn, Sweden.

Still image from video captured by the author. November 6, 2019.

The students hold up their right arms—normally they would be holding small ropes—and

arrange themselves into a straight line. The tabel, a medium-sized bass drum frequently used in

Lebanese dabke performances, booms through the speakers along with the smaller tabla

(darbuka) drum and a few electronicized melodic instruments. The students join hands and stop

with their left feet, thrusting their bodies forward before splitting into two lines, each of which

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moves from right to left. The footwork is more consistent with choreographed dabke teams than

with the more traditional style of dabke dancing one might see at a wedding or other community

event:

Table 1 –“Al Ein” Dabke Choreography

Beat: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + Tabel: Dum - - - - Dum Dum Dum Tabla: Dum - Tek - - - - Tek Footwork: Left step Low right kick Right heal Right step Left step - Right step - 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + Dum - - - - Dum Dum Dum Dum - Tek - - - - Tek Right hop - Right hop - Left step Low right kick Right heal Right step 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + Dum - - - - Dum Dum Dum Dum - Tek - - - - Tek Left step Low right kick Right heal Right step Left step - Right step - 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + Dum - - - - Dum Dum Dum Dum - Tek - - - - Tek Left knee raise - Left step - Right Step - Left Step -

When the group finishes with the dance, three of the girls, all around fifteen years old,

come over to chat with me and review their footwork. They teach me some of the steps from

their routine, and I ask them why they chose to enroll in the class. “The music,” they all agree,

not missing a beat. They talk about watching Hanna dance and learning about these dance styles

in earlier dansmix classes, explaining that exposure to this type of music as part of their dance

training when they were younger developed their interest in this style as they got older.

“Hanna uses a lot of different types of music… a LOT in her dansmix classes,” says one

participant in a later interview. “Some of it I’ve never heard. She uses a lot of Bollywood or

Arabic songs, and sometimes she’s used a lot of really popular pop songs. It’s nice, because it’s

all really good music. I don’t know how she finds all of it.”

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“Yeah, when I was a kid, that’s the only thing I listened to,” another girl adds. “My

Spotify list was all just music from dance class. Learning about all of the different music and

dance made me want to try this, too.”

“Do you think being in this class helps you understand more about Arabic people and

culture?” I ask.

“Yeah, for sure,” says one of the girls. “Sometimes when we perform, we perform at

events with a lot of Syrians, Arabic people there. I have met a lot of new people this way.”

“Do they ever say anything about your performances?” I inquire.

“They’re normally super nice. They’re like ‘oh look at the little Swedish girls up there

knowing how to dance shaabi.’ They think that it’s really cool. We always get a lot of

compliments after.”

“And sometimes we have teachers like Mohanned who come and teach us Iraqi dance

and things—he’s actually from Iraq and trained there before he moved to, well I can’t remember

if it’s Stockholm or Gothenburg where he lives now—but it’s actually people who, like, know

that music and the dances really, really well and can teach us with workshops and things. So we

learn more about the culture that way, too,” one of the students chimes in.

“That’s really interesting,” I reflect. “It sounds like you learn more about the cultural

aspects from performances and workshops and things.”

“Well, we learn mostly from Hanna,” says one of the girls. “I mean, she actually lives

this stuff and is really well-known in the dance world. This is her life... But yeah, when you are

actually [immersed] in [the culture] when you are outside of the kulturskola, you learn more

about other people. I think that’s why [Hanna] has us do these things. So that we can have that

experience and also learn to be better dancers and perform and stuff. It’s all part of it.”

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Though I am interested in the girls’ performances as a way of encountering other people

and cultures, I can’t help but think about the fact that this class, which focuses primarily on

Arabic music, seems to cater more to a core group of non-Arabic speakers than it does the local

Arabic population. I ask Hanna about this, and she explains that there is something of an age and

gender aspect to this, as most of her dance students with refugee backgrounds tend to be younger

and/or Kulturgarantin students. “There have been a lot of times where I have played an Arabic

song in a class, and I see the [refugee] kids get really excited about it. It’s not just for the Arabic

kids, though,” Hanna states. “A lot of the Swedish kids really like the music and have asked me

about it…It does get harder when they become teenagers, which is what this older group is.

That’s one reason why I started a girls’ group on Wednesday nights—to give some of the local

Muslim girls and women area an opportunity to dance and be healthy. It’s something that’s really

important to me.”

I remember some of the Wednesday night sessions that Hanna spoke about in the above

conversation. The class typically incorporates music and routines from Hanna’s kulturskola

dansmix and oriental dance classes. As I chat with Hanna, however, I wonder what other factors

might contribute to the participation (or, more aptly, non-participation) of some of Syrian and

Afghan students in these “Arabic dance” spaces, especially since Simrishamn’s teachers often

lauded the presence of such spaces as one of the reasons they have been successful in reaching

refugee populations

“Homeland Musics” and their Complexities

Hanna’s personal and professional ties to Sweden’s larger Arabic arts and culture scene have

played a significant role in garnering interest and trust in the kulturskola among Simrishamn’s

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refugee students. She makes it clear, however, that there is no expectation in her classes that

young refugees know (or even like) dances such as dabke “just because they’re Arabic.” Rather,

Hanna employs a wide range of musics and dance styles, enabling students to “learn how to sail

and anchor musically, and how to interact interculturally and ethically at the most local,

everyday level of diversity” (Karlsen 2017, 224). This type of approach gives students access to

what might be considered their “homeland musics” while also giving them opportunities to

anchor themselves elsewhere if they so choose.

That being said, the above narrative offers one example of an instance where including

students’ “homeland” music and dance styles (i.e., dabke) might have a larger impact on

majority cultural groups learning about minority groups than it does on the minority groups with

whom such musics are typically associated. Swedish-born students cite Hanna’s class as a

catalyst for learning about and building relationships with the broader Arabic-speaking

community through their performances. They also cite their exposure to Arabic musics in their

formative dance years as a reason that they have continued to pursue the study of these styles,

which, I might argue, creates a case for more expansive music and dance curricula in

kulturskolor and similar institutions. Yet it is also worth pointing out that almost none of the

students enrolled in the orientalisk dans course come from Arabic-speaking backgrounds. This

introduces a complexity where, on the one hand, the fact that students are not expected to

musically align with assumed or ascribed cultural identities embraces a more inclusive and

dynamic vision of kulturskola engagement, and where, on the other hand, the possibility exists

that students who do want to participate in these kinds of activities will, for any of a variety of

reasons (age, gender, religion, time commitments), be excluded. Hanna’s girls’ group represents

one seemingly effective response to this complexity, but continuing efforts will be needed to

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ensure that new and varied opportunities for bridging students’ own cultural backgrounds with

their right to self-definition and expression are cultivated in the future.

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CHAPTER 8

KULTURGARANTIN

In the fall and early winter months of 2019, I found myself accompanying kulturskola teachers,

including Hanna, to the area’s compulsory schools as part of the Kulturgarantin program. During

these trips, the kulturskola teachers would introduce me as “a special American guest,” after

which point the respective classroom teacher would inevitably ask the class if anyone knew how

to say “hello” in English. I would take my place as a happy observer (or dance partner, if the

class had uneven numbers), usually figuring out my role by the time we got to our second or

third classroom of the day.

Kulturgarantin days are fast-paced, with kulturskola teachers running anywhere between

two and five 40-minutes sessions at one or two different schools each week. By the end of every

school year, each classroom will have encountered Kulturgarantin for six separate sessions (not

including special “full day” Kulturgarantin-related activities). I highlight two of these sessions

below—one music-focused and one dance-focused—to better contextualize this program, as well

as to investigate how refugee students engage with Kulturgarantin. Both excerpts demonstrate

how teachers facilitate refugee inclusion within an artistic space, often with other students taking

on the role of making young refugees feel welcome in the process. They therefore speak to larger

themes of hospitality and relationship-building, while also touching upon language learning with

and as a result of these encounters.

Making Music in Simrislund

“This is Tela. She’s new. She only speaks Dari,” explains Amirah, one of the students in Ms.

Andersson’s second grade classroom. “My mom speaks Dari, so she speaks to her mom

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sometimes.” Anna, Lars, and I have just arrived at Simrislundsskolan—one of the elementary

schools in Simrishamn—for one of the kulturskola’s Kulturgarantin sessions. This is the first of

two schools we will visit today. Anna and Lars, a renowned musical duo among the area’s

elementary students, start unpacking dozens of ukuleles, placing them in the center of the

classroom.

Figure 8: "Här kommer Lars och Anna." Photo by the author. November 19, 2019.

The students form a circle on the floor around the instruments. Ms. Andersson sits close

to Tela, their classroom aide watching from a nearby chair. This is the group’s third meeting of

the year with Anna and Lars; most know the drill by now. Lars picks up his guitar, Anna

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following suit with her ukulele, and they begin to sing, “Här kommer Lars och Anna…” (“Here

come Lars and Anna”), a short ditty they wrote to begin each session. Tela nestles herself close

to her teacher, watching intently with the other students. Anna and Lars transition into their

English rendition of “Over the Rainbow” before switching over to a few familiar favorites such

as “Blinka lilla stjärna där” (“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”), “Lille katt” (“Little Cat”), “Lilla

snigel” (“Little Snail”), and “Huvud, axlar, knän och tår” (“Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes”).

Most of the children sing along, mimicking Anna’s actions to the songs. Ms. Andersson helps

Tela with the movements, slowly articulating the words to help her learn. Amirah looks over at

Tela, also emphasizing her gestures in an effort to help out.

