Dr Katrina Jaworski

Hi there.

I hold a PhD situated in Sociology, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies and to a lesser extent, Philosophy. The thesis was awarded the Ian Davey Research Thesis Prize for the most outstanding thesis in 2007 at the University of South Australia. Completed in 2007, "The Gender of Suicide" is a dissertation that questions how knowledge about suicide becomes knowledge through the lens of gender. Race and sexuality were also examined as further conditions for understanding gender in suicide. A short brief on the thesis was published in Suicide Prevention Australia News, August 2008, Volume 5 (http://www.suicidepreventionaust.org).

In 2009, I am working as a Research Fellow at the School of Health Sciences (0.5). My working life revolves around publishing material from my thesis and developing new post PhD research. Furthermore, I’m writing two ARC grant applications: a) older men and private backyard sheds and, b) queer youth suicide. Still further, I provide teaching support to Honours research students at the Division of Health Sciences. Prior to the current position, I worked on an ARC Linkage Project as a Research Associate.

My life outside academia revolves around organic gardening; keeping chooks; learning the arts of traditional Chinese cooking; and the making and selling of chicken, duck and fish stocks in the food industry.

My research partnerships and interests are diverse. I work with researchers at Health Sciences as well as Hawke Research Institute. Such work often includes crossing disciplinary boundaries – an enterprise which is easier said than done. My research interests revolve around death and dying, and suicide in particular, gender and bodies. I am also interested in issues related to health, space and visual culture. My thinking and writing is influenced by scholars such as Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Elizabeth Grosz, Giorgio Agamben, Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, to name a few. I’m committed to, and passionate about, scholarship that provides not only valuable knowledge that can contribute to immediate outcomes, but importantly, challenges ideas and assumptions in hope that this will provide future opportunities of thinking otherwise. For some, thinking otherwise can be a matter of life and death.

Prize winner in 2007

The Ian Davey Research Thesis Prize

Hawke Institute for Sustainable Societies

"How I became an organic intellectual in the process of researching suicide"

School of Communication Power Grads

• Sociology
• Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies Association of Australasia

The Australian Sociological Association

Golden Key National Honour Society, University of South Australia Chapter

Doctor of Philosophy (Social Sciences) University of South Australia, 2007.

Bachelor of Arts (Honours - Sociology), University of South Australia, 1997.

Bachelor of Arts (Psychology & Sociology), University of South Australia, 1996.

• Current research interests include; suicide and gender, feminist philosophies, post-structuralist and postmodernist theories, performativity, visual culture, youth studies, ethics (death and life).

PUBLICATIONS UNDER REVIEW

Jaworski, K. 'The author, agency and suicide'

Jaworski, K. ‘Ghostly Appearances: Representations of Queer Youth Suicide in Australian Newsprint Media’.

Ormsby, J., Stanley, M. & Jaworski, K. ‘Older men’s participation in community-based men’s sheds programs’.

Bryant, L., Hoon, E. & Jaworski, K. 'How diverse are rural non-agricultural workplaces? An Australian perspective'.

Stanley, M., Moyle, W., Ballantyne, A., Jaworski, K., Corlis, M., Oxlade, D., Stoll, A. & Young, B. ‘"Now a days you don't even see your neighbours": loneliness in the everyday lives of older Australians’.

BOOK CHAPTERS

Jaworski, K. (Forthcoming/2009). ‘What it Means to See’: Reading Gender in Medical Examinations of Suicide, in Abjectly Boundless: Boundaries, Bodies and Health Work, eds, T. Rudge & D. Holmes, Ashgate.

Jaworski, K. 2005. '(Un)desirable Acts of Death: Gendered Truths in the Cultural Production of Suicide' in "Corporeal Inscriptions: Representations of the Body in Cultural and Literary Texts and Practices", eds. E. Lorek-Jezinska and K. Wieckowska, The Nicolaus Copernicus University Press, Torun, Poland, pp. 209-220.

REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES

Jaworski, K. (Forthcoming/2010). 'The male preserve of martyrdom': Palestinian female suicide bombers in Australian newsprint media, Feminist Media Studies, vol. 10, no. 2.

Jaworski, K. (Forthcoming/Accepted). ‘The gender-ing of suicide’, Australian Feminist Studies.

Jaworski, K. 2008. ‘Don’t you know how to speak English properly?’: Language and writing in the production of a doctoral dissertation, Journal of Educational Enquiry, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 38-50. (http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/EDEQ/article/viewFile/470/348)

Jaworski, K. 2008. ‘Elegantly wasted’: The celebrity deaths of Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, vol. 22, no. 6, pp. 777-791.

Jaworski, K. 2003. ‘Suicide and Gender: Reading Suicide Through Butler’s Notion of Performativity’, Voicing Dissent, New Talents 21C, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 76, pp. 137-146, 247-249. *Publication launched at Perth International Writers Festival, February 2003*

Jaworski, K. 2002. ‘Bodily Inscriptions and Gender in Legal Discourses of Suicide’, Sister in Law: A Feminist Law Review, vol. 6, pp. 168-184.

