Associate Professor Kathryn (Kate) Henne is an ARC DECRA Fellow in the School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet). She earned her MA and PhD (with a specialisation in Anthropologies of Medicine, Science and Technology) from the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine, and a second MA from the College of Health and Human Services at the California State University, Long Beach.

Her research interests, broadly conceived, are concerned with biogovernance, which is the governance of populations and individual humans through science and technology. The bulk of her work examines intersections between inequality, social control and technoscience, with a focus on how they contribute to understandings of human bodies and the ways they are governed. It spans topics related to biometric surveillance, practices of policing, and the regulation of human enhancement and physical well-being.

Her DECRA research explores the rise of traumatic brain injury as a health concern, focusing on how shifting scientific and public health discourses frame of the condition and its treatment. It considers how inequality mediates regulatory strategies targeting traumatic brain injury among sport participants, military personnel, and survivors of intimate partner violence in Australia, Canada, and the United States (including U.S. Pacific Island territories). The aim is to illuminate how science and regulation interact across contexts, as well as how they reflect shifting understandings of brain health, the mind and body, and (injured) human agency.

Research interests

crime, law and society; critical health studies; embodiment; race, gender and sexuality; regulation and governance; science and technology studies; sociology of deviance; surveillance