Kate Douglas
Biographic Data
| ID | 3652402 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kate Douglas |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kate |
| FAMILY NAME | Douglas |
| SIGNATURE | DOUGLAS K |
| AFFILIATIONS | Flinders University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9290-5004 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1952 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Teaching English literary studies online, asynchronously as an inclusive strategy
When we started teaching English in the university context, perhaps none of us expected to be teaching it online: in hybrid, hyflex, or asynchronous modes. But by the 2020s, this is where we find ourselves. Coming from a reading-rich discipline where classroom reading, often interpreting collectively, remains the core practice, many English teachers may have felt quite unprepared for what has happened next. This paper presents an investigation of…
“I Liked Reading the Kids’ Stories Best”: Notes from a Kids’ Book Club in Australia
Biography remains a highly popular genre in children’s literature internationally, yet, at least in the Australian context, we know relatively little about how children engage with it. This paper reflects on findings from a small ethnographic observational study of a children’s book club conducted over a two-year period. In the book club, primary-school children living in Adelaide, Australia, read contemporary biographies written for young reader…
‘With this first cigarette, I kissed childhood goodbye’: Girlhood in crisis in Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi's 2003 graphic memoir Persepolis is a coming-of-age story set in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. 19 years after its publication, at a time when we are witnessing increased cultural displacement across the globe, Persepolis's representation of an adolescence lived across and between cultures feels as insightful and provocative as ever. Satrapi explores Marjane's childhood development as she grows into adolescence and experiment…
Field Culture in Unprecedented Times: Writing the Unexpected, Narrating the Future at a Virtual Conference
We are colleagues and collaborators working in the field of English Literary Studies, broadly defined. This paper reflects on our collective encounters working as Life Writing scholars within the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA). Specifically, we muse autocritically on our experience of organising an online conference at a time when scholars are still experiencing the impact of the pandemic. We propose the term 'field culture' to d…
Boundaries and Borders in Australian Life Writing
Transnationalism has been the subject of much scholarly reflection over the last two decades. In one of the earliest definitions of the term, historian Aihwa Ong suggests:\n\nTrans denotes both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something. Besides suggesting new relations between nation-states and capital, transnationality also alludes to the transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the transgres…
Translingual, Transnational, and Transmedial Narratives
[no abstract]
Children and Biography: Reading and Writing Life Stories
The first study of life narratives produced for, about, and written by children, this book examines the recent popularity of children’s biographies and how they engage with the biggest issues of our time: environmental change, health crises, education, and children’s personal and political development.
Metabiography: Reflecting on Biography
Reading Objects, Watching YouTube, Writing Biography, and Teaching Life Writing: Student Engagement When Learning Online During Covid-19
In this article we discuss our experiences of team teaching via ‘emergency remote teaching’ a hybrid literature/creative writing subject, ‘Life Writing’, during 2020, amid the Covid-19 pandemic. We explore how a focus on concepts and issues foundational to life writing as a discipline provided unique points of engagement at a challenging time for students. We discuss our experiences via case studies ranging from object life writing to YouTube and…
Okay to Laugh? Trauma, Memoir, and Teaching the Podcast Mum Says My Memoir Is a Lie
In her 2017 podcast Mum Says My Memoir Is a Lie, the author and comedian Rosie Waterland reads aloud her bestselling memoir, The Anti-Cool Girl (2015), chapter by chapter to her mother. As Rosie reads and her mother responds, the podcast mimics and destabilizes some of the more persistent critiques that have attended memoirs of traumatic childhood. This essay discusses the authors’ experience teaching Waterland’s podcast as a set text in an under…
Circuits of Children’s Testimony: Reading Syrian Children’s Drawings of Home
