Our Story
IMAJIN was founded in January 2022 as a small collective of researchers seeking support from one another in exploring the potentials of music in prison settings. By 2025, the network had burgeoned to include over 200 members internationally, including researchers across a wide range of scholarly disciplines including music, law, criminology, social work, health and education; musicians; legal experts; not-for-profit and industry partners; cultural and community representatives; people with lived experience of incarceration; and others working at the intersections of music and carceral institutions around the world. Our members engage across a range of settings, including jails, prisons, detention centres, asylum seeker and refugee accommodations, re-entry organisations, and other contexts shaped by systems of confinement and control.
IMAJIN members share a commitment to exploring the potential of music to challenge systems of punishment, confinement, and control, while contributing to more socially just, equitable, culturally connected, and liberatory futures.
Our Projects and Researchers
Leadership
IMAJIN values shared and distributed leadership, recognising that knowledge, expertise, and leadership are held across our diverse membership. We invite members to contribute their skills, perspectives, and lived and professional experience in ways that reflect their interests, expertise, and capacity. Through collective leadership, we aim to create a network where members can shape priorities, initiate collaborations, and contribute to the directions and activities of IMAJIN.
IMAJIN was founded by Professor Mary Cohen and Associate Professor Alexis Anja Kallio in 2022.
Professor Mary Cohen
Co-founder
Mary Cohen is a Professor of Music Education at the University of Iowa, lead author of Music-Making in U.S. Prisons: Listening to Incarcerated Voices, and co-leader of IMAJIN. In 2025, she became an affiliate in Music and Peacebuilding with the Min-On Music Research Institute, based in Tokyo. In her research and creative scholarship, she works to create caring communities through music-making, collaborative songwriting, and community singing circles. She led the Oakdale Community Choir, with a total of 300 non-incarcerated and incarcerated singers, from 2009-2020. The participants wrote 150 original songs, and the choir sang 75 of these songs. For two years (2023-2025) she co-led weekly music groups inside the Linn County Juvenile Detention Center. She created the Inside Outside Songwriting Collaboration Project with incarcerated and non-incarcerated partners who build relationships while creating original songs. She now co-leads the Singing Love into Life Circle inviting returning citizens to join the monthly singing circles.
Associate Professor Alexis Anja Kallio
Co-founder
An internationally recognised interdisciplinary scholar and qualitative methodologist, Alexis Kallio's research examines music education and research as political processes wherein individuals and social groups negotiate meaning, values, ideals and power. Her current work focuses particularly on how music programs can support justice-involved youth as part of policing or community initiatives, youth detention and community reintegration programs. Drawing together her expertise across music, education, and criminology, she explores how music can support a broader shift from punitive responses to youth offending to align with contemporary youth justice approaches that emphasise child-centredness, youth voice, and community connection. Alexis is currently Head of Music Studies at the Queensland Conservatorium, where she also previously served as Deputy Director (Research) and Deputy Director of the Creative Arts Research Institute. She is Editor in Chief of the leading international journal Research Studies in Music Education, and has (co)Edited the books: Difference and Division in Music Education, The Politics of Diversity in Music Education, and Music, Education, and Religion: Intersections and Entanglements.
