Catherine's research is organised around three streams: youth and girls studies (with emphasis on ideas about adolescence and on media and popular culture); rural cultural studies (with an emphasis on Australia and on ethnographic research); and cultural theory (with an emphasis on modernity and modernism). Her current major research projects focus on cultural sustainability in Australian country towns (with researchers at Melbourne and Wollongong), media classification systems and minority (with Liam Grealy), on gender and online gaming (as sole author and with Meaghan Morris and Elaine Lally), and on cultural studies' debt to pragmatism and phenomenology