After about twenty minutes, the singing portion of the morning concludes. Anna and Lars

hand out the ukuleles to individual students, instructing each to hold the upright in front of them

until it is time to play. When everyone has received an instrument, Anna tells them to place their

pointer fingers on the third fret of the fourth string (a D chord, according to the standard Swedish

tuning). Ms. Andersson gently places Tela’s fingers in the correct position—the other students

had learned this the last time Anna and Lars visited. Amirah nods her head toward Tela in

encouragement, and the group begins to rhythmically strum their instruments. A cacophony of

chords fills the room. Lars walks around, quietly adjusting the students’ finger positions. He

stops in front of Tela. She smiles and extends her ukulele in front of her in a “Look, I’ve got it!”

sort of way. Lars gives her a thumbs-up. “Bra—good!” he responds.

Dancing in Borrby

Hanna and I have just finished meeting with the preschool class in Sankt Olof, a small village

school about 19 kilometers northwest of Simrishamn. We are on our way to Borrby, about a 22

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kilometer drive south of our current position. Thursday and Friday mornings are Kulturgarantin

days for Hanna.

We park behind the school and head in through the back door, where we remove our

shoes and head toward Ms. Lundgren’s classroom. She and her three teachers’ aides greet us at

the door, followed by a group of four girls who immediately give Hanna a hug. The other fifteen

students in the class start to pack up their blue counting blocks from their math lesson and head

over to the large open area of the classroom. One of the aides helps a boy in a wheelchair over to

the space while Hanna hooks up her iPad to the classroom’s speaker.

As I look around, I notice that this is the largest and most ethnically diverse classroom we

have visited thus far. There are about twenty students in total, about a third of whom come from

immigrant backgrounds. Hanna points out one student from Syria and three other students from

Afghanistan that she knew from her previous trips to the school. “I want you to dance with her

during our partner activity,” she says, pointing to one of the Afghan girls named Malia. “I think

it is important for her to see an example adult who looks Swedish, but who doesn’t speak the

language perfectly. It will be really good for her confidence.” I happily oblige, though wonder

how Malia will feel being paired with and adult, rather than one of her peers.

The dance session begins. Hanna explains that today the students will be exploring an

imaginary haunted house. She plays musical excerpts, each meant to evoke a different mood or

movement. “First, we must sneak around the haunted house,” she tells the group. Everyone

tiptoes around the room as pizzicato strings emanate from the speaker. A loud, dissonant chord

plays, and the students laugh as they pretend to scare their friends. “Now, there is a large gust of

wind,” Hanna playfully declares. Everyone twirls around the room to recorded wind sounds.

“And statues guard the doors,” she adds. At this point, she pairs up each of the students and

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instructs them to “make their partner into a statue.” I join Malia, and I tell her that she can go

first. She giggles as she gently begins to move my arms and legs, “sculpting” me into a twisted

tree. We swap roles, and I do the same for her.

After about five minutes, Hanna reassigns partners. She pairs me with a boy whose father

was born in England. “I can translate for you if you need me to. I speak really good English,” he

proudly states. I smile and tell him thank you, and that his English is, indeed, very good. I look

over and noticed that Hanna had paired Malia with a Swedish-born girl that I recognized from

the previous year’s Sommarkulturskola. Hanna was always a bit intuitive when it came to

identifying students who might need a friend. It’s one thing I grew to appreciate about her over

the years.

The Right to Culture Kulturgarantin guarantees children in Simrishamn and its surrounding villages the right to

quality cultural activities through their presence in the compulsory school system. The two

examples of Kulturgarantin activities in this chapter demonstrate how these questions of quality

are negotiated relative to a diversifying population of students. Chiefly, they show that the young

people play an active role in the program, thus meeting its larger goals of democratic

engagement.

The child’s right to culture underscores all programs associated with Simrishamn’s

kulturskola. The aim is not necessarily language learning or “learning about other people and

customs” (though these themes are present), but rather access to culture, broadly conceived. For

students where language remains a barrier, emphasis on movement and gesture enables

participation. And though a more “global” approach to musical content is not particularly present

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in these two excerpts, both Hanna and Anna say that they have incorporated Arabic-language

songs or songs from countries in the curriculum in the past. “At the end of the day, the goal is

creativity and expression and that these kids can feel good about [their participation],” notes

Hanna. “It’s that they can have access to professional cultural activities, no matter what their

situation is at home.” However, ideas about culture, and particularly whose culture (and by

extension, whose music, dance, art, etc.) are represented as “quality” remain complex.

“It’s not Kultur, like in the German way,” one teacher explains to me, referring to Nazi-

era interpretations of cultural superiority, “but kultur as in art and music and expression.”

“It’s important that the students be able to see themselves in these activities, but you also

don’t want to put them in a box,” Anna adds. “I think it was Daniel Winnicott who once said

something like ‘it is in the play and only in play that the child or the adult can be creative and use

all of his personality and it is only by being creative that the individual can find the self,’20 so

that’s what I think is important.”

Placing creativity and play at the center of culture enables programs such as

Kulturgarantin to fulfill the “right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic life,” per

Article 31 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. It also enables young

people to shape cultural and artistic life through their participation. In other words, through their

goal of “reaching all children” the kulturskola ensures that all children have the opportunity to

become part of a larger cultural process. The extent to which young people are able to engage

with this process however, relies on a society that accepts their participation and expressions, and

that is not always the case for young refugees in Simrishamn.

20 Winnicott 2003, 92.

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CHAPTER 9

ZAK

“When I came to the Sommarkulturskola in 2016, I was a child. Now, I am 14. I am an adult. I

have grown up here. It’s my home,” reflects Zak. The month is November, and I am interviewing

Zak in the art room after his weekly singing lesson with Anna. Zak is a particularly beloved

student among students and staff at the kulturskola; he takes singing and trumpet lessons and has

become a “regular” in Sommarkulturskola circus and dance classes.

Of all of the students I encountered during my time in Simrishamn, I have spoken with

Zak the most. We often chatted after his voice lessons or outside the kulturskola after school.

During the summer months, he attended nearly every Sommarkulturskola session, both in the

morning session as an unofficial “helper” for the younger students, and in the afternoon as a

participant. It was here where we first connected.

Zak fled from Syria to Turkey with his mother Esma when he was six years old. The two

of them initially planned to cross the Mediterranean toward Mytilene, Greece, and continue

onward to Sweden, where the rest of their family would later join them. During their first attempt

to leave Turkey, however, their raft began to sink, and they were captured by Greek authorities.

The authorities returned all of the women, children, and elderly from the raft back to the Turkish

border without their papers, medication, valuables, or mobile devices. Esma later learned that the

young men from the ship were taken elsewhere, beaten, and sent back to Syria by the Turkish

police.

After this experience, Esma knew that the journey would be far too dangerous for Zak.

She contacted her husband in Syria, and they determined that Zak would remain with his uncle in

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Antakya, Turkey, while Esma would try to travel to Greece again on her own. She eventually

made it to Mytilene, and on March 1st, 2013, she boarded a plane to Frankfurt, Germany. From

there, she made her way to Sweden, where Zak, his father, and his sister were then able to join

her under the Family Reunification Act, which granted separated families the ability to live

together once one of the family members was granted a legal residence permit.

Esma established residency for her and her family in Simrishamn, where she opened a

catering business and worked part-time at a local nursing home. An advocate for free artistic and

cultural expression, she enrolled Zak in the Sommarkulturskola in 2016 and registered him for

trumpet and singing lessons the following fall. “I see how, at the kulturskola, he feels like a

singer,” she once said of Zak’s involvement at the kulturskola. “He loves music very much. He

has a big heart and loves all people, and he is the best child in the whole world for me.”

The transition to Swedish life was not always easy for Zak. In addition to the myriad

difficulties many young refugees encounter in their lifetime, Zak also has a learning disability

that makes it hard for him to comprehend dates and times. Weekly (and, at times, daily)

attendance at the kulturskola has played an important role over the past few years in helping him

establish a routine and manage his schedule and feel a sense of independence within this space.

The following excerpts speak to Zak’s relationship with the kulturskola and Sommarkulturskola,

as well as his experiences as a young Syrian living in a predominantly white, Swedish

community. While themes such as relationship building (and particularly building relationships

with teachers and other adults) and learning about other people and cultures are present here, one

main take-away from Zak’s story is how young people often see the kulturskola as a site for

social mobility where concepts of “goodness” and belonging emerge.

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Interviewing Zak

Zak and I have returned to our interview in the art room. He sits calmly with his hands in his

sweatshirt pocket leaning back ever so slightly in his chair. So far, Zak has spoken about his

history with the program, his involvement in Sommarkulturskola and music lessons, and some of

the staff members. I am interested in his broader musical environment and influences. “Do any

of your family members play music?” I ask him.

“I have grown up watching my father play the oud,” says Zak, referring to the iconic

chordophone found throughout the Arab music world. We talk a bit about his family, during

which he briefly brings up his time in Turkey: “Before I lived in Sweden, I lived in Turkey. I

never really learned the language while I was there, though…” He trails off and redirects the

conversation toward the kulturskola: “The teachers are really nice, even though sometimes they

say, ‘do this,’ or ‘do that,’” he tells me. “But maybe one day I am going to work here, too, and I

am going to help the other kids understand what they are supposed to do.” I nod in

encouragement, wondering if he has told anyone else this, or if this a new development.

“Och de andra studenterna?—And the other students?” Do you have other friends at the

kulturskola?” I ask.

He twirls the strings of his jacket, contemplating my question. “Yes and no,” he replies.

“Listen. I have many friends here in Simrishamn, but we are not always so close. Sometimes I

feel like I get along better with the adults.”

“I see. But you are friends with Sam, right? I remember you were together a lot when I

was here last summer.”

“You weren’t here last summer,” Zak reminds me.

“True. I guess it was two summers ago, then. 2018.”

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“Sam annoys me sometimes.”

“Oh? How come?” I ask. Zak opens his mouth to respond and quickly snaps it shut.

