Associate Professor Kate Seear is Principal Research Fellow in the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2021-) and a practising solicitor. She was an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow from 2016-2019. Her research is socio-legal and empirical in nature and typically explores connections between law, health, gender and the body. Her interests include the intersections between harm reduction and the law, and drugs, gender, human rights and the law.

Kate is the author of four books – Law, Drugs and the Making of Addiction: Just Habits which was the Winner of the prestigious UK Socio-Legal Studies Association’s 2020 History and Theory book prize; Critical perspectives on coercive interventions: Law, medicine and society (with Claire Spivakovsky and Adrian Carter); Making Disease, Making Citizens: The politics of hepatitis C (with Suzanne Fraser); and The Making of a Modern Epidemic: Endometriosis, Gender and Politics, which was based upon Kate’s PhD research. Kate has a unique multi-disciplinary background, with expertise in sociology, gender and the law.

In 2020-21, Kate began work with colleagues on two new ARC-funded projects. The first is an ARC Discovery Project exploring hepatitis C-related stigma and discrimination in a post-cure world. The second is an ARC Future Fellowship exploring the relationship between drug policy, human rights, and sex/gender.

For a full list of Kate’s publications, grants and projects, click here.

Supervision

Kate has expertise in a range of qualitative methods and welcomes supervision opportunities in drug law, gender, the body, and health. Her main theoretical interests are in feminist theories of health, the body, agency and subjectivity, science and technology studies, feminist and queer theory and critical human rights.

Qualifications

• PhD, Monash University
• BA (Hons) Sociology, Monash University
• LL.B. (Hons), Monash University

Research Interests

• Drugs, alcohol and the law; gender and the body; drugs and sport.