Rate My Professor Denise Buiten

Dr Denise Buiten is a Senior Lecturer in Social Justice and Sociology in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Notre Dame Australia Sydney campus, where she joined in 2011. She earned her DPhil in Sociology, focusing her doctoral research on the construction of gender in South African news texts and journalists' discourses. Her academic career began in South Africa, followed by a Post-doctoral Fellowship in Global Justice and Gender Equality at the School of Social Justice, University College Dublin in 2009. Additionally, she holds the position of Senior Research Associate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg since 2016. Buiten teaches courses in Social Justice, Sociology, and Media and Communications, and supervises higher degree by research students on topics such as coercive control in family violence, public discourses on youth detention, and the mental health impacts of hearing impairment.

Her research centers on diverse forms of gendered violence, including filicide, familicide, sexual and domestic violence, and the evolution of media, public, and political discourses on gender and violence. Key publications include the monograph Familicide, Gender and the Media: Gendering Familicide, Interrogating News (Springer, 2022) and the forthcoming co-edited volume The Public Child: Media Power, Strategic Silencing and Children’s Rights (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). Selected journal articles are Young Men and Feminism: Gendered Struggle and Sense-Making for Australian University Students (Men and Masculinities, 2024, with J. Kean), Representations of Violence, Representations as Violence: When the News Reports on Homicides of Disabled People (International Journal of Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2023, with R. Cresciani), Competing discourses and cultural intelligibility: Familicide, gender and the mental illness/distress frame in news (Crime, Media, Culture, 2022, with G. Coe), and Laying claim to a name: Towards a sociology of gender-based violence (South African Review of Sociology, 2020, with K. Naidoo). Awards include the Promising Young Researcher Award from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, South Africa (2007), and a University of Notre Dame Australia Transformative Research Fellowship for 2026, supporting her project on victim-survivors' perspectives of news reporting on domestic and family violence. She is a member of the Australian Women and Gender Studies Association and the Australian New Zealand Association of Criminology, and serves on the NSW ACT Domestic, Family & Sexual Violence Research Network.