Dr Kathryn Claire Higgins
Staff details
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Kat is a critical interdisciplinary scholar of communication, culture, and the politics of vulnerability. Her work explores how media culture negotiates justification for different practices of violence, exclusion, and domination -- in particular, those enacted in the name of 'safety' or 'justice'. Her research is concerned with the contingencies of modern vulnerability politics within the representational terrain of media.
Kat's approach coalesces (digital) media and journalism studies, cultural studies, multi-modal critical discourse analysis (CDA), feminist theory, and the sociology of criminalization, securitization, and state violence.
Academic qualifications
- PhD in Media and Communications (London School of Economics and Political Science) 2022
- MSc in Media and Communications (London School of Economics and Political Science) 2015
- BA in International Studies (RMIT University) 2013
Research interests
Kat's research and writing span topics including criminalization and crime journalism; believability and sexual violence; mediated victimhood and vulnerability politics; visual politics and securitization; mediated feminisms; and the gender and racial politics of "post-truth."
Her first book is [Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt] (https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=believability-sexual-violence-media-and-the-politics-of-doubt--9781509553815) (with Sarah Banet-Weiser, Polity Press)
Further profile content
Featured publications
Media engagements
Publications and Research Outputs
Books
2023 [Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt] (https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=believability-sexual-violence-media-and-the-politics-of-doubt--9781509553815) (co-authored with Sarah Banet-Weiser)
Journal Articles
2022 [Rethinking visual criminalization: news images and the mediated spacetime of crime events] (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/14703572221102547)
2022 [Television and the 'honest' woman: mediating the labor of believability] (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/15274764211045742) (with Sarah Banet-Weiser)
2022 [Nobody feels safe: vulnerability, fear, and the micro-politics of ordinary voice in crime news television] (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14648849211001788)
2021 [Sensing the invisible: domestic cleaning and clearners on Mumsnet Talk] (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14680777.2021.1922486) (with Shani Orgad)
Book Chapters
2023 [Cruel benevolence: vulnerable menaces, menacing vulnerabilities, and the white male vigilante trope] (https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003200871-10/cruel-benevolence-kathryn-claire-higgins)