“I shouldn’t say. Let’s talk about something else,” he says nervously.

I remembered Firas telling me that that Sam and Zak hung out a lot, but sometimes had a

tense relationship outside of kulturskola hours. I decided not to push the question further. “Okay,

that’s fine. I was just wondering. So, back to friends. Is it different between Sommarkulturskola

and now [during the school year]?”

“Oh yeah,” he nods. “So Sommarkulturskola—we started that in 2016. That was my first

summer, and my sister went there, too. That summer was really fun, but it was also hard. It was

hard to meet other kids. But everyone was nice. I really liked the adults.”

“And now?” I ask.

“Yeah, so now I know a lot more people. I still go to Sommarkulturskola, and it is fun. I

do more with other people there, but at the [yearlong] kulturskola I get a lot more attention from

the teachers playing trumpet and singing and stuff.” Zak pauses, his eyes widening as he starts to

backtrack. “I mean, no, not like attention…but I want them to know about me and to know that I

am good. Do you understand? I am not looking for extra attention or anything like that.”

I chuckle. “No, I get it. No worries—you are good. But when you say that you want them

to know that you are good, do you mean good at music, or good in general, or…?”

“Both. I meant, like, in general—that I am a good person. I am not a troublemaker. But I

guess I want them to think that I am good at music and things, too.”

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Young Refugees and the Importance of “Being Good”

The idea of being a “troublemaker” appears multiple times over the course of my conversations

with Zak and the other students in Simrishamn. Some students, like Zak, believe the kulturskola

helps some of the older members of the community realize that they are “not the kind of kid who

is there to cause problems.” Among some of my anonymous interviewees, some parents and

students similarly think that the kulturskola is a good alternative to “being out on the streets” or

to “getting into trouble because you have nothing else to do.”

A few weeks after our conversation about “being good,” Zak and I meet again for one of

his singing lesson with Anna. He is noticeably upset when he arrives, so Anna and I ask him

what’s wrong. He explains that he had an encounter with a white, middle-aged, Swedish woman

who scolded him for “playing his Arabic music too loud” outside of the library.

“It’s not fair,” he cries. “[These women] say to their friends, ‘oh these boys are just on

the streets [blasting] their Arabic music and making trouble,’ but that’s not true. It’s just NOT.”

Later that day, Zak brings up the incident again to one of the male staff mentors at the

Bénka-dí youth center.

The staff member is sympathetic. “So how are we going to handle this if it happens

again?” he prompts.

Zak grows frustrated. “What do you mean? I can’t do anything. No matter what I do, [this

woman] will think these things about me. She doesn’t even know me, and she thinks these

things.”

Zak and the staff member converse a little longer and make a plan for future encounters:

Zak agrees to use earphones when listening to music outside and to find an adult (either at

Bénka-dí or elsewhere) if he runs into another problem. Once they finish talking, Zak moves to

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another corner of the room, away from the others. He looks less upset, but I sense that he is not

fully satisfied with the results of the conversation.

I include this story about Zak not to inspire discussion about how this situation should

have been handled, or whether Zak was or was not playing his music “too loudly,” but rather to

outline how Zak viewed and articulated a confrontation in which he was othered by another

community member. His statement, “she doesn’t even know me, but she thinks these things”

does not explicitly say what Zak believes the woman is thinking. It does suggest, however, that

Zak is not only aware and experienced with the racial and ethnic essentialisms and stereotypes

that surround him as a young, Arabic-speaking boy in Simrishamn, but extremely affected by

them. In other words, the impetus to “be good” is always going to be situated within an

environment that has historically told him that he is not good. It is therefore interesting that, in

wanting to be seen as “a good person,” or “not a troublemaker,” that he looks toward the

kulturskola – a historically white, democratic, middle-class institution, to develop and perform

“goodness” in his daily life. It becomes, in a way, a symbol social mobility, as well as a point of

mediation surrounding issues of race, ethnicity, and “otherness” within his larger community.

The Library Concert

Zak returns to the library a few weeks after the incident with the older woman, this time as a

performer in the kulturskola’s fall variety show.

“I’m so nervous,” Zak says to me, looking toward the stage. Nestled between the stacks

of books is a small, raised platform adorned with music stands and a Yamaha keyboard. Zak

dons a cool black hoodie, jeans, and sneakers, his hair newly cut and styled into a pompadour

fade. He’ll be singing “Utan dina andetag” (“Without Your Breath”), a song popularized by

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Swedish rock band Kent, later in the show. He found the song in one of Anna’s songbooks

during one of his lessons and decided that he wanted to sing it for the performance.

“You’re going to be great,” I assure him. “You sounded awesome during your lesson

yesterday!”

Zak bites his lip and looks back toward the audience. “No, listen. I am really, really

nervous,” he says. “Wait, where’s my music?”

“I have an extra,” Anna tells him. Zak digs around in his jean pockets.

“Never mind, I found it,” he says as he unfolds a crumpled lyric sheet from his left

pocket.

A small group of audience members take their seats. I linger in the back with Zak’s

mother, father, and sister, my camera strapped over my shoulder so that I can capture a few

photos of the event for the kulturskola’s social media pages. The show begins, and we listen to a

guitar solo, trumpet duet, and a haunting rendition of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” by one of the

older students. Two of the circus students perform a balancing routine, and the folk music

ensemble plays a lively polska and vals set. Zak will be singing soon. I see him peering over one

of the bookshelves, waiting in anticipation for his turn to perform.

I walk over toward a table where two staff members are standing in order to get a better

camera angle for Zak’s song. They casually lean against the table, watching intently as Zak and

Anna walk toward the stage. Zak places his (noticeably fresh) lyric sheet on the music stand,

takes a deep breath, and cues Anna to start her piano accompaniment. She plays the first chord,

and he shakily begins to sing:

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Jag vet att du sover

Känner värmen från din hud

Bara lukten gör mig svag

Men jag vågar inte väcka dig nu…

I know that you're sleeping

I feel the warmth from your skin

Just the scent makes me weak

But I don't dare to wake you now..

Zak continues the song, becoming visibly more comfortable as it progresses. He uncrosses his

arms, relaxes his voice, and throws his head back as he belts the chorus:

Jag kan inte ens gå

Utan din luft i mina lungor

Jag kan inte ens stå

När du inte ser på

Och genomskinlig grå

Blir jag

Utan dina andetag

I can't even walk

Without your air in my lungs

I can't even stand up

When you're not watching

And translucent grey

I become

Without your breath

(Joakim Berg, “Utan dina andetag,” 1997)

The song ends, and the audience erupts in applause. Zak breathes a sigh of relief and makes his

way off stage, smiling.

As the applause dies down, one of the staff members turns to me and whispers, “I got

chills – his story is so beautiful…You can hear that kind of Arabic sound in his voice—that kind

of wavering sound.” I am struck by her comment. What she had heard as “Arabic,” I had

interpreted as Zak’s nervousness. The wavering sound in Zak’s voice was not present during his

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rehearsals, and Zak had repeatedly mentioned that he was anxious prior to going onstage. It is, of

course, possible that “Arabic” elements of Zak’s sonic environment had crept into his

performance, but I couldn’t help wonder why the staff member chose to make this comment at

this particular moment. Why was it important for her to mark Zak’s “Arabic-ness” in his

performance of a well-known Swedish rock song?

After the performance, Zak, his parents, and I congregate together to chat about the

performance. The staff member joins us again. “Zak did such a wonderful job,” she says.

“He did—we are very proud of him,” says his father.

“Maybe next time the two of you can perform together, maybe something in Arabic,” she

says as she turns to me. “Zak’s dad is a very good oud player, you know.”

She and Zak’s parents chat a bit more. I look at Zak. “So, is that something you would

ever do—sing in Arabic with your dad?”

“I don’t know,” he grimaces. “It would be weird to do it here [with the kulturskola].

Nobody else would be singing with their parents… or in Arabic.” He places extra emphasis on

the words “parents” and “Arabic.”

I smile. “Yeah, that’s a good point.”

In a later interview, I ask Zak if he would consider singing in Arabic if it were an official

part of the curriculum. He says that it would be a possibility, but that “the teacher would have to

be nice and would have to actually play that kind of music.”

“Would you sing a solo?” I ask.

“Only if other people were,” he says. “For example, in the dance classes, there are many

people dancing with Hanna, so it is not weird that the music is in Arabic. In music, I would be

the only one doing that. So it would depend on the context.”

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“Do you think the kulturskola should have a teacher who focuses more on Arabic

musics?” I inquire.

“They could, but I don’t think they really have to. You can learn that kind of music from

other people if you want. You don’t need to have it here [at the kulturskola] just because

someone like me is here.”

“Sounding Arabic”: Markedness in Public Space and Performance

What does it mean to “sound Arabic” in a public context? The examples above provide two

situations where “sounding Arabic” creates a moment of friction or tension between Zak and

adult members of his musicultural environment. In the first example, Zak was targeted for his

loud, pointedly “Arabic music” outside of the community library. In the second, a well-meaning

staff member mishears a nervous shake in Zak’s voice at a kulturskola performance as an

“Arabic sound.” Both instances project assumptions surrounding Zak’s linguistic and cultural

background onto the performance. A later attempt by the same staff member at inclusion—that

is, her suggestion for Zak and his father to perform a song in Arabic together—are met with

hesitation by Zak, who recognizes that both the language and the parental presence would mark

him as different from the other students in the group. It is, in a way, an “inclusion complexity”

(Karlsen 2017), whereby an attempt of inclusion did not lead to its intended result.

