It was an honour to receive the ANZSOC Early Career award for my article ‘Domestic Violence Policing of First Nations Women in Australia: ‘Settler’ Frameworks, Consequential Harms and the Promise of Meaningful Self-Determination’.
This article was published in late 2021 while I was still completing my DPhil studies part time through University of Oxford. But the research project that led to the article had been going since 2015 when I started scoping out the design and approach with First Nations Elders and domestic violence service providers.
I consider that it is our role as criminologists to work to illuminate complex sites of inequality and violence. This research is heartbreaking in so many ways, not least to the extent it illuminates Australia’s failure to truly respect First Nations peoples’ right to self-determination. It is my hope that this country can move forward in ways that truly respect that right, supporting transformative and community-controlled solutions to violence outside of narrow Eurocentric frameworks and conceptualisations of safety.
I learnt so much during this research. I owe an enormous intellectual debt to those who were involved in it; especially First Nations stakeholders and participants, trusted advisors, colleagues and friends. I also want to acknowledge the First Nations women whose advocacy and scholarship lay the groundwork for this study.
Dr Emma Buxton-Namisnyk is a Lecturer in the School of Law, Society and Criminology in the UNSW Faculty of Law. She completed her DPhil as a Clarendon Scholar at the University of Oxford in 2022. Emma researches at the intersection of criminology and international human rights law, with a particular emphasis on domestic and family violence and sexual violence responses (including policing and specialist service responses), state responsibilities and intersecting rights. Emma also has a strong interest in legal and criminological theory and comparative human rights law.
Before commencing in UNSW Faculty of Law, Emma worked extensively in the fields of domestic violence death review, coronial law and First Nations justice. Emma worked in the Office of the Pro Vice Chancellor Indigenous UNSW from 2020-2021 and as a member of the Indigenous Law Centre. She was the inaugural Research Analyst on the NSW Domestic Violence Death Review Team from 2012-2021 and a senior researcher on the Family is Culture Review into Aboriginal Children in Out-of-Home Care in 2018-2019. Emma has also worked as a tipstaff to the Honourable Justice Sackville AO QC at the NSW Court of Appeal, as an associate at Baker & McKenzie Sydney and as an international clerk in Bangkok.