In this article, we discuss Ben Quilty’s Home: Drawings by Syrian Children (2018) as a case study that explores how we might approach children’s life narratives that are mediated by adult curators. Children’s lives and stories demand recognition, but, reading them (within scholarly and activist or benevolent spaces), requires ethical methods; in particular, generous reading frameworks that attempt to read ‘through’ mediation, and beyond adult/chi…
Emma González, Silence and Youth Testimony
This paper use life narrative methods to analyse two public speeches of youth activist Emma González as examples of how youth testimony gains traction at times of cultural crisis. Drawing on the work of Leigh Gilmore, we ask, how did González become an ‘adequate witness’ at a time when the testimony of women and children, particularly those from racial and sexual minority groups, are so often ‘tainted’ or discredited in the public sphere? What ro…
Alabedbana: Twitter, the child, and the war diary
On 3 October 2016 The Guardian ran a story titled, ‘“I need peace”: Seven-Year-Old Bana Tweets Her Life in Besieged Aleppo’. @AlabedBana’s Twitter feed recounts Bana’s everyday experiences in Aleppo. The posts emphasise a child’s-eye perspective: simple language and pleas for peace amid violence and trauma. Sometimes her mother tweets from the account and signs off with her name. After The Guardian’s story Bana’s Twitter followers grew by tens of…
Contesting Childhood: Autobiography, Trauma, and Memory
The late 1990s and early 2000s witnessed a surge in the publication and popularity of autobiographical writings about childhood. Linking literary and cultural studies, Contesting Childhood draws on a varied selection of works from a diverse range of authorsùfrom first-time to experienced writers. Kate Douglas explores Australian accounts of the Stolen Generation, contemporary American and British narratives of abuse, the bestselling memoirs of An…
Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives
Visualising lives: “The Selfie” as Travel Writing
Enabled by the speed and ease of mobile technologies, and by the ubiquity of camera phone photography, first-person and visual forms of travel narration have become a significant mode of travel writing in the twenty-first century. Such narratives offer an almost limitless (albeit fragile) archive of travel information with a very broad reach. Numerous practices, including simple photo sharing or photo diaries or the serialised “selfie”, locate an…
Youth, trauma and memorialisation: The selfie as witnessing
There have recently been a series of high-profile media controversies around inappropriate selfies taken by young self-portraitists at trauma memorial sites. Popular media critiques propose that the selfie is a self-centred and disrespectful response to traumatic histories. In this article, I consider such selfies in light of cultural shifts in second-person witnessing. I propose that these selfies prompt a rethink for theorists of witnessing. Wh…
Locating Lives: Life Writing and the Asia-Pacific
Malala Yousafzai, Life Narrative and the Collaborative Archive
This article looks at the numerous life narrative texts authored by and written about the Pakistani youth activist Malala Yousafzai. I consider the ways in which Malala’s archive of collaborative life narrative texts, which represent a progressive narrative that explicitly addresses critiques made about Malala as it proceeds, makes visible moments of resistance. Malala has crafted a speaking position that utilises the ideologies and cultural cons…
Childhood and Youth
Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation
Becoming Girl: Collective Biography and the Production of Girlhood
The emerging area of girlhood studies considers the ways in which girlhood cultures and experiences are recognized and represented. The field brings together a range of scholarly ideologies and methods, including sociology, cultural studies, psychology, medicine, law, social work, history, gender studies, and literary studies. Girlhood studies seeks to go beyond the foundational work of these disciplines to establish new scholarly parameters, the…
Why literature students should practise life writing
This article considers our experiences teaching a hybrid literature/creative writing subject called “Life Writing.” We consider the value of literature students engaging in creative writing practice—in this instance, the nonfiction subgenre of life writing—as part of their critical literary studies. We argue that in practicing life writing, our literature students are exposed to and gain wider perspective on the practical, critical, creative, and…
Heavy Lifting: The Pedagogical Work of Life Narratives
Life narrative, as a practice or a theory, is a staple in various educational contexts. For instance, life narratives often play a complementary role in courses with a wider focus. First-year writi