There are always pedagogical challenges when trying to bridge “at home” music with

“school music” (Wallerstedt and Lindgren 2016). Zak’s response to the staff member’s

suggestion, however, is one example where bringing young people’s “at home” music to the

kulturskola might not best serve minority students. Any attempt to bridge the two must be

cognizant of the types of racial biases that might underscore such efforts within a local setting,

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especially if that setting (in this case, the local library) brings with it associations of racism or

other forms of epistemic violence. That is not to say that Zak might not choose to sing in Arabic

in future performances at the kulturskola, but at this moment and in this context, Zak prefers not

to pursue that option. That is also not to say that another student might not feel differently about

this type of performance (in fact, I have seen multiple teenagers perform in Arabic at one of the

Bénka-dí open mic nights). Zak’s comments, however, demonstrate that any attempt to bridge

“at home” and “school” music must do so in a way that does not single the student out as “other”

or “different” from the rest of the group.

“Ung och naiv”

In March 2020, immediately prior to the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Simrishamn

Kulturskola held a concert in Valfisken for their music students. Featured were the pop choir and

folk music ensemble, as well as the newly formed klezmer ensemble. Zak was slated to perform

another solo, as were several other flute, piano, and Suzuki students. I caught up with him before

the performance.

“Hej Zak! It’s been awhile. How have you been?” I ask.

“Allt är bra—all is well,” he says. “My mom is in Helsingborg right now. She just got her

citizenship.”

“That’s excellent!” I exclaim. “I am so happy for you all.”

We hang out for a while longer, listening to some of the other groups as they rehearsed

The folk music ensemble and joint choirs begin the first verse of “En gång i min ungdom”

(“Once in my Youth”), a lively smithing song from the Uppland region of Sweden.

“Did you ever do the choir at the kulturskola?” I ask Zak.

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“Nah, that’s not for me,” he says. “I do at school, but I would rather sing by myself.”

“That’s fair,” I nod. “What are you singing this time?”

“Here.” He hands me his lyric sheet. I read the title: “Ung och naiv” (“Young and

Naïve”). The song, released by Safari (the stage name of former Swedish Idol contestant Joakim

Jakobsson), describes how values from childhood change as one grows older:

Som små gjorde vi allt, allt och lite till, och det vi inte fick.

Gränser dem satte vi själv, livet var ett spel, där ingen gjorde fel.

Vi kunde ej förstå att livet är hårt, det är så svårt, tiden den är vår.

Ung och naiv, du ser allt så klart så som det ska va.

Men lek blir till våld vuxna tar kontroll världen byter håll.

Om du bara kunde få mig att förstå. Allt du rör och hör det kan jag aldrig nå.

Så ung och naiv du ser allt så klart, så som det ska va.

(As children, we did everything, everything and a little more, and what we weren’t supposed to.

We set the boundaries ourselves, life was a game, where no one did anything wrong.

We could not understand that life is hard, it is so difficult, the time is ours.

Young and naïve, you see everything so clearly as it should be.

But play turns into violence adults take control the world changes direction.

If only you could make me understand. Everything you touch and hear I can never reach.

So young and naïve you see everything so clearly, as it should be.)

(Joakim Jakobsson, “Ung och naiv,” 2018)

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I hand Zak’s music back to him. “Wow, did you pick this out yourself?” I ask.

“Yeah, Anna helped me find it. I really like it.” He pauses. “You know, when you sing

something, you sing what you feel inside.”

“That’s really beautiful, Zak.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

Adultness and Individuality

Whereas many of the young people in this study emphasize community building with other

young people at the kulturskola, Zak’s experiences center more on his relationships with the

adult members at the school and his own individual music-making. His opening remarks about

“growing up” in this institution point to a deep connection to the kulturskola. To him, it is a place

where he can be musical and express his individuality, where he can be seen as a leader among

some of the younger students, and where he might gain a certain amount of social and cultural

capital (“goodness”) through his participation. While there are occasional moments of tension

between him and the other students, or even between him and a staff member, he ultimately feels

that the kulturskola is his “home” and that it is a safe place to express himself through song or

otherwise.

Zak’s musical interests are vast and diverse. Though he listens predominantly to Syrian

hip-hop when he is on his own, he also grew up listening to his father playing tarab music on the

oud or to his mother’s Fairuz albums. When Zak performs, he prefers to sing in Swedish and

tends to gravitate toward rock ballads from the 1990s and later. His listening and performance

contexts remain distinct within this space, though he does not necessarily separate them in his

own discussions of his musical life. He does, however, stipulate what might be required to bridge

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these contexts at the kulturskola—namely, knowledgeable and culturally sensitive teachers and

creating spaces where performing in Arabic would not be “the exception” to the rule.

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CHAPTER 10

ON TEACHING REFUGEE STUDENTS

In early 2020, after I had been at the kulturskola for several months, I sat down with a few of the

school’s music teachers for more extensive interviews and conversations about working with

students with refugee backgrounds, how they have adapted their teaching over the years, and

their thoughts about the role of the kulturskola in their community. Most of these conversations

happened at local coffee houses or lunch spots, though it was also fairly common to catch up

with one another between lessons in Godsmagasinet or Rosa huset.

One day, I was sitting in the kitchen with Agneta, one of the piano pedagogues. We had

done an “official” interview the week before, where we chatted about her background, teaching

philosophies, and experiences with the kulturskola. Our mutual curiosities, however, led to

several subsequent rich conversations on these topics. Therefore, when she sat down her stack of

music on the kitchen table and settled into one of the staff room’s bright red chairs, I

immediately grabbed my notebook and started to scribble down her remarks.

“I was thinking about it after we last spoke,” she started, “and I wanted to mention—you

asked about playing Arabic musics. I have this one student, Amara. She’s from Egypt, but her

mother comes from Syria. She sent me these links to an Arabic song that she wants to learn on

piano. One of the links is one of those YouTube videos, where—how should I describe it—a lot

of my pupils like to bring in these videos with all these colors that show which notes to play, and

they say they’ve been learning [piano] that way. I suppose it can be good because it gets them

interested. Students bring me a lot of video game music, for example, or want to learn to play a

birthday song for their grandparents. But it can also be frustrating because they don’t learn

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proper technique. That has been a big change over the years as a teacher. That, and getting

students to practice. They just have so much going on with sports and school. There is so much

for them to do, so kulturskola is not as big of a focus as it was, say, ten or twenty years ago.

Anyway, my student sent me these links to this song. I’ll send them to you. It might be a bit too

hard for her, but I am going to see if there is a way we can make it work. The song is actually

quite nice. She says it’s a rather famous song.”

When I received the links from Agneta a few hours later, I chuckled. One of them was a

“piano cover + tutorial” for Fairuz’s “Sahr El Layali,” complete with guitar-hero-like graphics. I

soon discovered that there is a slew of YouTube tutorials in this style dedicated to Fairuz piano

covers—a topic that perhaps needs its own dissertation to unpack. Nonetheless, there is

something to be said for how young people are using YouTube to engage with and direct their

own pedagogical endeavors. These YouTube clips, in a way, enable kulturskola teachers who

might not have much knowledge about student interests (refugee or otherwise) to further engage

students in their programs. It also makes children’s perspectives more central to their learning.

On the other hand, many teachers find trying to balance the child’s perspective with their own

pedagogical approaches challenging. The following conversation with Henrik, one of the

school’s guitar pedagogues, speaks to these challenges while also demonstrating that “learning

about other people and customs” applies to not only the students at the school, but the teachers as

well.

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Coffee with Henrik

“Would you like another coffee?” I ask Henrik. We are about an hour into our first “formal”

interview and have covered topics ranging from his own background as a student at the

Simrishamn kulturskola to his newly formed kulturskola photography group.

“I’m ok. I have a guitar student in Godsmagasinet in an hour,” he says.

“Ok, I won’t keep you too much longer, then,” I say.

“Oh, no worries. I hope this is helpful.”

“It really has been,” I say. “Thank you again. But I am wondering—one of the things I’m

interested in in my work is diverse populations of students, and particularly children and young

people from Syria, Afghanistan—those newly arrived in Sweden—and I am curious if you’ve

worked with anyone with that background and what that was like.” I realize I have fumbled the

question a bit, but Henrik shakes his head, understanding. Most of the teachers are familiar with

my research by now.

“I don’t have a lot of experience,” he starts, “but two years ago Anna was having a group

with like six or seven older students, or it was a mix, but it was like people in gymnasium and

people who have left gymnasium. And they were playing guitar, and I was getting into that group

playing with her and those six or seven from Afghanistan and Syria.” Henrik pauses. I nod,

remembering that Anna had previously told me about how she started a weekly guitar group

tailored toward Muslim girls in 2016. “It worked pretty good for one year,” he continued, “and

then some left for other cities, and then it was just two or three left. I got one of them for

individual lessons. It was different. It was somewhat hard to… well, different because they have

a whole other non-western approach to music, so that was a tough one to try to meet them. They

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showed us clips on YouTube and I had to figure them out. And I came [to the group] with some

“western” music and we mixed them a bit.

“That’s interesting,” I acknowledge.

Henrik continues. “Anna and I had one attempt at going down to this home for

ensamkommande barn [unaccompanied children] over at Strandvägen. Did you know Nina’s

husband worked there?”

I shake my head “no.” Nina is one of the administrative assistants at the kulturskola. The

topic hadn’t come up in any of my conversations with her.

“So I think it’s through him they come to us saying ‘[the kids there] hang around and

they have nothing to do, so maybe we can put music into their lives,’ Henrik says. “And we were

there. We played some mixed things the first time. But the next time we went, there were only

like two people, so it turns out there was not much interest in what we delivered. But one of the

kids—the one I told you about that I had as a separate student [earlier in the interview]—he was

from there.”

