In the last decade different forms of discourse analysis have emerged in research on Arts education in Sweden. It includes macro- as well as micro oriented studies and embraces perspectives such as discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, discourse theory and Foucault inspired analysis. The application is spread to a wide range of educational contexts from pre- and elementary school to higher education at universities as well as to schools of music and art. The purpose of this paper is two-folded: i) to give some examples on how discourse analysis have been used in Swedish research on Arts education and ii) discuss this in a meta-perspective focusing on similarities and differences according to empirical material and results. Data consists of four larger research projects completed during the last five years, all conducted by the authors. In a meta-perspective, all four studies enclosed, two kinds of approaches are shown: Word-level analysis, identified as rhetorical actions in group-conversations, and practice-oriented analysis, identified as rhetorical actions in classroom praxis. Both approaches aim to identify hegemony and antagonistic discourses, and also to problematize the subject agency and what possible subject positions they open up for. The relation discourse-subject also contributes to the analysis of the over-determined subject and ideological dilemmas. According to the results, the area of Arts education in Sweden seems to be a battlefield of different discoursers. For example, this is shown by different ideological dilemmas related to activities in the music classroom and in the questions of democracy and pupil influence that rises in the studies. Among teacher educators in arts education two prominent discourses are shown: The first is a relativization of the concept of quality, and the second is that lack of subject knowledge is articulated as a teacher quality. With Foucaultian discourse analysis, questions of power and control in arts education are handled. In line with this, democracy and knowledge formation are then put into focus, something that is also discussed in this presentation.