Biography
Kerryn Drysdale is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Research in Health (CSRH), a specialist research centre located in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at UNSW Sydney. She first joined CSRH as a Research Associate appointed to a three-year NHMRC-funded research project but was swiftly invited to join a number of other projects soon after. Kerryn currently conducts research in two programmes:
- at the intersection of social inquiry and public health, particularly in the experiences and expressions of health and wellbeing among same-sex attracted and sex/gender diverse people and people who use drugs; and
- social configurations for lesbian and queer women, with a specific focus on everyday affects in precarious urban infastructure.
Previously she lectured at the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the Unviersity of Sydney.
Kerryn’s disciplinary background lies broadly within Cultural Studies, though her interdisciplinary expertise includes theoretical and methodological approaches from Gender Studies, Anthropology, Sociology and Philosophy. She has developed the framework of ‘scene-making’ that extends the theoretical tradition of scene studies to include a consideration of affect in scenes’ emergence and decline of public feelings. This approach also brings in contributions from human geography and the sociology of storytelling to map any scene’s consolidation into collective meaning and their retrospective coalescence into forms of social memory. Kerryn has been invited to teach this method to international audiences.
To date, Kerryn has authored 10 peer reviewed publications, including 1 monograph and articles published in quartile-1 journals, as well as non-traditional research outputs. She has presented research extensively at international conferences, community fora and research symposia, and as part of invited guest lectureships. In addition to academic publication, Kerryn actively participates in research dissemination and translation for policy makers, community organisations and public scholarship. She is also actively involved in a number of community- and university-based advisory and service roles.