Graduate Researchers

Graduate researchers associated with Musikverket.

Elin Franzén

Elin Franzén is a doctoral student in ethnology at Stockholm university. Her thesis project explores how experiences of radio listening constitute meaningful contexts in people’s everyday lives: how does radio appear to the listeners in terms of material objects, media content, routines, memories and imaginations? What situations are created through the practice of radio listening? Through in-depth interviews and questionnaire answers the study builds on empirical data describing a century of radio listening, from the arrival of a new wireless medium to the age of smartphones and podcasts. 

Questionnaire answers have been collected in collaboration with the Nordic Museum in Stockholm and the Institute of Language and Folklore in Uppsala.

Anne Sigfrid Refsum

Anne Sigrid Refsum is a PhD candidate in Scandinavian Literature at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim. Her project is part of the project "Norwegian Broadside Ballads 1550-1950: Recovering a Lost Cultural Heritage" funded by the Norwegian Research Council. In her project, she explores how these ballads and songs may have contributed to the creation of a sense of community and national identity in the decades surrounding the Norwegian constitution of 1814, which was also the year of the dissolution of the union with Denmark. This period is usually associated with national romanticism in Norway, but how nationally inclined were the lower classes of the time? Which songs did they enjoy singing, and to what extent did those songs contribute to the ideas of what Norway and being Norwegian was?

Sofia Joons

Sofia Joons is a doctoral student in musicology at Åbo Akademi. Her research project Estonia-Swedish identity hightlightened by three song repertoires from the beginning of the 20th century focuses on how Estonia-Swedishness has been constructed through music during different periods of the population group’s history. For the Estonia-Swedes, the 20th century started in Estonia, a country that belonged to Russia until it declared its sovereignity in 1918. The majority of the Estonia-Swedes escaped to Sweden during the Second World War, where the group has maintained a cultural continuity. One of the selected song repertoires has been transmitted both orally and through hand-written songbooks and publications from the 1920s until today. The other two consist of handwritten songbooks. Central questions are how Estonia-Swedishness and interethnic contacts are reflected in the selected song-repertoires and how the cultural heritage processes have been carried out around the songs that have been transmitted both orally and through publications.