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The aim of this thesis is to critically investigate the discourses of Sweden's Art and Music Schools (SAMS, kulturskolor in Swedish) connected to policy processes for the democratisation of music education for all children and adolescents. A further aim is to contribute to knowledge on the development and enactment of policy processes for the democratisation of music education. The empirical material is based on focus group conversations with sixteen SAMS leaders and policy documents related to SAMS. The overall research questions are as follows: (1) What discourses of inclusion and exclusion constitute and are constituted by leadership positioning in relation to policy processes for the democratisation of music education? (2) How is the enactment of policies constituted within and through SAMS leaders' discursive practices? (3) How is the inclusion of all children constituted within and through SAMS leaders' discursive practices and within and through policy documents with relevance for SAMS?SAMS were originally developed as a loosely coupled system of locally shaped schools for learning musical instruments. Gradually, they have embraced other subjects like dance, drama and the visual arts, along with different forms of collaboration with the compulsory school system. The inclusion of all children and the training of professional musicians have been part of the rationale for the development of the system. However, the inclusive aim of SAMS has been problematised in policy and research, exposing an unfulfilled democratic potential.The theoretical framework of the thesis constitutes of discourse theories – Foucauldian discourse analysis and discursive psychology – and policy theories. Among the concepts applied are discourse, regime of truth, policy enactment and policy cycle.The results show that several discourses constituted by and constituting subjectivity are at play: multicentric inclusion discourse, normalisation discourse, specialisation discourse, market discourse, economic discourse and collaboration discourse. The results indicate that there is a need to raise awareness of discourses involved in SAMS activities. Finally, the study offers possible pathways towards the democratisation of music education through engagement in policy processes.

In the Nordic countries, as in other contemporary societies across the world, increased migration following from conflicts, persecution and natural disasters has led to the arrival of and ensuing responsibility for cohorts of refugees and asylum seekers, many of which are underage children. With small chances of a safe return to their homelands for years to come, these children rely on the policies and practices of their host nations to promote the development of skills and competencies necessary to understand, live and work in their new societies. Moreover, they depend upon their host cultures to facilitate social integration while also providing the opportunity of maintaining and developing their own cultural identities. Through the UN convention relating to the status of refugees, as well as the UN convention on the rights of the child, refugee children are ensured these rights: the right to elementary education, the right to practice and enjoy one's own language and culture, and notably also the right to participate fully in cultural and artistic life.In Sweden and the other Nordic countries, the established system of municipally financed music and art programmes have, in recent years, cautiously assumed some of the responsibility for facilitating refugee children's social integration, learning and participation in and through music and art activities. Following visions of including all children, the Swedish and Norwegian Art and Music Schools have explored, tentatively, different ways of recruiting and engaging refugee children and youth in cultural activities. However, recent research suggests that participation in Art and Music School activities amongst refugee and immigrant children stay low, compared to their peers. How to include (fulfil their own vision), and thereby contribute to secure the rights of, refugee children, remains a challenge and also a political priority for the Art and Music Schools.Sweden's Art and Music Schools have under the last few years gone through a historical political period; they have been subjected to a national policy process, a process officially initiated by the government to create national regulation for the first time in history. Within the process, inclusion, in general, appears as a key issue as exemplified by the title of the investigation report on Art and Music Schools (SOU 2016:69), "An inclusive Art and Music School on its own terms". In this article, we investigate how the inclusion of refugee children in Swedish Art and Music and Schools is addressed and considered by Art and Music School leaders when discussing policies and their own Art and Music and School practices. Our approach entails tracing and analysing the discursive tension fields that form in focus group conversations with Art and Music School leaders talking about inclusion of refugee children in relation to practice and to the national policy process, as well as tracing and analysing the discourses that emerge within official documents of the policy process.105NNMPF2019, Stockholm PhD ProjectsThe aim of this article is to investigate the discourses and discursive tensions that emerge when Swedish Art and Music School leaders talk about inclusion of refugee children in relation to policy, as well as in relation to their own Art and Music school practices. The research question is: how do Art and Music School leaders talk about policy and inclusion of refugees when describing their own practice fields?The data for the present article consist of official documents (such as the investigation report on Art and Music Schools) as well as two focus group conversations with a total of twelve Art and Music School leaders from Sweden. Both conversations were conducted during the mentioned national policy process. Foucault inspired discourse analysis together with concepts from educational policy theories constitute the theoretical and analytical framework.A dominant inclusion discourse emerges through the initial analysis of the data. However, there are tensions between the policy and the practice levels when it comes to the inclusion of refugees. One example of such a tension is that when the municipalities do not have a specific policy for Art and Music Schools to include refugees, new kinds of including practices might not get funded. Further analysis of the data will trace discursive tensions within each dataset (the official documents and the focus group conversations) as well as between them. Moreover, further analysis will focus on how the concept of inclusion itself is spoken and written of. The concept of policy as process, as text and as discourse will also be applied in the analysis.