Kathryn Claire Higgins
The Artificial Univeristy
BBC Radio 4 Documentary, Currently
For BBC Radio 4, this documentary investigates the growing use of Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini among university students in the United Kingdom. It includes interviews and conversations with students, academics and university leaders from across the country.
Against the backdrop of climbing student debt and a wider funding crisis for higher education, can the university survive AI? Listen Here.
(Presented by Kathryn Claire Higgins, Produced by John Rogers, Executive Produced by Robert Nicholson. First aired 05/07/2026)
Feminism and the Far-Right
Funded Project and Symposium (Goldsmiths UoL)
Feminism and the Far-Right was an international symposium about growing threats to reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, and queer and feminist liberation amid the global ascent for far-Right political movements.
It was convened at Goldsmiths, University of London on 06/06/25 and was co-hosted by the Goldsmiths Centre for Feminist Research. The symposium formed part of a larger funded project on reproductive justice and far-Right cultural politics, supported by an award from the Goldsmiths Early-Career Research Fund (ECRF).
Read more about the event here.
Vulnerability, Violence and Victimcould
Book Project (Ongoing)
This second monograph project is provisionally titled Victimcould: Vulnerability Politics, Media, and the Imaginary Future. It explores how appeals to hypothetical injuries and imaginary futures (often in/through digital media, including Generative AI) structure the cultural politics of reactionary and far-Right movements and inform their disposition towards the predicament of human vulnerability.
Combining feminist theory, conjunctural critique and multi-modal critical discourse analysis, it explores the contemporary life of victimcould across four key domains: criminalization and crime control; feminism & anti-feminism; migration and bordering; and the climate emergency.
Read published analysis about the 'criminalization' of Donald Trump and the victimcould of the MAGA movement in European Journal of Cultural Studies.
Believability and Sexual Violence
Book Project (Polity Press)
This first monograph project, Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt, is co-authored with Sarah Banet-Weiser and was published by Polity Press in 2023. It explores the cultural and political aftermath of the #MeToo movement, particularly for women who speak out publicly about sexual harassment and assault.
Theorizing a mediated 'economy of believability' as the contemporary context for public speech about sexual violence, it situates contemporary anti-feminist backlashes within the context of a 'post-truth' digital culture characterized by ambient deception and endemic doubt.
Analysis from this project is additionally published in Television and New Media, Journal of Gender Studies, European Journal of Cultural Studies and in Rethinking Mediations of Post-Truth Politics and Trust: Globality, Culture, Affect (Routledge, edited by Jayson Harsin)
Criminalization and White Victimhood
PhD Project (London School of Economics and Political Science)
My PhD thesis is titled Realness, Wrongness, Justice: Exploring Criminalization as a Mediated Politics of Vulnerability. Using multi-modal critical discourse analysis, it develops a novel theory of how criminalization works in/through media representations as sites of encounter between competing claims to vulnerability. Empirically, it focuses on the so-called 'African gang crime' moral panic that saturated Australian news and current affairs reporting between 2016-2018.
My PhD was awarded in July 2023. Analysis from my thesis research is published in Journalism, Visual Communication and Routledge Companion to Gender, Media & Violence (edited by Karen Boyle & Susan Berridge).