Rate My Professor Fairleigh Gilmour

Dr Fairleigh Gilmour is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Gender Studies in the Sociology, Gender Studies and Criminology Programme, School of Social Sciences, Division of Humanities at the University of Otago. She holds a BA (Hons) and a PhD from Monash University. Gilmour's research specializations include sex work governance, the intersections of race, gender, and class in media representations of crime, particularly criminalised girls and women, and prison education. As a designated media expert, she provides commentary on crime and the media with emphasis on social and new media intersections with gender and crime, prisons and prisoner education, crime technology and surveillance including CCTV, and sex work laws. Her academic interests extend to gender, work, and consumer culture.

Gilmour coordinates and teaches several courses, including GEND 210/310 Gender, Crime and Justice, SOCI 103 Crime, Deviance and Social Transformation, SOCI 312 Crime, Technology and Social Change, and sections of GEND 206/306 Gender, Work and Consumer Culture. She supervises postgraduate research in areas such as media representations of crime, gender and social media, sex work, and prison education. Key publications feature co-editing the Proceedings of the Te Taura Takata Sociology, Gender Studies & Criminology Postgraduate Symposium VIII (2024), the book chapter 'Media representations of criminalised women in 1950s Aotearoa New Zealand' in Women’s criminalisation and offending in Australia and New Zealand (2024, Routledge), and the peer-reviewed article 'Under surveillance: Does Global Positioning System monitoring of offenders reduce recidivism?' with A. L. Hawkes and M. Sellbom in Criminology & Criminal Justice (2024). Additional significant contributions include co-editing Women, Crime and Justice in Context: Contemporary Perspectives (2022) and the chapter 'The Impacts of Decriminalisation for Trans Sex Workers' in Sex Work and the New Zealand Model: Decriminalisation and Social Change (2021). In 2025, Gilmour was awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award in the Humanities. She leads a three-year pilot of the Inside-Out prison education programme at Otago Corrections Facility, teaching degree-level classes to prisoners.