REFEREED CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS

Jaworski, K. 2009. ‘Deliberate Taking: The Author, Agency and Suicide'. Foucault: 25 years on Online Conference Proceedings, Centre for Postcolonial and Globalisation Studies, http://www.unisa.edu.au/hawkeinstitute/publications/foucault-25-years/default.asp.

Jaworski, K. 1999. ‘Challenging a Classic: Gendered Dilemmas in Durkheim’s Suicide’, in Proceedings of Challenges and Prospects: Sociology for a New Millennium, The Australian Sociological Association Annual Conference, ed. M. Collis, L. Munro & S. Russell, Monash University, Churchill, pp. 231-238.

BOOK REVIEWS

Jaworski, K. 2000. ‘Youth Studies: An Australian Perspective’, Journal of Sociology, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 115-116.

REFEREED ABSTRACTS

Jaworski, K. 2007. ‘Supporting older Australians managing loneliness’, Australasian Journal on Ageing, vol. 26, supp. 1, pp. A45-A51.

Jaworski, K. 2006. ‘“Writing as doing”: An enquiry into the gendered knowing of suicide’, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, vol. 5, no. 3, http://www.ualberta.ca/~ijqm.

SELECTED INVITATIONS

‘Researching Suicide and Gender’, Researching Health/Researching Illness Conference, City University London, London, UK, 23 October 2008.

‘Ghostly Appearances: Representations of Queer Youth Suicide in Australian Newsprint Media’, Visiting Scholar Seminar, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in Professional Practice, School of Community and Health Sciences, City University London, London, UK, 15 October 2008.

‘How I became an organic intellectual in the process of researching suicide’, 2008 Higher Degree by Research Forum Keynote lecture, University of South Australia, Magill Campus, Adelaide, August 2008.

‘The Gender of Suicide’, Research Centre for Clinical and Community Practice Innovation Research Seminar Series, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Griffith University, Nathan Campus, Brisbane, August 2008.

‘‘Doing Death and Dying’: Theories, Methods and Practice in Researching Deathly Matters Symposium’, 7th IIQM Conference, Advances in Qualitative Methods 2006, International Institute for Qualitative Methodology. Individual paper entitled, ‘Writing as Doing: An Enquiry into the Gendered Knowing of Suicide’, July 2006.

Invited Participant, The Judith Butler Symposium, University of Western Sydney, with Professor Judith Butler, June 2005.

"(Un)desirable Acts of Death: Gendered Truths in the Cultural Production of Suicide", session entitled, ‘Institutional Sites, Resistant Bodies, Being and Becoming’ with V. Crowley, T. Evans and C. Loeser. Everyday Transformations: The Twenty-First Century Quotidian, Cultural Studies of Australasia (CSAA), Murdoch University, Fremantle, Western Australia, December 2004.

'Reading Suicide through Visual Culture’, LASALLE-SIA College of the Arts Seminar, Department of Fine Arts, Singapore, September 2003.

SELECTED CONFERENCE AND SEMINAR PAPERS

‘Deliberate Taking: The Author, Agency and Suicide’, Foucault: 25 years on, Centre for Post-Colonial and Globalisation Studies, University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia, June 2009.

‘Ghostly Appearances: Representations of Queer Youth Suicide in Newsprint Media’, panel session entitled, ‘Apperance/s’ with V Crowley, TA Baylis and J Horncastle, Futures, Cultural Studies of Australasia (CSAA), Curtin University of Technology, Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, 6-9 December 2008.

'“Elegantly Wasted”: The Celebrity Deaths of Michael Hutchence and Paula Yates', Sustaining Culture, The Annual Conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA), University of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australia, December 2007.

"Cutting Open the Object of Death: Gendered Truths in Medical Discourses of Suicide", "Vital Politics: Health, Medicine, and Bioeconomics into the Twenty-First Century", London School of Economics, University of London, UK, September 2003.

"Cutting Open the Object of Death: Gendered Truths in Medical Discourses of Suicide", “Culture Incorporated: Bodies, Technologies, Habitats”, CSAA Annual Conference, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, December 2003.

"Gendering the Irrational Mind: Discursive Navigations of Suicide in Psychopathology", Research Centre for Gender Studies Postgraduate Seminars, Magill Campus, South Australia, August 2003.

"Suicide and Gender: Reading Suicide Through Butler’s Notion of Performativity", The Australian Sociological Association Annual Conference, University of Sydney, Camperdown Campus, New South Wales, December 2001.

"Bodily Inscriptions in Legal Discourses of Suicide", 3rd Annual Inter-disciplinary Conference for Postgraduate Researchers, “Law, Culture, Social Change – Legal Responses to Innovation”, University of Sydney, New South Wales, November 2001.

"The Presence of Gender in Suicide", Divisional Research Forum, University of South Australia, Magill Campus, South Australia, November 2000.