Risky Business: Teaching “Fails” in the Auto|Biography Classroom: An Introduction
In a series of short essays, leading auto/biography scholars reflect on their experiences teaching life narratives, considering occasions when things did not go according to plan. They remind us that “teaching lives” comes with particular perils, and share strategies for negotiating those challenges. Exploring issues including teaching across genres, analyzing writing about trauma, decolonizing pedagogies, and challenging assumptions (our own, ou…
Heavy Lifting: The Pedagogical Work of Life Narratives
Life narrative, as a practice or a theory, is a staple in various educational contexts. For instance, life narratives often play a complementary role in courses with a wider focus. First-year writi
Youth, trauma and memorialisation: The selfie as witnessing
There have recently been a series of high-profile media controversies around inappropriate selfies taken by young self-portraitists at trauma memorial sites. Popular media critiques propose that the selfie is a self-centred and disrespectful response to traumatic histories. In this article, I consider such selfies in light of cultural shifts in second-person witnessing. I propose that these selfies prompt a rethink for theorists of witnessing. Wh…
Lost and Found: The Life Narratives of Child Asylum Seekers
In this paper I explore the emergence of asylum seeker narratives, and suggest their significance as a form of Australian life writing. These narratives have emerged strongly in recent years and have functioned to raise awareness of the experiences of asylum seekers. I use the examples of Julian Burnside's From Nothing to Zero: Letters from Refugees in Australia's Detention Centres and Heather Tyler's Asylum: Voices Behind the Razor Wire to explo…
Alabedbana: Twitter, the child, and the war diary
On 3 October 2016 The Guardian ran a story titled, ‘“I need peace”: Seven-Year-Old Bana Tweets Her Life in Besieged Aleppo’. @AlabedBana’s Twitter feed recounts Bana’s everyday experiences in Aleppo. The posts emphasise a child’s-eye perspective: simple language and pleas for peace amid violence and trauma. Sometimes her mother tweets from the account and signs off with her name. After The Guardian’s story Bana’s Twitter followers grew by tens of…
Locating Lives: Life Writing and the Asia-Pacific
Malala Yousafzai, Life Narrative and the Collaborative Archive
This article looks at the numerous life narrative texts authored by and written about the Pakistani youth activist Malala Yousafzai. I consider the ways in which Malala’s archive of collaborative life narrative texts, which represent a progressive narrative that explicitly addresses critiques made about Malala as it proceeds, makes visible moments of resistance. Malala has crafted a speaking position that utilises the ideologies and cultural cons…
Ethical Dialogues: Youth, Memoir, and Trauma
This article maps the reception of an African soldier memoir, Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, and in response explores what an ethical reading of this youth-authored trauma text might require. This case study offers a mandate for ethical scholarship in the study of youth-authored trauma narratives
Go Back to Where You Came From: Stunt Documentary, Conversion Narrative, and the Limits of Testimony on Australian Television
The 2011 reality television series Go Back to Where You Came From used established narrative modes of stunt memoir, testimony, and conversion to start a public conversation about Australia's recent treatment of asylum seekers. This essay explores both the cultural possibilities and the pitfalls of the series' textually-hybrid approach
Witnessing on the Web: Asylum Seekers and Letter-Writing Projects on Australian Activist Websites
(2006). Witnessing on the Web: Asylum Seekers and Letter-Writing Projects on Australian Activist Websites. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 21, Epistolarity in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 44-57
The universal autobiographer: The politics of normative readings
In Australia, autobiographies occupy a cultural space which commonly sees them marked as socially valuable, functional texts. Autobiographies are thought to be concerned with the dominant concerns of our time, representing individuals who, through their strength and resilience, become universalised exemplars for the wider community. In this paper Dr Douglas examines the implications of reading an autobiographical narrative through such establishe…
The decentralization of syphilis screening for improved care in Jamaican public clinics. Collaborative Working Group on Decentralized Syphilis Screening
