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Jennifer Rutherford

Professor Jennifer Rutherford is Director of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at The University of Adelaide.

Prof. Jennifer Rutherford

Director of the J.M. Centre for Creative Practice

  • J.M. Centre for Creative Practice
  • The University of Aidelaide

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My research traverses empirical sociological research, social and psychoanalytic theoretical research, literary criticism, cultural analysis, and creative production in both verbal and visual forms. I create interdisciplinary work that fuses the Humanities and Social Sciences and that experiments with writing and visual representation. I am interested in narrative, memory and place-making; in the slowness and inertia of cultures and subjects in times of great change; in the way individuals and communities dwell in, and through, the traumas that shape them, and in the role that artists and writers play as conduits for change. Psychoanalysis informs much of what I do, as does the troubled history of colonial race–relations. I am teased by the idea that theory can be performed, that acadmic discourse need not be anchored in stale genres, and that the university might still be a place of excitement.