Dr Katherine Kenny

Dr Katherine Kenny is an early career researcher in the Centre for Social Research in Health at UNSW Sydney. She gained her PhD in Sociology and Science Studies from the University of California, San Diego in 2015. Her research draws on science and technology studies and post-structuralist theories, and uses qualitative methodologies, to better understand how health and disease, (or illness and wellness) are understood, ‘treated’, experienced and made meaningful in ways that are often concealed within the dominant cultures of health, biomedicine and care. Her research interests include health and illness, biopolitics, the new materialisms, the politics of knowledge production and the lived experience of illness, wellness and care.

Her publications span a range of empirical topics including the lived-experience of advanced cancer (e.g. Subjectivity 2017, The Sociological Review 2018); informal care (The Sociological Review 2016); death, dying and bereavement (Health 2017, Palliative and Supportive Care 2017); cultural understandings of cancer in India (Critical Public Health 2018); and how health is measured and valued on a global scale  (Journal of Sociology 2015). However, they are unified by such questions as: what constitutes health and affliction, and how is it biomedically codified, and collectively and individually experienced? What forms of care are required and what kinds of suffering emerge in their absence? And how are health practices evolving within the rapidly changing contexts of biomedicine, health and informal care?

Since joining UNSW, she has contributed to two large ARC-funded collaborative projects. The first focuses on the social, relational, embodied and temporal dimensions of cancer survivorship drawing across the experiences of those who have been diagnosed with cancer, their families/caregivers and their health professionals (see Research Program on Cancer, Palliative and End-of-Life Care). The second concerns the social dimensions of antibiotic governance within a context of the growing global health threat of antimicrobial resistance (see Research Program on Infectious Diseases and Antimicrobial Resistance).