Dr Jeanne-Marie Viljoen

Jeanne-Marie is a scholar and lecturer at UniSA Creative in the field of contemporary literature & visual culture. In her interdisciplinary teaching and research she is primarily occupied by the problem of the apparent gap between the way people view their experiences and how they communicate them; and how this gets in the way of solving social problems & imagining new futures.  Because contemporary visual literature such as comics and animated documentary films seems to perform this problem, she often teaches and researches these forms of communication through a humanities lens.  Her work is thus about the unique role that art & aesthetics plays in helping us think through intractable problems in contemporary times because of the ways in which different art forms help us capture what lies beyond language & help us envision situations in which experience/data may not be immediately visible. This has lead her to focus on applying aesthetic theory, postcolonial theory, affect theory and theories of haptic visuality to visual and textual communications and media (including interview transcripts and literary forms), in order to study problems with the representation of marginal groups & stigmatised experiences.

Her interdisciplinary international training as well as living and working in contested states with violent histories (such as Apartheid South Africa, Cyprus & Australia) drive her engagement with marginalisation and decolonisation. This work has lead to publications, presentations, research supervision and the design and delivery of courses on the use of images to communicate trauma. Her work on mobile learning has lead to research projects and teaching tools designed to bridge the gap between the physical and the digital in the design of learning environments.

Her work on contemporary media arts & literature; language & digital learning support has lead to successful research collaborations and three internal and two external grants. Her current projects include: writing a book in graphic medicine about how comics may help us envision women’s mental health; being chief investigator on grants projects using comics to prevent suicide in young men in farming & supporting neurodiverse comics creators.

She is a member of the ‘Creative People, Products and Places (CP3’) research concentration in the University's 'Transforming Societies' research stream and an associate member of the 'National Enterprise for Rural Community Wellbeing' at UniSA. She is an external examiner and reviewer of several national and international universities and journals. She is also a member of the following professional organisations: The Institute of Postcolonial Studies (Melbourne); The Memory Studies Association & The Cultural Studies Association of Australasia.

2020 - present, reveiwer for the Journal of International Students         

2020 – member & reviewer for The Institute of Postcolonial Studies (Melbourne)

2020 – member, Memory Studies Association

2016 – present, reviewer for Social Identities Journal (UK)

2016 – present, member of Cultural Studies Association of Australasia & reviewer for 'Continuum'

2012 – present, reviewer for English Academy Review (RSA)       

Qualifications

• Doctor of Philosophy University of South Australia

• Master of Arts University of Pretoria

• Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults University of Cambridge

• Bachelor of Arts University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

• Honours Bachelor of Arts University of South Africa

Work history

English Studies lecturer, University of South Africa,   2011- 2012

Reading & writing facilitator, University of South Africa, 2010 - 2011

Research Assistant, Witwatersrand Institute for Social & Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg 2009-2010

Learning materials developer, Unit for Distance Education, University of Pretoria, South Africa, 2002 - 2008

Lecturer in English literature & instructional design, Girne American University, North Cyprus, 2007