Associate ProfessorKatrina Clifford

Katrina Clifford is an Associate Professor in Communication in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University. She is a specialist in media criminology. Her work seeks to challenge and disrupt normative assumptions about the media-crime nexus by bringing together criminological concepts and frameworks with an applied understanding of media practices. Katrina was previously a Visiting Fellow in the School of Journalism, Media & Cultural Studies at Cardiff University, and is a current member of the Advancing Rural, Regional Culture and Society research group at Deakin University and a Research Associate, UNE Centre for Rural Criminology. Katrina brings over 10 years' industry experience to both her teaching and research, having worked as a journalist and magazine editor for a number of business titles. She later expanded her expertise as a communications consultant and corporate writer, providing strategic advice on policy and stakeholder communications to not-for-profit organisations, including the Australian Institute of Company Directors and Suicide Prevention Australia. Throughout her academic career, she has worked to strengthen the connections between academia and industry, contributing to major curriculum initiatives focused on graduate employability and work-integrated learning. As Director of Employability for the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin University (2021-2024), she led the development and implementation of a scaffolded sequence of course-wide employability units within the Bachelor of Arts and undergraduate Communication and Creative Arts degrees, designed to equip students from diverse backgrounds with the skills and capabilities necessary for future career success and lifelong learning. In 2025, Katrina was invited to undertake a six-month academic secondment with the Office of the PVC Graduate Employment at Deakin to lead an interim evaluation of the Employability Sequence, authoring the resulting evaluation report and recommendations to inform its future development. Katrina is also the author of two books: Policing, Mental Illness and Media: The Framing of Mental Health Crisis Encounters and Police Use of Force (Palgrave Macmillan) and Media and Crime: Content, Context and Consequence (with Rob White, Oxford University Press).