Henrik pauses again before concluding his thought. “Yeah, it was kind of hard, both

musically, but also because the kids stay in one place for some time, then they leave. So it’s not

like we are used to [at the kulturskola] where [students] usually come when they around 10-

years-old and stay for as long as they have the interest.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” I affirm while thinking about which direction to take the

interview next. Something tells me I should probably push him on the ‘western music’ question.

“So you said that it was kind of hard with the different kinds of musical systems, so what did you

do to overcome that?” I ask.

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“The same thing I do with all students. I listen to them [and ask], ‘What do you like?

Why do you choose to play guitar?’ If I am showing interest and choosing to deliver some of

that, I feel I can come with my knowledge and my know-how and my ‘I know this is good for

you, like medicine or something’ approach. And then we meet. This was my approach [with the

newly arrived students] as well, but there was a greater distance between the two worlds. So I

had to play their music and I did as best I could. We also listened to the folks at Strandvägen, and

they told us, ‘maybe they want to learn more Swedish visor and that kind of stuff, so don’t come

here playing Michael Jackson or something.’ Well, not in those words. We tried to play some

pop music. But they told us, ‘ah, maybe they want to learn like an old Swedish song or

something instead.’ ‘So okay, I don’t know.’ I say. ‘Maybe I can try this as well.’ I don’t know

that that was what they really wanted, though…” Henrik trails off, and I shake my head

knowingly, thinking about the politics of good intentions.

I ask almost every music teacher the same question I asked Henrik about their work with

diverse populations of students. Most remark that they have not worked much with young

refugees in the context of private lessons, though they have through Sommarkulturskola,

Kulturgarantin, or other project-based initiatives. “Part of the reason we didn’t have as many

students [at the year-long kulturskola] has to do with people not realizing that things like

Sommarkulturskolan were part of Kulturskolan Simrishamn at first,” Sylvia admits. “They

thought they were different. Some still do, but I think we have communicated this better since

then, and now we have more Syrian and Afghan students enrolled… Lina’s nieces are in the

queue for piano lessons,” she points out. “We have had quite a few especially want to do guitar

and singing. Of course, there is Zak who plays the trumpet, too.”

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Most music teachers also say that they, like Henrik, do not have much experience with

“non-western” musics, but also want to try to rectify this through other approaches such as song

arranging or focusing on other mutual song interests. I realize over time that the participation of

students like Zak or Lina’s nieces seems like an exception to the rule when it comes to individual

lessons at the kulturskola. Indeed, initiatives such as Sommarkulturskola have helped bring in

more students with refugee backgrounds to the program. However, I can’t help but notice that

these initiatives brought in significantly more students to dance, art, or group music classes than

they did to private lessons. It is therefore appropriate to ask why this might be and whether or not

this trend constitutes a problem. These questions weigh rather heavily on almost every teacher I

speak with during this research process, including Sven, the school’s folk music teacher.

The Folk Music Ensemble

Every Wednesday from 6:00-7:00 p.m., the waltzes, polskor, slängpolskor, and schottischer of

the kulturskola’s folk music ensemble ring from Rosahuset across the town’s rose garden. The

group is small, but dedicated; there are three students (a guitar player, a cellist, and a flute

player) and three staff members (a fiddle player, a guitar player, and flautist). All of the students

are teenagers between 14 and 17, Swedish-born, and have family members who played or

expressed interest in Scandinavian folk music. The rehearsals are relaxed and focus on learning

tunes by rote, though the instructor does have transcriptions of the tunes available for outside

practice.

This ensemble is relatively new to the Simrishamn kulturskola and was established when

the school hired Sven, the ensemble director, a few years ago. Sven is a renowned fiddler and

educator in the Swedish folk music community. He has toured throughout England and the

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Nordics and currently performs professionally with a local trio that bridges Scandinavian folk

musics with musical elements influenced by other global music traditions.

Sven’s experience with the kulturskola is a bit different than most of the other teachers I

spoke with. While most have encountered students with refugee backgrounds in some capacity

during their time in Simrishamn, Sven has not yet had that opportunity (though he has during his

time working with an El Sistema group in Malmö). Part of this has to do with him being a newer

teacher in the area, he recognized. However, another part of this might be attributed to larger

questions of refugee engagement and interest in the types of music that Sven teaches and plays.

For Sven, the question of “locality”—what constitutes local music and who gets to determine

this—is central to his own explorations of teaching diverse students.

A Conversation with Sven

I am meeting Sven for fika and an interview at the café on the corner of the main square in

Simrishamn. I arrive about ten minutes early and order coffee and a semla roll from the counter

before finding a quiet place in the corner to set up my zoom recorder. Sven texts me that he will

be about a few minutes late, so I scoop a spoonful of whipped cream from the top of my semla,

pop it in my mouth, and anxiously start to look over some of my notes from the previous night’s

folk ensemble rehearsal. I am not the first ethnomusicologist to interview Sven. He’s a fairly

well-known fiddler in the Swedish folk music community and has been a research “subject”

within this context. And though we have spoken frequently in Rosa huset and played together in

the local orchestra, we had not gotten around to doing an official interview until now.

He arrives, grabs some coffee form the counter, and we start to chat about some of his

students. He tells me about his musical background, the previous kulturskolor he’s worked with,

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and his visions for Simrishamn’s program. I ask him about his students, and he notes that most

are the stereotypical kulturskola student—predominantly white, almost none with immigrant

backgrounds, he explains. We talk for about two hours, and I start to sense that we are both

getting tired. I ask my standard end-of-interview question: “Is there anything that I haven’t asked

about, or that you thought I would ask about, that you think I should know?”

Sven takes a sip of his coffee. “Well, coming here, I was a bit worried,” he says. “You

did ask about how diverse my group of students is, and that’s something where I feel maybe

I’m… to be honest, sometimes I feel like compared to some of my colleagues, I can be a bit

critical of myself in that I don’t have so much engagement with that question. I think the kind of

trivial explanation I create for myself is that it has to do with my own middle-class background.

And to be honest that makes me feel less comfortable outside of that environment. I guess one

way of describing it is that instead of having all these thoughts about how to reach all children in

Simrishamn, my thinking has been going more into the children that I meet. How can I give them

as big of an experience of music as possible, which I suppose, in a way, is a way to try to

diversify things.”

I reflect upon his comments and appreciate his honesty. I decide it is appropriate to

reciprocate. “I mean, in terms of that question, I guess I was thinking of that more as a structural

thing with the institution,” I say. “I think it was more of a general curiosity of when people do

work with these populations, what can we learn from that if you’ve had that experience. Plus, if

you are a folk musician in what you say is a traditionally ‘white’ genre, that would be very

interesting if that ever came up to parse out.”

Sven nods. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I mean, the whole thing with folk music

and… I’m thinking a lot about why do I play folk music? Why do I like it? How do I relate to it?

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Because I, on a personal level, really have a strong way of relating to it that has to do with a

region and roots and locality and… this is perhaps off topic from kulturskola…”

“It’s not,” I assure him.

“I grew up in Lund. It’s on the other side of Skåne. It’s probably a hundred kilometers

away from here, but I think partly that’s how I was taught folk music—with a strong focus on it

being local music—that it was sort of this guy who was in this tiny village that you pass when

you go here [to Simrishamn]. And even if I’ve studied traditions from other parts of Sweden and

other parts of Europe, I kind of kept coming back to this local music, and that’s something I

really like. I really enjoy doing it, and it does give me a really strong sense of connection with

time and place and history and whatever. And it’s also given me so much knowledge and

interesting meetings and so many good things. But sometimes I think that if I want to teach this

to immigrants or just people who don’t have that same feeling or who are maybe not looking at

that aspect of being connected with place—those who are not turned on by this feeling of

locality— how and why should I teach them this music? For me, on a personal level, [the

context] just goes together with the music. And if I choose between wanting to play this tune or

that tune, the story behind the tune is often as important or even more important than the melody

of the tune [itself], because I often feel that they’re very… so if I have an interesting story that I

feel connected to behind this tune, that I would choose to play that tune and teach that tune. So

they’re thoughts I’ve been struggling with.”

Transformations in Teaching and Learning

The above case studies speak to the kulturskola’s larger efforts to reach young refugees through

their programs, as well as some of the areas where refugee participation has not been as

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prominent. In general, teachers at the kulturskola who have worked with refugees emphasize a

broad range of musical content in their pedagogical approaches, sometimes drawing upon mutual

interests or outside media to build connections with their students. Yet, cultural context is an area

where many teachers currently struggle when deciding who, what, and how to teach music or

dance in a transforming local environment.

There are several moments in the above examples where kulturskola participation does

facilitate cultural transfer and exchange, enabling both teachers and students to “learn about

other people and cultures.” Use of YouTube and other media to share musical ideas across

cultural barriers was a main theme among kulturskola teachers who have worked with refugee

populations. In other conversations, some of these teachers have remarked that their ability (and

flexibility) to implement such strategies derives from the kulturskola’s existing children’s rights

perspective, which places the focus on individual and local phenomena, as opposed to a national

or standardized curriculum. In other words, the fact that the teachers already had tools to

incorporate the interests of individual children in their lessons enabled them to give their refugee

students “as big of an experience of music as possible.” Yet the possibilities for these

experiences are still dictated by teacher’s own pedagogical preferences, skillsets, and language

competencies, which may or may not align with those of their students. These tensions and

“misalignments,” however, encourage both students and teachers to find new ways of interacting

musically (and socially) with one another, once again creating sites of social and artistic

transformation.

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CHAPTER 11

RETROSPECTIVES

If I could go back to 2016 and talk to myself, I would say that things are better. I would tell myself to do the Sommarkulturskola—it’s exciting. It would have been harder to integrate into society if the Sommarkulturskola wasn’t there the first year. I mean, I still had friends and things to do. I could have watched movies or whatever, but it helped me to better understand Swedish people and their customs.

