Dr Denise Buiten

Senior Lecturer, Social Justice & Sociology
DPhil

Email: denise.buiten@nd.edu.au
Phone: 02 8204 4170
ORCID

  • Biography

    Denise Buiten is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Sciences, University of Notre Dame Australia, specialising in Sociology and Social Justice.

    Her research focuses on understanding and addressing diverse forms of gendered violence, including filicide, familicide, sexual and domestic violence. Her work examines the ways media, public and political discourses around gender and violence are evolving and aims to promote nuanced discussion and analysis of these issues in the classroom, the media, and scholarship.

    Denise is a Senior Research Associate of the University of Johannesburg. She began her academic education and career in South Africa, where she completed her PhD examining the construction of gender in news text and in the discourses of journalists. In 2009, she moved to Ireland to complete a Post-doctoral Fellowship in Global Justice and Gender Equality at the School of Social Justice in University College Dublin, before joining the University of Notre Dame Australia (Sydney) in 2011.

    Her book, Familicide, Gender and the Media: Gendering Familicide, Interrogating Newswas published by Springer in 2022. The book advances a feminist sociological analysis of familicide as a form of gender-based violence and critically examines how it is reported in the Australian news.

  • Teaching areas

    • Social Justice
    • Sociology
    • Media and Communications

  • Research expertise and current projects

    • Gender, violence, and representation.
    • Familicide, filicide, and domestic and family violence.
    • Feminism(s) in media and public discourse.
    • Pedagogical approaches to teaching gender-based violence.

  • HDR and honours supervision

    PhD and Masters Supervision:

    • How have the evolving meaning(s) of coercive control in the context of family and domestic violence influenced criminalisation efforts in Australia? (current)
    • Beyond Hope and Behind Bars: Public Discourses on Youth Detention (current)
    • Exploring the Impact of Hearing Impairment on the Mental Health of Adults (current)
    • Dr Louise St Guillaume (2014). The same but different: how people with a partial capacity to work are governed in recent policy changes to the Australian income support system and the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Co-supervisor: Prof. Cate Thill

    Honours Supervision:

    • 2023: Ffion Thomas: The Ones Who Survived: Investigating LGBTIQ+ people’s experiences of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Sydney during the 1980s-1990s.
    • 2022: Thomas Benson: AI Governance or Governance by AI? A sociological inquiry into Australian policy discourse on Artificial Intelligence.
    • 2020: Rebecca Hetherington (First Class Honours; Awarded ACUR Award for Best Undergraduate Research Presentation). Move, Nourish, Believe: Neoliberal regulation of the self in the Lorna Jane brand.
    • 2019: Lauren Brooks (First Class Honours). Digitally (De/re)constructing Gender: “Affordances” for Performing Gender in the Sims 4 Avatar Customisation Interface.
    • 2018: Georgia Coe (First Class Honours). Beyond ‘Mental Illness’: An exploration into the ways in which the Social and Emotional Wellbeing approach is negotiated in contemporary policy associated with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples ‘mental health’. Co-supervisor: Dr Louise St Guillaume
    • 2017: Chloe Goy (First Class Honours). “Nicole Arbour’s ‘Dear Fat People’: Discourses of Fat Shaming & Fat Acceptance in a Contemporary Space.
    • 2016: Simone Fernandes (First Class Honours). Participation and the Social Model of Disability: A Discourse Analysis of the Framing of Participation

  • Books and edited books

    Buiten, D. (2022). Familicide, Gender and the Media: Gendering Familicide, Interrogating News. Singapore: Springer

  • Book chapters

    Recent selected book chapters:

    • Buiten, D. (2023). Familicide, gender and “mental illness”: Beyond false dualisms. In K. Boyle and S. Berridge (Eds.). Routledge Companion to Gender, Media and Violence. London: Routledge.
    • Buiten, D. (2023). Mental illness/distress in representations of maternal filicide-suicide: Silencing the gendered aetiologies of violence. In S. Banwell, L. Black, D. Cecil, Y. Djamba, S. Kimuna, E. Milne, L. Seal, & E. Tenkorang. International Handbook of Feminist Perspectives on Women’s Acts of Violence. Emerald Publishing.
    • Gerber, M., Le Berre, S. & Buiten, D. (2023). Young masculinities and violence in South Africa: Reflections on the Literature. In K. Naidoo, O. Adeagbo & X. Li Young (Eds.), Young People, Violence and Strategic Interventions in Sub-Saharan Africa. Springer
    • Buiten, D., Finlay, E. & Hancock, R. (2022). Towards an Intersectional Feminist Pedagogy of Gender-based Violence. In A. Day, L. Lee, D. Thomas & J. Spickard (eds). Diversity, Inclusion & Decolonization: Practical Tools for Improving Teaching, Research & Scholarship. Bristol University Press.
    • Naidoo, K. & Buiten, D. (2022). Tackling Gender-Based Violence in South Africa: Organizing, Calling Out, Embracing #MeToo. In M. C. Alcalde & V. Paula-Irene (eds.). #MeToo & Beyond: Perspectives on a Global Movement. University of Kentucky Press.
    • Buiten, D. (2020). Sex and Gender. In Arvanitakis, J. (ed.). Sociologic: Analysing Everyday Life and Culture (2nd Edition). Oxford University Press.
    • Buiten, D. (2016). South African Feminisms. In N. Naples, R. C. Hoogland, M. Wickramasinghe & W. C. A. Wong (Eds.) The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies. Milton, QLD: Whiley-Blackwell.

  • Journal articles

    Recent journal articles:

    • Buiten, D. & Cresciani, R. (2023). Representations of Violence, Representations as Violence: When the News Reports on Homicides of Disabled People. International Journal of Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 12(3), 64-76. https://www.crimejusticejournal.com/article/view/2720
    • Buiten D., & Coe, G. (2022). Competing discourses and cultural intelligibility: Familicide, gender and the mental illness/distress frame in news. Crime, Media, Culture, 18(2).
    • Buiten, D. (2020). It’s ‘vile’ but is it violence? A case study analysis of news media representations of non-consensual sexual image-sharing. Feminist Media Studies, 20(8), 1177-1194. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1708773
    • Buiten, D., & Naidoo, K. (2020). Laying claim to a name: Towards a sociology of gender-based violence. South African Review of Sociology, 51(2), 61-68. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2019.1708773
    • Buiten, D. & Naidoo, K. (2016). Framing the problem of rape in South Africa: Gender, race, class and state histories. Current Sociology, 64(4). 535–550.
    • Buiten, D. (2013). Feminist approaches and the South African news media. Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies, 34(2), 54-72. Taylor & Francis.
    • Buiten, D. & Naidoo, K. (2013). Constructions and representations of masculinity in South Africa’s tabloid press: Reflections on discursive tensions in the Sunday Sun. Communicatio: Southern African Journal for Theory and Research, 39(2), 194-209.
    • Buiten, D. (2007). Silences stifling transformation: Misogyny and gender-based violence in the media. Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equality, 71. 115-121.

  • In the media

    • Buiten, D. (2023, February 15). Why do men who kill their families still receive sympathetic news coverage?. The Conversation.
    • Buiten, D. (2021, January 20). Men and women kill their children in roughly equal numbers, and we need to understand why. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/men-and-women-kill-their-children-in-roughly-equal-numbers-and-we-need-to-understand-why-153527
    • Buiten, D. (2021, May 10). Domestic Violence Awareness Month. University of Notre Dame Australia. https://www.notredame.edu.au/news-items/expert-opinion-domestic-violence-awareness-month
    • Why do men kill their families? Here’s what the research says. (2020, February 25). The Conversation.
    • 2SER Radio Interview, "Domestic Violence". The Daily Show (2019, July 1).
    • Jepson, B. (2021, February 19). A year ago, Hannah Clarke and her children were murdered. Can you remember their names? https://www.mamamia.com.au/what-is-filicide-hannah-clarke/
    • Jepson, B. (2021, April 24). Kobi Shepherdson, and the faces of domestic violence we mustn't look away from. Mamamia. https://www.mamamia.com.au/kobi-shepherdson-domestic-violence/

  • Professional affiliations

    • Senior Research Associate: Department of Sociology, University of Johannesburg (2016 to present)
    • Member: Australian Women and Gender Studies Association.
    • Member: Australian New Zealand Association of Criminology.

  • Awards

    • Promising Young Researcher Award (Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, South Africa) (2007)

  • Grants

    Men, masculinity and gender equality: Young men's perceptions, responses and negotiations (2020-2021)
    Awarded by: University of Johannesburg Faculty of Humanities Research Committee
    Partners:  Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney; Department of Sociology, University of Johannesburg

  • Community and industry engagement

    Denise Buiten engages with students and practitioners of applied and clinical sociology through her work with the Association of Applied and Clinical Sociology. She regularly contributes to media reporting on issues of gender and violence.