Yousound

The YouSound project explores the use of music as a tool for the social inclusion of underage refugees in Europe. One of its key innovations lies in the integration of two distinct research fields — refugee studies and music education studies — in order to understand the potential of music education as a means of fostering the social inclusion and holistic development of young refugees in their host countries.

Two deductive research questions frame the project:

(1) How can music education function as a tool to achieve individual and collective outcomes conducive to the social inclusion of underage refugees in Europe?
The convergence of music education and refugee studies adds value by opening up pathways for the development of original, arts-based research methodologies and for the production of new knowledge about these specific social realities.

(2) How can music serve as an ethnographic methodological device to access the “self” of each social actor involved — particularly students and teachers?
Here, the focus is on analysing everything required for teaching, learning, and performing music, including material artefacts, as a way of conducting in-depth ethnographic research. The “self” is understood both in terms of music as a medium for expressing emotions and ideas, and in terms of how music contributes to identity formation. This aligns with what Tia DeNora, following Foucault, conceptualises as a “technology of the self” (1999).

To address these research questions, the project adopts qualitative and arts-based methodologies, with fieldwork carried out in two European countries that receive significant numbers of underage refugees: Greece and Sweden. Greece, home to some of the most overcrowded refugee camps in Europe, has faced unique challenges in managing large migration flows from the southeastern Mediterranean (Cabot, 2019). Sweden, due to its strong child protection laws, receives a high number of underage migrants from the Middle East (Wernesjö, 2020). Two months of intensive fieldwork were conducted within two ongoing music programmes: El Sistema Greece and the Swedish Dream Orchestra.

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