Kate Holland is a Senior Research Fellow in Communication and Media Studies at the University of Canberra. Her main current research project is an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award titled ‘Mediating Mental Health: An integrated approach to investigating media and social actors’. The project is examining media reporting of mental health issues and the views, experiences and media practices of mental health consumers, advocates, researchers and professionals, along with general community members and journalists. The qualitative research is drawing upon concepts of biocommunicability, mediatisation, media criticism and cultural studies of psychiatry.

Kate’s other research interests include health journalism, anti-obesity campaigns and fat politics, social practice theory, mad studies, anti-stigma campaigns, disease mongering, the consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement, health activism and resistance, critical public health, and disability studies. Her research has been published in journals such as Journalism Studies, Journalism, Communication Research & Practice, Social Semiotics, Health, Risk & Society, Journal of Sociology, Journal of Risk Research, Qualitative Health Research and Qualitative Inquiry.

Kate is currently vice-chair of the Health Communication and Change working group of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and prior to that was co-chair 2010-2015.

I am currently available to supervise Higher Degree by Research Students in the following areas (subject to faculty/institute capacity and approval):

Health news and journalism

Media and public understandings of health issues

Public health communication