Kat Higgins

Research topic

Realness, wrongness, justice: exploring criminalization as a mediated politics of vulnerability

Kat researches and writes at the intersection of media culture, critical discourse analysis, and the sociology of crime control and state violence, with an empirical focus on contemporary Australia. Informed by an abolitionist ethic, her doctoral research is concerned with the role played by news media in cultural processes of criminalization. More specifically, she investigates how journalistic representations of crime events delimit imaginative possibilities for different forms of security action, and in doing so help maintain the cultural conditions of possibility for policing, incarceration, and other coercive and punitive strategies of crime control.

Empirically, her project investigates the mediated construction of so-called ‘African gang crime’ in and through the Australian press, deploying a multi-modal critical discourse analysis of both print and televisual media. This analysis approaches crime news texts as sites of vulnerability micro-politics, where different and sometimes competing accounts of social vulnerability struggle for public recognition and where the legitimacy of different forms of security intervention is negotiated. Kat’s thesis positions ‘imaginability’ as an important political frontier in efforts to transform the practices through which we pursue safety and justice, and crime journalism as critically important to how imaginaries of (in)security are made and remade.

Her thesis hopes to unearth new insights into how media discourses help projects of domination and exclusion sustain access to morality through the language and logics of security, and to reimagine crime journalism for more just and emancipatory security futures.

Supervisor: Professor Lilie Chouliaraki and Professor Robin Mansell

Biography

Kat's research interests include media culture, critical discourse analysis, the politics of crime control, the journalism of justice and (in)security, and contemporary mediated feminisms. She holds an MSc in Media and Communications from the LSE and a BA in International Studies from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Kat graduated the LSE with both the Best Overall MSc Performance Prize and the 2015 Silverstone Dissertation Prize for writing in the field of media and ethics. She was also the recipient of the 2021 Top Student Paper Award from the ICA Visual Communication Studies Division. Her research and writing have appeared in a variety of publications, including peer-reviewed journals like Journalism and Feminist Media Studies and public-facing outlets like Progressive International. She is also an experienced and passionate teacher and a full Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy (AdvanceHE). Kat's doctoral research is supported by an LSE PhD Studentship.

Expertise

Crime and Policing, Journalism, Mediation, Critical Discourse Analysis, Critical Security Studies, Vulnerability, Visual Culture, Australian Politics, Contemporary Feminisms