Kai Arne Hansen

Short description

Kai Arne Hansen is professor in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies. His primary research interests include popular music and identity, gender and sexuality, contemporary media, narrativity, audiovisual aesthetics, and the musical cultures of children. Hansen is the author of Pop Masculinities: The Politics of Gender in Twenty-First Century Popular Music (Oxford University Press, 2022), which directs attention to the ambiguities and contradictions that characterize the performance and reception of gender identity in pop music contexts. He is currently the principal investigator of the NORHOP project (2023-2027), which is funded by the Research Council of Norway and investigates the multiple social functions and cultural implications of hip hop in contemporary Norway. He has previously participated in the EU-funded project MaMuMi - Mapping the Music of Migration (2019-2021) and served as the editor-in-chief of the Norwegian Journal of Musicology (2019-2022). Hansen co-chairs the research group Music Education and Cultural Studies and is an elected board member of The Association for Gender Research in Norway and The Young Academy of Norway. 

Selected publications:

Books

2022: Hansen, Kai Arne. Pop Masculinities: The Politics of Gender in Twenty-First Century Popular Music. New York: Oxford University Press.

2020: Hansen, Kai Arne, Eirik Askerøi and Freya Jarman (eds.). Popular Musicology and Identity: Essays in Honour of Stan Hawkins. London: Routledge. 

2019: Braae, Nick and Kai Arne Hansen (eds.). On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 

Journal articles and book chapters

2024: Hansen, Kai Arne. Personal Storyworlds: Retrospection, Reinvention, and Transmediality in Pop Music. Persona Studies 10 (1): 7-21.

2024: Gardner, Abigail and Kai Arne Hansen. Mapping the music of migration: Emergent themes and challenges. European Journal of Cultural Studies 27 (1): 3-16.

2023: Hansen, Kai Arne and Tyler Bickford. Negotiating Girlhood in Rock Music: Nandi Bushell, Prodigy Discourse, and Adult Mentor-Fans. Popular Music 42 (2): 123-142.

2022: Hansen, Kai Arne. Staging a "Real" Masculinity in a "Fake" World: Creativity, (In)Authenticity, and the Gendering of Musical Labour. Cultural Studies 36 (5): 713-731. 

2022: Hansen, Kai Arne and Steven Gamble. Saturation Season: Inclusivity, Queerness, and Aesthetics in the New Media Practices of Brockhampton. Popular Music and Society 45 (1): 13-30.

2022: Hansen, Kai Arne. The ambiguity of 'new' masculinities: Zayn Malik and disordered eating. Celebrity Studies 13 (3): 470-474.

2020: Hansen, Kai Arne. The Earth is Sick: Environmentalism and the Politics of Age and Gender in Children's Musical Culture. IASPM Journal 10 (2): 3-19.  

2019: Hansen, Kai Arne. (Re)Reading Pop Personae: A Transmedial Approach to Studying the Multiple Construction of Artist Identities. Twentieth-Century Music 16 (3): 501-529. 

2019: Hansen, Kai Arne. It's a Dark Philosophy: The Weeknd's Intermedial Aestheticization of Violence. In On Popular Music and Its Unruly Entanglements, edited by Nick Braae and Kai Arne Hansen, 235–255. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 

2018: Hansen, Kai Arne. Sangfoni: Magisk realisme, leken læring og identitetsutforsking i barns audiovisuelle musikkultur. [Sangfoni: Magical Realism, Playful Learning and Exploring Identity in Children’s Audiovisual Music Culture]. Studia Musicologica Norvegica: Norwegian Journal of Musicology 44 (1): 102–117.

2018: Hansen, Kai Arne. Fashioning a Post Boy Band Masculinity: On the Seductive Dreamscape of Zayn’s Pillowtalk. Popular Music and Society 41 (2): 194–212.

2018: Hansen, Kai Arne and Stan Hawkins. Azealia Banks: 'Chasing Time', Erotics, and Body Politics. Popular Music 37 (2): 157–174.

2017: Hansen, Kai Arne. Empowered or Objectified? Personal Narrative and Audiovisual Aesthetics in Beyoncé’s Partition. Popular Music and Society 40 (2): 164–180.           

2017: Hansen, Kai Arne. Holding on for Dear Life: Gender, Celebrity Status, and Vulnerability-on-Display in Sia’s ‘Chandelier’. In The Routledge Research Companion to Popular Music and Gender, edited by Stan Hawkins, 89–101. New York: Routledge.