Research Students
I am open to supervising new research projects (honours, MPhil, PhD) in the areas of religion, death, materiality and technology.
Bio: Kate is a qualitative researcher and death educator with a background in Social Work, Psychology, and Thanatology. Broadly, Kate is interested in technological innovations in deathcare and bereavement. She uses video games as a backdrop to educate about death, dying, grief, and loss, and is interested in their potential as non-clinical grief support tools. She is also interested in pet loss: how humans memorialise and grieve their animal family members.
Project: Creating Community Online in Life and Death: How Player-Created Video Game Memorials Can Honor the Dead and Support the Bereaved
Kate’s research draws from Anthropology, Psychology and Game Studies, and is rooted in ritual and grief studies across disciplines. Her project examines death rituals and memorialisation of the dead in online video game communities. Most grieving people do not seek clinical support for their grief (Australian Psychological Society, 2026). According to the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association (IGEA) 2025 Australia Plays Report, 85% of Australians play video games. One of the goals of this project is to understand who participates in in-game memorials and to ask them about the impact of attending and/or planning such a ritual on their bereavement. Kate is investigating in-game memorials to community members of online video games to understand their potential as non-clinical grief support.