OBJECTIVES: This study examined the decentralization of syphilis screening for improved care in Jamaican public clinics. METHODS: One of every five serum samples tested at the six peripheral sites was frozen and retested at the central laboratory in Kingston. Patient files and laboratory logbooks were compared over a 3-month period. RESULTS: Between May 1993 and December 1994, 15.5% of 32913 patients with sexually transmitted diseases and 8.3% of…
Dr. Grierson's Life of Tovey
Journal Article DR. GRIERSON'S LIFE OF TOVEY Get access J. DOUGLAS, J. DOUGLAS Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar H. DICKSON H. DICKSON Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Music and Letters, Volume XXXIII, Issue 3, July 1952, Pages 198–202, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/XXXIII.3.198 Published: 01 July 1952
Beyond Borders
A review of Bob Hodge and John O'Carroll, Borderwork in Multicultural Australia (Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2006
The decentralization of syphilis screening for improved care in Jamaican public clinics. Collaborative Working Group on Decentralized Syphilis Screening
OBJECTIVES: This study examined the decentralization of syphilis screening for improved care in Jamaican public clinics. METHODS: One of every five serum samples tested at the six peripheral sites was frozen and retested at the central laboratory in Kingston. Patient files and laboratory logbooks were compared over a 3-month period. RESULTS: Between May 1993 and December 1994, 15.5% of 32913 patients with sexually transmitted diseases and 8.3% of…
JAS review of books
D A Low (ed), Keith Hancock: The Legacies of an Historian, Melbourne University Press, 2001, pp 303, $32.95. Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, Inside the Olympic Industry: Power, Politics, and Activism, State University of New York Press, 2000, pp 216, pb US$44.00. Douglas R G Sellick, Antarctica: First Impressions 1773‐1930, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2001, pp 256, pb $29.95. Pamela Jeanne Fulton (ed), The Minerva Journal of John Washington Price, Melb…
"Blurbing" Biographical: Authorship and Autobiography
In the community that consumes autobiographical writing, how is the author positioned, and what are the implications of this positioning? One method for exploring the author construct and its impact upon readership is the initial point of introduction and consumption of the material autobiographical text: the book jacket. Book jackets provide the glue binding author and text together; they are the site where the author's biography meets with mark…
JAS review of books
David Burchell and Andrew Leigh (eds), The Prince's New Clothes: Why Do Australians Dislike Their Politicians?, University of New South Wales Press, 2002, pp 191, pb $34.95. ISBN 086840604X. Don Watson, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: a portrait of Paul Keating, Random House, 2002, hb $45.00. ISBN 0091835178. Warwick Anders, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Radical Destiny in Australia, Melbourne University Press, 2002, pp 364…
The universal autobiographer: The politics of normative readings
In Australia, autobiographies occupy a cultural space which commonly sees them marked as socially valuable, functional texts. Autobiographies are thought to be concerned with the dominant concerns of our time, representing individuals who, through their strength and resilience, become universalised exemplars for the wider community. In this paper Dr Douglas examines the implications of reading an autobiographical narrative through such establishe…
Increasing walking
Lost and Found: The Life Narratives of Child Asylum Seekers
In this paper I explore the emergence of asylum seeker narratives, and suggest their significance as a form of Australian life writing. These narratives have emerged strongly in recent years and have functioned to raise awareness of the experiences of asylum seekers. I use the examples of Julian Burnside's From Nothing to Zero: Letters from Refugees in Australia's Detention Centres and Heather Tyler's Asylum: Voices Behind the Razor Wire to explo…
Witnessing on the Web: Asylum Seekers and Letter-Writing Projects on Australian Activist Websites
(2006). Witnessing on the Web: Asylum Seekers and Letter-Writing Projects on Australian Activist Websites. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 21, Epistolarity in the Twenty-First Century, pp. 44-57
Trauma in the Twenty-First Century
In her genealogical approach to the study of trauma, Ruth Leys situates the most recent turn to trauma studies across a range of disciplines and in relation to the waxing and waning of interest in
Ayen's Cooking School for: African Men : Mediating Life Narratives of Trauma
