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Music educational researchers in the Nordic countries have pointed out how municipal arts schools are organised based on, and tend to reproduce, anthropocentric values and approaches, and that such unequal norms and structures are to be challenged. Taking a border-crossing musical comedy project as a starting point, the specific aim of the current study is to illuminate how, and on what levels, organisational norms and traditional structures can be challenged, and what possibilities and new challenges that occur in a project taking place beyond the Anthropocene. To be able to grasp the aspects of becoming within the project and how that is related to aspects of organisation, we created a research entanglement based on post-human theory. Hence, situations seen as webs of relations were created, including the actors: humans with intellectual disabilities, musical performance students, educators, artists, researchers, and varied digital communication tools. Observations, video recordings, collaborative writing, qualitative surveys, and interviews produced material for analysis. Actor-network theory was applied aiming to describe how the constantly performed intra-active networks were constituted, as well as how the actors influenced each other. The results identify significant actors and trajectories in Sammankonst, that in turn challenge anthropocentric organisational structures of municipal arts schools.

The starting point for the study presented in this article is constituted by experiences of using Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy aiming to describe and understand the becoming of musical women in Swedish schools. Earlier research conducted outside the area of music shows that Beauvoir’s theories can help to explain – and provide means of change for – situations where there is a risk that traditional gender roles will be conserved. A majority of gender studies in the field of music education are based on the performativity theory of Judith Butler. In comparison, de Beauvoir states that repetitions and habits are stratified in the body as experiences, and that human beings are able to make choices in a situation. The aim of the study is to explore how caring is nurtured among girls in Swedish music educational settings. Material generated through two phenomenological studies conducted within specialist music programs in lower respectively higher secondary education in Sweden, constituted the empirical base for a re-analysis. The re-analysis followed a hermeneutical phenomenological analytical model. Examples of how caring seemed to be nurtured among girls in music education appeared at different levels and in different situations. It concerns actions made by the girls aiming to make the social and musical setting function in agreed upon “good” ways, namely in the form of taking initiatives, filling “gaps”, and being flexible, andbecoming (aware) musical women. In the end we reflect upon causes and changes in relation to actions that seem to establish and maintain female students as immanent, and non-able to run their own projects, to speak with de Beauvoir.