INTERESTS
Leanne Higham is a sociocultural theorist of education. Interested in the operation of slow violence and nonviolence, she takes a neo-Spinozist approach to empirically examining power, inequality, and ethics in education contexts.
A former secondary teacher of History, Politics, and Law, Leanne is interested in the micropolitics that constitute educational climates, cultures, and ethos. Her research is theoretically and empirically informed by queer and feminist affect theories, new materialisms, and critical posthumanities.
Work
Leanne’s work has been awarded the Australian Association for Research in Education’s Ray Debus Award (2025); the University of Melbourne’s Chancellor’s Prize (2025) and Doctoral Research Prize (2025); the Australian Educational Researcher’s Best Paper Award (2024); the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia’s Doctoral and Postgraduate Presentation Award (2023), and the University of Melbourne’s Freda Cohen Prize (2016).
She is a co-convenor of the Gender, Sexualities and Cultural Studies SIG at the Australian Association for Research in Education.