Dr Kerryn Drysdale

Kerryn Drysdale is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Research in Health (CSRH), a specialist research centre located in the Faculty of Arts, Design, and Architecture at UNSW Sydney. Through her disciplinary background in Cultural Studies, Kerryn endeavours to bring a critical cultural lens to everyday lived experiences as they pertain to public health concerns. 

Kerryn currently conducts research in two broad programmes of work:  

• Responding to health inequities and social determinants of health, particularly by working with marginalised or vulnerable populations to determine their health and wellbeing needs.
• Tracking social scenes for LGBTQ+ people, with a specific focus on the sex-based social norms and affects in precarious urban contexts that give rise to innovative and intra-community forms of health promotion and harm reduction. 

In a concurrent position 2020-2021, Kerryn was Community Partnerships Fellow at the Health Equity Research and Development Unit (HERDU), jointly held by the Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity, UNSW Sydney, and Clinical Services Integration and Population Health, Sydney Local Health District. In this newly created role, she championed community-engaged processes for working with affected communities on reducing health inequities, continuing her emphasis on accessible health research translation and dissemination. Previously she lectured in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University 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 an innovative framework on ‘scenes’ that extends the theoretical tradition of scene studies to include a consideration of affect, mobile human geographies, the sociology of storytelling, and ethno-archival practices in scenes’ emergence and decline of public feelings. This approach maps 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. She has since applied her framework to other complex phenomena, such as ‘chemsex’ (the combination of sex and drugs) in order to better harness participants’ agency in determining how scenes take form, the relations they support and the practices they enable.

To date, Kerryn has authored high-quality peer reviewed publications in quartile-1 journals, including one monograph, 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.