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Lecturer in Global Digital Politics
Media, Communications and Cultural Studies
k.higgins (@gold.ac.uk)
Kat's work explores the mediated cultural politics of vulnerability, (state) violence, and contemporary feminisms.
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.
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)
Banet-Weiser, Sarah and Higgins, Kathryn Claire. 2023. Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 9781509553815
Higgins, Kathryn Claire and Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2024. The Post-Truth of Rape. In: Jayson Harsin, ed. Re-thinking Mediations of Post-truth Politics and Trust: Globality, Culture, Affect. New York: Routledge, pp. 43-60. ISBN 9781032484198
Higgins, Kathryn Claire. 2023. Cruel benevolence: vulnerable menaces, menacing vulnerabilities and the white male vigilante trope. In: Karen Boyle and Susan Berridge, eds. The Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 84-94. ISBN 9781032061368
Higgins, Kathryn Claire and Banet-Weiser, Sarah. 2024. A roundtable discussion of Kathryn Claire Higgins and Sarah Banet-Weiser’s Believability: Sexual Violence, Media and the Politics of Doubt. Feminist Theory, ISSN 1464-7001
Higgins, Kathryn Claire. 2022. ‘Nobody feels safe’: Vulnerability, fear and the micro-politics of ordinary voice in crime news television. Journalism, 23(10), pp. 2114-2131. ISSN 1464-8849
Higgins, Kathryn Claire. 2022. Rethinking visual criminalization: news images and the mediated spacetime of crime events. Visual Communication, ISSN 1470-3572
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)