Siw Tønnessen

PhD candidate/teacher
Oslo/Drammen, Norway
Emails: Siw.H.Tonnessen@usn.no and siwtonnessen@gmail.com
Web: www.usn.no/english/about/contact-us/employees/siw-heidi-tonnessen and www.researchgate.net/profile/Siw-Tonnessen

Siw Tønnessen is a Ph.D. candidate and university lecturer at the South-Eastern University of Norway. She has a Master in Family therapy and systemic practice from VID Specialized University in Oslo. She teaches amongst more systemic perspectives within the field of mental health and substance use challenges. Her research interests is within social construction, discourses, positions and systemic thinking and practice. She has a special interest in challenging the methodological discourses within qualitative research both in ways of generating data and in ways of analyzing data. She has competence on Photovoice and Autoethnography, as well as how to do reflexive thematic analysis with use of theory on social construction. Thematically her research centers around topics like mental health, substance- and alcohol use/addiction and different recovery discourses. In her latest publication she explores her own recovery from active alcoholism in the context of the `drinking-alcohol-with-control` discourse. In her thesis (with the preliminary tittle “social constructions of meaningful everyday life for people in recovery (from mental health and/or substance abuse challenges”) she explores meaningful everyday life and recovery from different positions and perspectives. She privilege the first-person perspective over the second-person perspective, meaning that it is the person herself that knows what is helpful in her recovery. Thus, the professional needs to follow the person, not the other way around. Before having a full time position at the University, she worked 25 years in the municipality of Oslo with struggling young people in different contexts. She now also works part time at VID at the Family therapy and systemic practice program as an examiner, supervisor and lecturer.

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