-Yousef, October 24, 2019 There is an obvious reality to doing research with children and young people that often goes

unmentioned in ethnographic studies: eventually, they grow up. When I began this fieldwork in

2017, I met three young people—Samir, Yousef, and Nour—who, at the time, were in their mid-

teens and had arrived from Syria vis-à-vis Jordan and Lebanon in 2015 and 2016. Samir and

Yousef are close friends who lived with their families in one of the refugee settlements in

Österlen. Samir’s mother, pregnant at the time, had flown to Sweden earlier than the others in

order to receive maternity care.

Nour’s story was a bit different than Samir and Yousef’s. Her father, a medical

professional, had arrived to Sweden earlier on his own, stayed in a settlement near Köpingebro,

and was ultimately able to obtain Swedish residency through the immediate protections granted

to Syrian refugees during the 2015 refugee influx. After having lived in a settlement in Jordan

for three years, Nour, her mother, and her sister came directly to Sweden under the Family

Reunification Act and moved into an apartment in Simrishamn.21

Samir, Yousef, and Nour all participated in the Sommarkulturskola during its first year

and enrolled in year-long kulturskola activities in subsequent years. Samir and Yousef joined in

21 Nour is a published author has written about her experiences in her blog, currently accessible at https://nour935.wordpress.com/.

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the school’s dance courses and show group, while Nour found a home in Anna’s guitar group.

By 2018, all three of these students had moved on to gymnasium or college, and no longer

participated in kulturskola activities (though Samir and Yousef did visit some of the program’s

open dance classes every so often to dance and say “hello”). Their reflections, however, offer

key insights into the types of impacts the kulturskola had on these young people since they

arrived in Sweden, and how they understand and situate their participation within their broader

postmigration experiences.

Nordic Dialogues: Samir and Yousef’s Reflections

“The School of Culture Makes a Difference,” reads the title slide of a video produced by the

kulturskola at the end of Sommarkulturskola 2016. Samir, Yousef, and their friend Jasmin gather

around my computer screen, where the video is playing.

“Wow, I haven’t seen this in forever,” notes Jasmin.

“We were so young,” laughs Samir.

A camera crew from the Norwegian Kulturrådet (Culture Council) sets up their

equipment in the central room of Rosahuset. They are visiting Simrishamn to capture footage of

the kulturskola for the “Nordic Dialogues: Towards an Inclusive Cultural Sector” conference in

Oslo, Norway. It has been over three years since the kulturskola first interviewed Samir, Yousef,

and Jasmin about their experiences with the Sommarkulturskola as part of the Swedish

Kulturskolerådet’s “Kulturskolan och barn på flykt” initiative.22 Now, they are contributing their

22 “Kulturskolan och barn på flykt – ensamkommande och nyanlända möter kulurskolan,” or “The Culture School and Refugee Children –Unaccompanied Children and Newcomers Meet the Culture School” was a national project whose aim was to provide young refugees with better educational and living conditions through music, dance, drama, circus arts, and visual arts. The Kulturskolerådet, or Kulturskola Council, in Stockholm ran this project for three years from 2016 to 2019.

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thoughts and reflections to the Pan-Nordic “Kulturskolen som inkluderende kraft i

lokalsamfunnet (The Kulturskola as an Inclusive Force in the Local Community)” project.

The video continues. A younger version of Yousef discusses how he learned about the

kulturskola. “Lina, who works here at the kulturskola came and handed out leaflets. And I got a

leaflet.” The video cuts to him dancing dabke alongside Lina. “And I started in the

Sommarkulturskola,” he continues.

The film flashes to Samir. “And I learned from my friend,” he adds.

Back in Rosahuset, Samir and Yousef laugh hesitantly. “Oh, my Swedish was so bad,”

Samir groans.

A younger Jasmin appears next on screen and offers the perspective of a Swedish-born

participant: “We who speak Swedish have learned Arabic, too. And those who speak Arabic

learned more Swedish.” The three continue watching as the cameraman zooms in on their

reactions.

Figure 9: (From left to right) Samir, Yousef, and Jasmin watch footage of themselves in preparation for their interview with the Norwegian Cultural Council. Photo by the author.

October 23, 2019.

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As the three students watch themselves onscreen, Sylvia prepares the interview questions

that she, Hanna, and I discussed earlier that day. The video ends, and Sylvia begins. “So what did

you think of the film?”

“How long ago was that?” asks Yousef.

“2016. Three years ago,” Sylvia reminds him.

“Three years since? Wow. That was kind of when I first started dancing. You knew

nobody in the group. You didn’t really know if someone was part of Simrishamn’s [core] group

or if they lived in Stockholm. It was the beginning of the Sommarkulturskola.”

“I think about how far I have come…” adds Samir. “I think about how much my Swedish

has improved. [At the time], I knew nobody, and I wanted to get better with Swedish. And then

Yousef and I started dancing. It became more and more fun—easier and easier— and eventually

I started getting more comfortable. Life finds you.”

The interview carries on. Sylvia asks about Samir and Yousef’s family’s response to the

Sommarkulturskola. “I think they were just really happy I had hobbies,” says Yousef.

“And Hanna, she speaks Arabic. What was that like?” Sylvia asks.

“Surprising!” Samir laughs. “I didn’t expect someone who looked like… well, I didn’t

expect that she would know Arabic. That was cool.” The group continues their discussion of the

first summer, of meeting new people, and of the types of activities they participated in during

their time at the Sommarkulturskola. The interview starts to wrap up, and Sylvia asks me if

there is anything else I would like to ask the group.

I think for a moment. “Well, I guess I would be curious to know…if you were to look

back and talk to the version of yourself in the video, knowing what you know now, what might

you say?”

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Yousef, Samir, and Jasmin stare blankly at me and begin to laugh.

“Yeah, sorry, it’s a big question,” I say. They pause for another second. Yousef speaks

first.

“I would say that things are better [now]. I would tell myself to do the

Sommarkulturskola—it’s exciting… It would have been harder to integrate into society if the

Sommarkulturskola wasn’t there the first year. I mean, I still had friends and things to do. I could

have watched movies or whatever, but it helped me to understand Swedish people and their

customs.”

Samir goes next. “There is so much I would like to tell myself back then,” he says. “Just

go do it. I’d like to reassure myself, just do it. It’s been so much fun and so exciting. It’s been a

great experience.”

“I’m just thinking,” Yousef adds, “it was good for me that I dared. That I dared to come

here and try out the school. Because, since then, I’ve come such a long way as a dancer. I’ve

tried so much that I never would have otherwise dared. For daring to go that first time with

Samir, all these things happened afterwards, so that was good.”

After the interview concludes, we all head into the kitchen for a fika consisting of juice,

vanilla rolls, and coffee. Hanna and Samir talk a bit about the video clip from a Lebanese news

station he sent her via Facebook of him in a refugee camp several years ago. The clip depicts the

conditions of the camp and shows him crying for his mother on camera. “She’s not here for my

birthday,” a younger Samir weeps.

Samir tells us about showing the clip to his family, who have since reunited. “We all

started crying and hugging when we watched it together,” he says. “And then I showed it to

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Yousef and he made fun of me for crying on camera.” He playfully nudges Yousef as he makes

that comment.

I think about just how much of Samir and Yousef’s lives have been documented on

camera—the news clip, the first Sommarkulturskola video, and now this upcoming video for the

“Nordic Dialogues” conference. There is a bit of a complexity here. On one hand, these films

provide a space for self-representation, young people’s perspectives, and empathy building,

bringing further nuance to discussions concerning the inclusion of young refugees and asylum

seekers in Swedish cultural spaces. The “Nordic Dialogues” film also provided an opportunity to

reconnect in a space that these young people enjoy and believe in, and to reflect on positive

memories surrounding their experiences in a way that might influence other cultural institutions

to adopt similar programs and practices. On the other hand, each of the three videos required, in

part, that Samir and Yousef present themselves as “refugee child” or “former refugee” – labels

that inherently carries with them assumptions of helplessness, vulnerability, and exclusion (Nail

2015, Smith and Waite 2019). When, then, does a young person get to stop being called a

refugee, and how does this type of diversity and inclusion work help or hinder this process?

Nour’s Reflections

Do you ever meet Nour? She was playing the guitar. She loved that. Then I heard from another adult that she was in a refugee camp for three years and she was working/helping abandoned kids with an organization, and at that time she was so little — you know, fourteen or fifteen. So this was the first time she just kind of got to be a teenager herself doing something she really liked.

-Sylvia Carlsdotter, July 11, 2018. I first met Nour in 2017 during my pilot research. At the time, she was attending the local

gymnasium and participating in Anna’s guitar group with a few other girls from Syria. Now, she

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is a published author and student at Uppsala University. We did not speak much during my time

in Simrishamn or in the years following our initial meeting (she was already enrolled at the

university by the time I was able to spend any extensive time in Sweden), but we have kept in

touch through email.

In 2020, I was looking through my fieldnotes and found a short conversation with Nour.

It was only one question, and it was a simple one: “Varför kommer du till kulturskolan?—Why

do you come to the kulturskola?”

“It’s the people,” she responded. “Anna and the others—they welcomed me here. They

made me feel like I belong.”

