International Health Humanities Network Membership

Kate is a Senior Research Fellow in the News & Media Research Centre, School of Arts & Communication, at the University of Canberra, Australia. She is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award for the project ‘Mediating Mental Health: An Integrated Approach to Investigating Media and Social Actors’. The project is located in the context of communication and media studies and cultural studies of psychiatry and draws upon concepts of biocommunicability and mediatisation and methods of discourse and thematic analysis to investigate factors shaping mental health news, the media-oriented practices of actors in the mental health field, and the ways in which media representations impact people’s views and experiences of mental distress.

Kate has a PhD in Communication and has undertaken qualitative research examining media framing and public understandings of a range of health issues, including obesity, alcohol and pregnancy and infectious diseases. Kate’s research is multidisciplinary, incorporating sociology, media and communication, cultural studies, mad and disability studies. Kate is also Vice-Chair of the Health Communication and Change working group of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR).