Kjetil Hjørnevik

I am an associate professor of Music Therapy in the Department of music (Griegakademiet). I have a background as a music therapist working in the UK and Norway where I have developed music therapy services across a wide range of settings including prisons and mental health institutions. I have also recently worked as an associate professor of music education in the field of teacher training. I completed my PhD in music therapy at Goldsmiths University, London in 2021. My PhD project was an ethnography of music therapy in a low security prison in Norway. As a practitioner-researcher I wanted to know more about the affordances of music for prisoners, and explored musicking as an everyday activity in the prison through participatory and art-based strategies for research. Conceptualising the prison as a therapeutic music scene, the study shows how prisoners engaged in processes of musical change, and how music therapy supported these processes. Through themes of identity, coherence and belonging my research links music therapy practice to developments in criminology and research into desistance from crime.