Jeanne-Marie Viljoen

Jeanne-Marie Viljoen is a Senior Lecturer in literary and cultural studies, whose research coalesces around literary trauma studies, specifically using decolonial comics in contexts of violence as primary data. She has worked at UniSA for the last ten years and before that worked at universities in North Cyprus and South Africa, where she developed lived experience of living in contested colonial contexts. In the Creative Academic Unit she teaches visual storytelling across media as a way of solving social problems and imagining new futures for diverse, cohesive societies. As an advocate for art to facilitate communication in contexts where language cannot capture all we want to say, she also supervises interdisciplinary research theses and works on creative practice and co-design research projects such as supporting neurodiverse comics creators and using creative methods to help prevent suicide in culturally and linguistically diverse men in farming occupations. In addition, 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. And her work on communicating wellbeing and belonging in situations of high cultural and linguistic diversity has lead to successful research collaborations and grants. She is a member of the 'Creative People, Products and Places (CP3') research concentration at the University of South Australia. She is an Australian Research Council expert peer reviewer for grant applications, an international research associate and external examiner for international universities and a regular reviewer for international publications focusing on comics in decolonial contexts. She is also a member of the following professional organisations: The Australian Literary Studies Association; The Memory Studies Association and The Cultural Studies Association of Australasia. Decolonial literature & literary trauma studies, Cultural studies- visual culture, race & belonging, Film studies - Iranian & African cinema, Poststructuralist, affect & aesthetic theory, Interdisciplinary embodied research methods

[2024] Viljoen, J. M. (2024). Being (in)formed by indigenous voices: First steps to using graphic narratives to decolonise speculative fiction. Image & Text, 37(37), 1-22. [2024] Viljoen, J. M., & Viljoen, D. (2024). Countering confinement and using comics to make life 'breathable'. Ethical Space: the international journal of communication ethics, 21(1), 1-21. [2023] Viljoen, J. M. (2023). Wakanda's 'digital colonialism': looking to Africa to re-form Hollywood's gaze. Safundi, 24(1-2), 52-57. [2025] Viljoen, J. M. (2025). Comics and Women's Mental Health: five stories (Vol. Part F972). Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan Cham. [2025] Emery, S., Viljoen, J. M., & Blaiklock, D. (2025). Augmenting Alice: an augmented comic about a Mparntwe road trip. In R. Scott (Ed.), Source details - Title: Fol