Go Back to Where You Came From: Stunt Documentary, Conversion Narrative, and the Limits of Testimony on Australian Television
The 2011 reality television series Go Back to Where You Came From used established narrative modes of stunt memoir, testimony, and conversion to start a public conversation about Australia's recent treatment of asylum seekers. This essay explores both the cultural possibilities and the pitfalls of the series' textually-hybrid approach
The affects of not reading: Hating characters, being bored, feeling stupid
This article brings recent debates in literary studies regarding the practice of close reading into conversation with Derek Attridge’s idea of ‘readerly hospitality’ (2004) to diagnose the problem of students in undergraduate literary studies programme not completing set reading. We argue that the method of close reading depends on encouraging students to foster positive affective responses towards difficulty – semiotic, emotional and intellectua…
Le Travail Social entre Résistance et Innovation. Soziale Arbeit zwischen Widerstand und Innovation
This is a complex book, with 34 chapters in either French or German, each prefaced in the other language. It is a selection from a conference held in Geneva in March 2010, with contributions not on
Ethical Dialogues: Youth, Memoir, and Trauma
This article maps the reception of an African soldier memoir, Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, and in response explores what an ethical reading of this youth-authored trauma text might require. This case study offers a mandate for ethical scholarship in the study of youth-authored trauma narratives
Life Narratives and Youth Culture: Representation, Agency and Participation
Becoming Girl: Collective Biography and the Production of Girlhood
The emerging area of girlhood studies considers the ways in which girlhood cultures and experiences are recognized and represented. The field brings together a range of scholarly ideologies and methods, including sociology, cultural studies, psychology, medicine, law, social work, history, gender studies, and literary studies. Girlhood studies seeks to go beyond the foundational work of these disciplines to establish new scholarly parameters, the…
Why literature students should practise life writing
This article considers our experiences teaching a hybrid literature/creative writing subject called “Life Writing.” We consider the value of literature students engaging in creative writing practice—in this instance, the nonfiction subgenre of life writing—as part of their critical literary studies. We argue that in practicing life writing, our literature students are exposed to and gain wider perspective on the practical, critical, creative, and…
Heavy Lifting: The Pedagogical Work of Life Narratives
Life narrative, as a practice or a theory, is a staple in various educational contexts. For instance, life narratives often play a complementary role in courses with a wider focus. First-year writi
Risky Business: Teaching “Fails” in the Auto|Biography Classroom: An Introduction
In a series of short essays, leading auto/biography scholars reflect on their experiences teaching life narratives, considering occasions when things did not go according to plan. They remind us that “teaching lives” comes with particular perils, and share strategies for negotiating those challenges. Exploring issues including teaching across genres, analyzing writing about trauma, decolonizing pedagogies, and challenging assumptions (our own, ou…
Youth, trauma and memorialisation: The selfie as witnessing
There have recently been a series of high-profile media controversies around inappropriate selfies taken by young self-portraitists at trauma memorial sites. Popular media critiques propose that the selfie is a self-centred and disrespectful response to traumatic histories. In this article, I consider such selfies in light of cultural shifts in second-person witnessing. I propose that these selfies prompt a rethink for theorists of witnessing. Wh…
Locating Lives: Life Writing and the Asia-Pacific
Malala Yousafzai, Life Narrative and the Collaborative Archive
This article looks at the numerous life narrative texts authored by and written about the Pakistani youth activist Malala Yousafzai. I consider the ways in which Malala’s archive of collaborative life narrative texts, which represent a progressive narrative that explicitly addresses critiques made about Malala as it proceeds, makes visible moments of resistance. Malala has crafted a speaking position that utilises the ideologies and cultural cons…
Childhood and Youth
Art (30 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Literature (24 works) · History (20 works) · Narrative (20 works) · Psychology (17 works) · History (14 works) · Media studies (14 works) · Aesthetics (13 works) · Political science (13 works)