Nour’s explanation is brief, but summarizes the feelings of several of the young people I

have encountered through this work—that the kulturskola has made them feel a sense of

belonging. Yet, for many, their time at the kulturskola is also associated with a time where the

term “refugee,” for better or worse, defined them. For this discussion, I turn again to Nour, who

writes in Anna Lindberg’s edited compilation Vi kunde bara tamed oss våra minnen (We Could

Only Take With Us Our Memories):

Over the years, I have heard many stories of death, seen tears without limits: tears of disappointment, despair and sorrow, of hunger, fatigue, of longing, remorse, and love. During these years, we have also realized that the word “refugees” will always be stuck to us. I have stopped counting the years. In the beginning, I had some control. But now we have stopped counting. We have stopped hoping. That one day we will get away from the word “refugees” and come home again and pick up where we paused. Now I sit here thousands of kilometers from Syria and feel that the years have passed so quickly. People have disappeared. Places have changed. But our dreams, memories, and hopes remain.23 (Al-houda Kanjo 2019, 111, translation my own)

23 Under åren har jag hört många berättelser om döden, sett tårar utan gränser: tårar av besvikelse, förtvivlan och sorg, av hunger, trötthet, av längtan, ånger och kärlek. Under dess år har vi också insett att ordet ‘flyktingar” alltid kommer att vara fastklibbat på oss. Jag har slutat räkna åren. I början hade jag en viss kontroll. Men nu har vi slutat räkna. Vi har slutat hoppas. Att vi någon dag ska slippa ordet “flyktingar” och komma hem igen och ta vid där vi pausade. Nu sitter jag här tusentalskilometer från Syrien och känner att åren har passerat så fort. Människor har försvunnit. Platser har förändrats. Men våra drömmar, minnen och förhoppningar består.

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After reading the above reflection, I reconnected with Nour via email to ask her if there

was anything else she would like to add about her time with the kulturskola. She responded with

the following:

Those were very nice days at the Sommarkulturskola in Simrishamn, I still long for those days. It really was a welcoming place. I am a person interested in culture so I really enjoyed being there. I learned to play the guitar, I met many nice people there and developed my Swedish language. I had a really fun time there. Now I am studying my third year in the pharmacy program at Uppsala University. It’s going well, but a lot of studyingand stress. I think back a lot to those days in Simrishamn and summer culture school. I really love those days. The summer was then calm with music, dance and art. I actually noticed that Uppsala municipality does not offer such activities for children and young people for free. But there in Simrishamn you could participate for free and the cultural school was open to everyone. I am actually grateful that I got the chance to be there and grateful for all the support, help and fun times I got from there.24

If one of the goals of the Sommarkulturskola and kulturskola is “creating new memories

for childhood,” Nour’s nostalgic reflections suggest that the program, at least to some degree,

succeeded. Nour has not continued her musical pursuits since she left Simrishamn, but she still

recognizes the kulturskola as a formative part of her experiences in Sweden. It provided her a

momentary space of calmness and relationship-building, as well as a basis of comparison for her

own evaluation of what a kulturskola’s role might be in its local community. For her, the “free

and open” nature of the Sommarkulturskola was an important, distinguishing factor in her

participation, and one that opened doors to other aspects of Swedish life.

24 De var väldigt fina dagar i Sommarkulturskolan i Simrishamn, jag längtar fortfarande efter de dagarna. Det var verkligen en välkomnande plats. Jag är kulturintresserad person så jag tyckte mycket om att vara där. Jag lärde mig att spela gitarr, jag träffade många fina personer där och utvecklade mitt svenska språk. Jag hade mycket roligt tid där. Nu läser jag mitt tredje år i apotekarprogrammet vid Uppsala universitet. Det går bra men mycket plugg och stress. Jag tänker mycket tillbaka på de dagar i Simrishamn och sommarkulturskola, jag älskar verkligen de dagar. Sommaren var då lugn med musik, dans och konst. Jag märkte faktiskt att Uppsala kommun inte erbjuder såna aktiviteter för barn och unga gratis. Men där i Simrishamn fick man delta gratis och kulturskolan var öppet för alla. Jag är faktiskt tacksam att jag fick chans att vara där och tacksam för all stöd, hjälp och rolig tid jag fick därifrån.

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The Kulturskola as a Transitional Space

Nour, Samir, and Yousef no longer call themselves refugees, but they each recognize the

kulturskola as a major transition point for their entrance into Swedish society. Both Samir and

Nour reference the kulturskola as a site of language development, and all three cite the actual

activities (guitar, dance) as “fun” or “exciting” aspects of their lives. Belonging was also a

central theme in our discussions, as were their relationships with the other people associated with

the program.

All three of the young people highlighted in this section have spoken publicly about their

refugee experiences and kulturskola participation. Samir and Yousef did so through the

kulturskola’s film projects, while Nour has done so through her writing and other speaking

engagements. In 2018, Swedish Migration Minister Helene Fritzon visited the kulturskola, where

Nour spoke to her about policy and presented her with the book Över en fika i Svea rike: en

novellantologi om sådant som skrämmer oss (Over a Coffee in Svea Rike: A Short Story

Anthology About Things that Scare Us), to which Nour contributed her fictional short story “En

stängd himmel” (“A Closed Sky”). The kulturskola became one channel for this type of meeting

and advocacy, while simultaneously adding “dancer” or “musician” to the multifaceted identities

of these young people. That being said, it also reinforced their status as refugees (or, at this point,

former refugees) in the process, which complicates their ability to move on from that label within

the kulturskola context. The kulturskola will thus always be, for them, a transitional space—a

space where “the word refugees will always be stuck to [them],” but also the space where they

could first shed that label and begin to create new memories and identities for themselves.

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CHAPTER 12

CONCLUSION

Since they first introduced the Sommarkulturskola 2016, Simrishamn’s kulturskola has

continued to gain national and international attention for its efforts to reach all children in their

community. While this has, in part, to do with Sylvia, Anna-Carin, and the diligent work of other

teachers and leaders working to build and share about this program, at the heart of this success

are young people’s stories and experiences.

“I was at Almedalen [Sweden’s largest political gathering] last week,” Sylvia told me on

the day we sat eating our ice cream and watching tourists on the beach in 2018. “There was this

woman from a kind of middle-leaning party, and we all were wondering what she would think,

but I believe I connected with her. You know how strong stories are. [The politicians] get so

touched because really it says something that we can’t understand so easily by other words. All

these stories make an impact on people, since we get so personal with them, and I really think

that is one of the big golden things. It’s not all the facts and things like that. It’s more like

opening up, relation building, building trust—that is what moves the minds of people.”

I’d like to return for a moment to the question posed at the beginning of this dissertation:

“Do these stories actually change anything?” Preliminary evidence from this dissertation

suggests that they might. In the above quotation, Sylvia points toward the role of emotions in

creating change, a theme demonstrated throughout this dissertation, and particularly in the

individual case studies surrounding student participation. This is evident in discussions that

emphasize cultures of care, children’s wellbeing, and belonging. However, it is the navigation of

these emotions—the juxtaposition, for example, of community biases toward young male

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refugees as “troublemakers” with the impetus to create caring and hospitable spaces for a family

who lost everything in an apartment fire after fleeing to Sweden—that one can begin to see how

change work starts to take effect both inside and in relation to the kulturskola as an institution.

Placing young people’s stories and emotional experiences at the center of this analysis opens

new doors for a more dynamic vision of what this might look like on local, national, and even

global levels. This is especially important when considering young people’s experiences through

a postmigration lens.

In the Introduction, I outlined five interrelated themes that characterize young people’s

postmigration experiences and interactions at the kulturskola: 1) language learning, 2)

relationship building, 2) care and hospitality, 3) learning about other people and customs, 4) self-

definition and borderwork, and 5) social mobility. These themes speak to some of the many ways

that the young people in this study have shaped, challenged, defined, and navigated “how [they]

want to live together in societies characterized by increasing heterogeneity” through their

participation in the kulturskola (Foroutan 2016, 248). Examples such as “Lyssna till musiken”

showed how the kulturskola modeled and promoted a space of language learning and hospitality

for refugee participants, while additional conversations with students revealed how the

kulturskola played a role in creating relationships between young refugees and other people in

the community. “Learning about other people and customs” and “self-definition and

borderwork” arose during discussions of musical content and approach (e.g., orientalisk dans,

Sam’s song), and ideas of care and social mobility came to light when examining how the

kulturskola facilitated additional opportunities for young refugees such as Padma and Salma.

These themes only scratch the surface of young refugees’ musical and extramusical engagement

at the kulturskola, but together, they help shape an understanding of how a musical institution

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can become a transitional space—an “emotional frontier”—where feelings and ideas surrounding

refugees and belonging are articulated, negotiated, and transformed.

Simrishamn’s model of refugee inclusion is by no means perfect, but it does offer a

systematic and compassionate approach to refugee inclusion from which other programs could

benefit. It has shown, for example, how an intensive focus on children’s rights can open

additional doors for social inclusion through new programs and curricular transformations, as

was the case with the Sommarkulturskola and several of the interactions between teachers and

students. The preceding chapters have also revealed, however, that inclusion does not always

mean that the kulturskola serves all students equally well. Students such as Zak still grapple with

the stigma of difference in their day-to-day interactions with their teachers, fellow students, and

community members, and there are several young people for whom the kulturskola still feels

inaccessible. Notably, those voices are not as present in this dissertation as others—a major

limitation which I hope to correct in future iterations of this research.

At the end of the day, this dissertation demonstrates that many students from outside of

Sweden have found their experiences at the kulturskola meaningful since their arrival in

Simrishamn. Some of them state that they have “grown up” at the kulturskola. Some say they

have learned more about themselves and others through their experiences. And though moments

of friction do at times occur regarding musical content and approach, these moments often lead

to new forms of interaction and transformation on both a curricular and individual level. Perhaps,

then, it is more than stories that can “move the minds of people.” It is the young people

themselves, their interactions, and their creativity that one day might lead to more equitable

institutions and societies. This close study of one cohort of young immigrants to Sweden at one

particular institution, the Simrishamn kulturskola, has offered vantage points onto a musicultural

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world in which such potential exists. This dissertation, first and foremost, is a story of their

stories, and they are stories that we would all do well to listen to attentively, compassionately,

and with a genuine willingness to learn and grow.

