Meet our researchers

What is your research about?

There are three different areas in my research. The first is music and emotions, and to what extent emotional experiences of music are shaped by social factors. The second concerns issues of gender equality in relation to various aspects of music creation and music consumption. The third, most recent research focus, is about the role of music in right-wing extremist radicalization. Specifically, my research looks at how contemporary right-wing extremist movements use music as a tool to both recruit members and spread their messages

How do you view the relevance of your research?

My research focuses on questions of how and why people engage with music. As such, it is relevant for understanding why and how people are musical. However, even though music is important, I also want to explore how it contributes to inequality and gender imbalance. It is important to understand the mechanisms through which people are excluded from making music and the potential harm that music can cause in counteracting such tendencies.

Ester Lebedinski is a music historian, primarily working with 17th-century music history in England. Ester is particularly interested in how different people used music in various historical contexts, what happens when a certain type of music is moved from one context to another – for example, an Italian cantata performed in London, or a Purcell song that becomes a broadside ballad – and how music interacts with other social processes.

What is your research about?

I defended my thesis in 2022 titled Dis/harmony: (Re)construction of Higher Music Education in Classical Music. The research I conduct focuses on power relations and perceptions of music in both music education and other musical contexts. My primary focus is on applying critical perspectives to the relationship between music and humans, regardless of the context. Ultimately, my research aims to make visible assumptions, practices, and values that contribute to maintaining and reproducing structures of exclusion, oppression, and social injustices.

How do you view the relevance of your research?

By studying music and humans from critical perspectives, I aim to make existing power relations visible in various musical contexts, but also to open up for alternative ways of thinking and acting. Challenging established power relations and questioning what is taken for granted is important for creating opportunities to promote greater justice.

Ulrik Volgsten is professor in Musicology. His research is concerned with musical communication in different media. In addition to the conceptual history of Western music (composer, work, listener) and musical aesthetics, an important area of research has been the role of vitality affects in music, which Volgsten has  pioneered and developed in a number of publications since the late 1990s. Beginning in 2021 Volgsten is leading, together with Benedetta Zucconi, the RJ-funded project ”The past as repeatable presence: How phonography changed music from ephemeral event to ever accessible object (a comparison between Sweden and Italy during the interwar years) ”.

Volgsten teaches at both graduate and post graduate levels. Courses include music history, philosophy and aesthetics of music, culture theory, scientific theory and method.

What is your research about?

In my research, I address questions of music and identity, particularly in the context of Nordic popular music. I am interested in how musical taste is negotiated and how genre and language create frameworks for how music is performed and consumed. The concept of authenticity plays a central role in this, both in relation to theatricality and staging, as well as gender and sexuality, and the relationship between aesthetics and technology, particularly how recording technology affects the listener’s relationship to voices.

How do you view the relevance of your research?

Music is a formidable arena for the creation of personal identity, both for artists and listeners, and my research aims to offer tools to investigate how artists negotiate their persona within the frameworks of genre, technology, and gender. In my research, I contribute to a critical perspective on ideas of the presumptively genuine and honest within music, and explore how the foundations of music's social status are negotiated, established, and naturalized through industry mechanisms and media discourses.

Head of Divisions of Musicology and Music Education. Teaches and supervises in music education and academic writing.

What is your research about?

My research is about the power relations that exist in music education, music creation, and the use of music. Music is a source of joy, comfort, and energy. Music can create unity between people, nations, and cultures. But it also means that there are norms that create boundaries and maintain differences. Access to education, jobs, and stages is limited by notions of class, gender, ethnicity, age, and tradition. Social structures restrict who feels at home at a basement concert or at the opera. There are also clear hierarchies between different music genres and professions within the music world. It is these conditions and injustices that my research addresses.

How do you view the relevance of your research?

Whether we are talking about music education, professional musicians, producers, and troubadours, or amateurs singing in choirs, it is necessary to critically examine the relationship between music and humans. We need to make visible the norms and unjust conditions that make the music world, in all its forms, exclusive. We need to challenge established ways of thinking, actions, and power structures. An important way to contribute to change is to discuss the results of my research with students who are studying to become teachers, musicians, producers, or cultural strategists. When they enter the professional world with the ability to question what is taken for granted, challenge, and act differently, it helps create new, more just practices.

What is your research about?

My dissertation project aims to shed light on power relations and structures within Swedish dance band culture. I raise questions regarding hierarchies, inequalities, and power dynamics. I focus on the media portrayal, the dancing audience, and how general participation in dance band culture is conditioned.

How do you view the relevance of your research?

For a long time, dance band culture has held a low cultural status, despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people participate in both the major dance band weeks and engage at the local level. I want to understand why, and I believe it is important to investigate issues of power in a culture that has often been looked down upon. My dissertation project is relevant for gaining a better understanding of Swedish dance band culture and its place in society, as it is a culture that has often been excluded due to its low cultural status.

Joshua Han is a guest researcher in Musicology. He has undertaken cross-disciplinary research across a range of fields and areas including linguistics, social semiotics, multimodality, critical discourse analysis, musicology and social media. He was awarded his PhD in music semiotics from the University of New South Wales in 2022. He has teaching experience in visual communication and social media studies, and has also worked extensively as a researcher in discourse analysis. 

Joshua’s current research project is entitled “Decolonising Music Theory” and is funded by Wenner-Gren Foundations. The aim of this project is to critically examine and work towards challenging the hegemonic position that western classical music theory holds in the field of music theory. Further, it investigates alternative music theoretical perspectives from diverse musical practices. Methods from critical discourse analysis and multimodal social semiotics are applied and applications of the research findings to music education are also investigated.

What is your research about?

In my dissertation project, I discuss the shaping of values by contemporary professional musicians within Swedish folk music.

What is your research about?

My research focuses on vocal herding music – songs and calls (kulning) that are used both to call cows, goats, and sheep in mountain pastures, and in more artistic contexts. In my research, I study the singing and calls from a more-than-human perspective, aiming to understand how they function as communication between humans, animals, and nature. The singing and calls here are not isolated human activities, but an ecological product – something that arises from the relationships between more-than-humans. I explore the musical capacities of animals and how the singing is intonated with their sounds, movements, and activities, as well as in tune with the acoustics of nature and other factors that influence the vocal expressions of both humans and animals in each situation. Even something as small as a horsefly or a mosquito can actually influence what happens to the melodies and rhythms in a song. Music here becomes a form of communication that transcends species boundaries, constantly shaped and reshaped depending on what happens second by second, minute by minute.

How do you view the relevance of your research?

Humanity faces enormous challenges today. One of them is the climate crisis that we have caused ourselves. Since humans are, to my knowledge, the only animals that consciously destroy their own environment, it is important that we reflect on this environment. Is it really only ours? We need to understand that everything we do affects life across the planet. We are in constant relation to all other living beings. Humans are neither above nor outside of other life. On the contrary, we are entirely dependent on it. So what does it mean to be human in times of mass extinction and environmental destruction? Music research can contribute to a necessary, micropolitical, self-reflection. By questioning the human’s self-appointed position as unique and superior, we can also question whether music is truly exclusively human. Through expanding the concept of music, my research shows that, even in musical contexts, we depend on what we have isolated ourselves from. It becomes a small but important contribution to the development of a more inclusive, ecological, and ethical perspective on music that can assist in the self-reflection processes necessary for a green transition.

Anna is writing her dissertation on becoming and being a music teacher in Sweden, a study on becoming and being a music teacher in Sweden for grades 4-6, with a focus on music teachers' (in)formal prior knowledge, educational paths, and perceived professional knowledge in the subject of music.