Public scholar: Laura Magnusson
How can artistic practice communicate the complex afterlife of sexual violence through affective means, extending beyond word-based forms?
Laura Magnusson (she/her) is a doctoral student in Interdisciplinary Humanities (research-creation stream), where she explores how trauma from sexual violence can be expressed through visual, material and embodied forms—expanding testimony beyond word-based frameworks.
Laura’s artistic practice spans sculpture, installation, video, performance, drawing and archival media, with particular attention to how systems of care or justice often reproduce harm by prioritizing procedures while overlooking the nuanced, lived impacts of trauma that rarely find space in official accounts. Drawing on her experience as a scuba diver, she creates work underwater, engaging water’s immersive, dynamic qualities to unsettle the fixed expectations of institutional reporting and open up new, fluid conditions for expression and witnessing.
Laura’s research-creation has been supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship (2020–23).
Department
Language
English