Catherine (Kate) Mackenzie

Catherine (Kate) Mackenzie is a 3rd Year PhD researcher in the School of Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews, with supervision also at the University of Strathclyde (Dr Elaine Webster, School of Law).  Kate’s PhD research is on Imagining Children’s Rights in Central Africa: Francophone Fiction and State Discourse since 1999.   She takes a post-colonial approach to analyse how such texts reflect differing conceptions of childhood and shed light on the tensions inherent in the relationship of the child to the adult, the individual to the state, and African nations to the international human rights regime.

Kate’s research is informed by her previous work in the UK Diplomatic Service, including in the fields of international human rights law and conflict resolution in Central Africa. 

Research Publications

MLitt Thesis (School of International Relations, University of St Andrews) 

Sources of Restraint on State Use of Political Violence: A Case Study, Zimbabwe 2000-2008, published 21 March 2021 in the Occasional Paper Series of The Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, University of St Andrews.

Conference Papers

'The adolescent protagonist: (un)naturalcultural formation in three Central African novels and in international children’s rights law', at The Child of the Future Conference 2022, International Research Society for Children’s Literature, 30 June 2022

'The adolescent narrator and the fractured self in two (post-)conflict novels from Central Africa' at Narratives of Selfhood and Ambivalence, PGR and ECR Symposium at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, 30/09/21;

'Inter-woven discourses – history, culture and imagination in the construction of international children’s rights law', presented to the University of Strathclyde 5^thAnnual Postgraduate Law Conference Reimagining Justice and Ethnography, 29 April 2021

Publications:

- blogpost ‘Interpreting the Rights of the Child: Look South (a lot further than Westminster)’, Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities blog, 23/06/2021