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APPENDIX A

HUMAN SUBJECTS COMMITTEE APPROVAL MEMORANDUM

The Florida State University Office of the Vice President For Research Human Subjects Committee Tallahassee, Florida 32306-2742 (850) 644-8673, FAX (850) 644-4392 APPROVAL MEMORANDUM Date: 2/22/2018 To: Carrie Danielson [REDACTED] Address: [REDACTED] Dept.: MUSIC SCHOOL From: Thomas L. Jacobson, Chair Re: Use of Human Subjects in Research Music, Children, and the Politics of Refugeeism in Sweden The application that you submitted to this office in regard to the use of human subjects in the research proposal referenced above has been reviewed by the Human Subjects Committee at its meeting on 02/14/2018. Your project was approved by the Committee. The Human Subjects Committee has not evaluated your proposal for scientific merit, except to weigh the risk to the human participants and the aspects of the proposal related to potential risk and benefit. This approval does not replace any departmental or other approvals, which may be required.

If you submitted a proposed consent form with your application, the approved stamped consent form is attached to this approval notice. Only the stamped version of the consent form may be used in recruiting research subjects. If the project has not been completed by 2/13/2019 you must request a renewal of approval for continuation of the project. As a courtesy, a renewal notice will be sent to you prior to your expiration date; however, it is your responsibility as the Principal Investigator to timely request renewal of your approval from the Committee. You are advised that any change in protocol for this project must be reviewed and approved by the Committee prior to implementation of the proposed change in the protocol. A protocol change/amendment form is required to be submitted for approval by the Committee. In addition, federal regulations require that the Principal Investigator promptly report, in writing any

130

unanticipated problems or adverse events involving risks to research subjects or others. By copy of this memorandum, the Chair of your department and/or your major professor is reminded that he/she is responsible for being informed concerning research projects involving human subjects in the department, and should review protocols as often as needed to insure that the project is being conducted in compliance with our institution and with DHHS regulations. This institution has an Assurance on file with the Office for Human Research Protection. The Assurance Number is FWA00000168/IRB number IRB00000446. Cc: Michael Bakan, Advisor HSC No. 2018.20313

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APPENDIX B

HUMAN SUBJECTS COMMITTEE RE-APPROVAL MEMORANDUM

Florida State University Office of the Vice President For Research Institutional Review Board Human Subjects Office humansubjects@fsu.edu/850-644-8673 RE-APPROVAL MEMORANDUM Date: 4/22/2019 To: Carrie Danielson [REDACTED] Address: [REDACTED] Department: MUSIC SCHOOL From: Florida State University Institutional Review Board (IRB) Re: Continuing Review Application Music, Children, and the Politics of Refugeeism in Sweden Your request to continue the research project listed above involving human subjects has been approved by the Florida State University Institutional Review Board. If your project has not been completed by 4/20/2020, you must request a renewal from the IRB. If you submitted a proposed consent form with your application, the approved stamped consent form is attached to this approval notice. Only the stamped version of the consent form may be used in recruiting research subjects. You are advised that any change in protocol for this project must be reviewed and approved by the IRB prior to implementation of the proposed change in the protocol. A protocol change/amendment form is required to be submitted for approval by the IRB. In addition, federal regulations require that the Principal Investigator promptly report, in writing any unanticipated problems or adverse events involving risks to research subjects or others. By copy of this memorandum, the Chair of your department and/or your major professor is reminded that he/she is responsible for being informed concerning research projects involving human subjects in the department, and should review protocols as often as needed to ensure that the project is being conducted in compliance with our institution and with DHHS regulations. This institution has an Assurance on file with the Office for Human Research Protections. The

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Assurance Number is FWA00000168/IRB number IRB00000446. Cc: Michael Bakan, Advisor [REDACTED] HSC No. 2018.26364

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APPENDIX C

GENERAL CONSENT FORM

FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

CONSENT TO PARTICIPATE IN A RESEARCH STUDY

Study Title: “Music, Children, and the Politics of Refugeeism in Sweden” Principal Investigator: Carrie Danielson

FSU IRB Approved 04/22/2019 p. 1 of 3

Introduction You are invited take part in a research study affiliated with Florida State University.

This is an ethnographic study on Sweden’s kulturskola programs. The research program will be based at the Simrishamn Kulturskola. Since you are affiliated with the kulturskola, or because your child participates in Simrishamn’s program, you and/or your child is eligible to take part in this study. Before you decide to take part, please take as much time as you need to ask any questions and discuss this study with the principal investigator, family, friends, or another professional.

Things you should know:

x Research will take place during the kulturskola’s normal hours of operation, and participation in the program is voluntary.

x Participation may include audio and video recording of your child participating in the school’s daily activities as well as conversations with them about music and their views about the world.

x Participating children may also be asked to assist in documenting the school’s activities and their music-making through use of individual video cameras, which will be provided for use by the researcher. All video recording will take place at the school and be supervised by the researcher.

x Participation in this aspect of the research is completely voluntary and any child who does not wish to take part may decline participation at any time.

x Participants will not miss any instruction time. x If the child indicates at any time that they want to stop participating in the study,

they may do so and return to their normal activities Please take time to read this entire form and ask questions before deciding whether to take part in this research project.

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135

136

APPENDIX D

PARENTAL CONSENT FORM

FSU Human Subjects Committee approved on 02/21/2018, void after 02/13/2019. HSC #2018.20313

Parental Consent Letter for Minors Music, Children, and the Politics of Refugeeism in Sweden

Dear Parent: My name is Carrie Danielson, and I am a student pursuing my doctoral degree in ethnomusicology in the College of Music at Florida State University (United States). I am conducting a research study on newly arrived and unaccompanied children’s musical participation in Sweden’s kulturskola programs. This research program will be based at the Simrishamn Kulturskola. Since your child participates in Simrishamn’s “Kids on the Run” program, s/he is eligible to take part in this study with your participation. Research will take place during the kulturskola’s normal hours of operation, and participation in the program is voluntary. Participation may include audio and video recording of your child participating in the school’s daily activities as well as conversations with them about music and their views about the world. Participating children may also be asked to assist in documenting the school’s activities and their music-making through use of individual video cameras, which will be provided for use by the researcher. All video recording will take place at the school and be supervised by the researcher. Participation in this aspect of the research is completely voluntary and any child who does not wish to take part may decline participation at any time. Participants will not miss any instruction time. If the child indicates at any time that they want to stop participating in the study, they may do so and return to their normal activities. There are no known risks to your child for participating in this study. It is not possible to say whether your child will derive direct benefits from this program, but it is hoped that this experience will provide an opportunity for all of the participating children to achieve a sense of agency and self-confidence through sharing their own music and worldviews. Another benefit of your participation is to contribute to high-quality research that aims towards the advocacy of children and youth as important and active members of society. Participation in this research is voluntary. Students may still participate in the kulturskola’s programs without participating in the research portion—those who choose to opt out will simply not have their activities in the program documented for research purposes. Findings from this research will become part of my doctoral dissertation, and may be published. Your child’s name will not be used. Note also that your child may be invited to be interviewed about the project, music, and/or perceptions of music through audio-recorded interviews or in written form that may be used in publications, presentations, or other educational materials related to this project. Your child is not required to take part in this aspect of the program. It is completely voluntary. If you have any questions please feel free to reach me via phone at +1 (651) 855-8139 or via e-mail at cad14c@my.fsu.edu. You may also contact my advisor, Dr. Michael Bakan, at mbakan@fsu.edu or at +1 (850) 644-4255. Sincerely, Carrie A. Danielson Doctoral Student in Ethnomusicology Florida State University, United States 651-855-8139

Approved

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138

APPENDIX E

VERBAL CHILD ASSENT FORM A

FSU IRB Approved 04/22/2019

VERBAL CHILD ASSENT FORM

Music, Children, and the Politics of Refugeeism in Sweden

To be read to the child by the researcher or parent: Script for Child Assent (ages 5-14) My name is Carrie Danielson. I am a student researcher from Florida State University. I would like you to participate in a project I am working on having to do with the “Kids on the Run” program here at the kulturskola. I am hoping that we can play and talk about music together. I would also like you to help me record our time together and the music you make at the kulturskola. If you don’t want to help record or to be recorded, that is okay and you can say “no” to me at any time. I’d also like to talk to you about your experiences with the “Kids on the Run” program if that’s okay with you. Your parents have told me it’s okay with them if you to do this program with me, but you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, and if you don’t want to do it at all that’s okay too. No one will be upset in any way if you decide not to participate, or even if you change your mind later and want to stop. You can still do all the other stuff you like to do here at the kulturskola even if you don’t want to be part of my program. Ask me anything you want to about the program. Also, if you don’t have any questions now but think of something you want to ask me about later, you can call me at +1 (651) 855-8139, or just ask me next time we see each other. Would you like to participate in this program? I have been told that my parents/legal guardian have said it's okay for me to participate, if I want to, in a project about music. I know that I can stop at any time I want to and it will be okay if I want to stop. Name: ___________________________________ Would you like to participate in this study?

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APPENDIX F

VERBAL CHILD ASSENT FORM B

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Carrie Danielson is a musicologist whose research interests lie at the intersections of children’s

musical cultures, forced migration, cultural policy, applied ethnomusicology, and Nordic

studies. She holds a Master of Music degree in Musicology from Florida State University and a

Bachelor of Arts degree in Music Theory, History, and Composition from Brown University.

Carrie has been a recipient of the 2018 Elizabeth May Slater Prize of the Society for

Ethnomusicology’s Education Section, the 2018 Presser Graduate Music Award, and a 2019

Florida State University International Dissertation Semester Research Fellowship. She has

presented her work at regional, national, and international conferences in the disciplines of

musicology, ethnomusicology, music education, Scandinavian studies, and children’s history.