Dr Cath Laws

Casual Academic, ACU Faculty of Education and Arts

Dr Cath Laws has worked in education teaching in regular and special settings, including schools for those categorised as having emotional and behavioural disorders and juvenile justice schools. She has also worked in out of school contexts in NSW, including state child protection policy, professional learning for staff and as NSW Statewide Manager of Behaviour Programs. She is currently a referee for the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Literacy – Journal of UK Literacy Association and The International Journal of Diversity in Education.

Dr Laws has always been interested in examining the ways children living at the margins are positioned. She looked at the discourses operating with these children and young people for her PHD thesis ‘Poststructuralism at work with marginalised children’. Dr Laws is involved in community organisations, and is currently NSW president of ‘Protective Behaviours’ – a child protection education program.

In 2006, Dr Laws received the NSW Department of Education and Training Director-General’s Award for service to public education.  While she is now retired, she continues to trouble the dominant discourses surrounding those at the margins through her work as an independent academic, her work at the ACU and her research. She reads her life’s work as exploring the ways those at the margins can come to act with agency and be treated differently.

Selected Publications

• Laws, C. (2016). Re-thinking ‘pointiness’: Special education. In E. Bendix Petersen & Z. Millei (Eds.) Interrupting the psy-disciplines in education (pp. 129-144). Macmillan: London.
• Bentley-Williams, R., Christine Grima-Farrell, C., Long, J.  & Laws, C. (2016). Collaborative partnership: Developing pre-service teachers as inclusive practitioners to support students with disabilities. International Journal of Disability, Development and Education, DOI: 10.1080/1034912X.2016.1199851
• Long, J., Bentley-Williams, R., Laws, C., & Grima-Farrell, C., (2014). Responding to educational needs: A School System and University partnership. International Journal of Diversity in Education, 13(4) 31-43.
• Grima-Farrell, C. R., Long, J., Bentley-Williams, R., & Laws, C. (2014). A school system and university approach to reducing the research to practice gap in teacher education: A collaborative special education immersion Project. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 39(5) 89-98.
• Laws, C. (2011). Poststructuralism at work with marginalised children. Online. Bentham Publishers.
• Zabrodska, K., Linnell, S., Laws, C. and Davies, B. (2011). Bullying as intra-active process in neoliberal universities. Qualitative Inquiry, 17(8) pp. 709-719.
• Ellwood, C. and Laws, C. (2009). Doing normal: Discursive constructions of youth in transformative educational programs. In Honglin Chen and Ken Cruikshank (Eds). Making a difference: challenges for applied linguistics. UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Bansell, P. Davies, B. Laws, C, Linnell, S. (2009). Bullies, bullying and power in the contexts of schooling. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 30(1), 59–60.
• Davies, B., Edwards, J., Gannon, S., and Laws, C.  (2007). Neo-liberal subjectivities and the limits of social change in university – community partnerships. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 35(1) pp. 27-40.
• Laws, C. (2004). Poststructuralist writing at work. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 17(1), 113-127.
• Davies, B., Browne, J., Gannon, S., Honan, E., Laws, C., Mueller-Rockstroh, Babette, and Bendix Petersen, Eva. (2004). The ambivalent practices of reflexivity. Qualitative Inquiry, 10(3) pp. 360-389.