“It sounds like a whisper”: feminist psychology and the gendering of power

Adrienne Scullion: Hello colleagues and friends. Good evening and thank you for joining us for this evening's lecture, a significant lecture for the University and for our lecturer, and a further event in our series of professorial inaugural lectures.

I'm Adrienne Scullion, Head of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences here at The Open University, and I'm really delighted to be hosting this evening's event for two reasons. Firstly, because it's part of a great series of talks by our University’s leaders, showcasing our research, teaching and knowledge exchange, and secondly, because this evening we'll hear from my colleague in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Rose Capdevila, our new Professor of Psychology. Rose will be discussing her important research around the gendering of power in three contexts, in activism, in the history of psychology, and in social media, important and I’m sure of great interest to us all.

Before we begin the traditional housekeeping. This lecture will be followed by a Q&A in which I hope that you will want to participate. Then for those of us in the theatre, discussion will continue over refreshments downstairs in the foyer. For those of you joining us online, you will need to make your own catering arrangements. For anyone in the audience using Twitter. Please feel free to post using the hashtag, #OUtalks and tagging, I don't even know what that word means, but tagging @OpenUniversity. For members of our audience joining us online via YouTube, please use the email address provided and keep your comments and questions brief so that we can get to as many as possible in our Q&A.

So, today we celebrate the academic contribution made by Rose Capdevila. Rose is our new Professor of Psychology here at The Open University. Rose’s research takes an intersectional feminist approach to gender digital spaces. She has an interest in the history of feminist psychology in the UK, and as a member of Psychology’s Feminist Voices International Team, and an Associate Dean for Research in the faculty. Rose has been co-editor of Feminism and Psychology and is a past Chair of the Psychology of Women and Equality section of the British Psychological Society. Supporting the best of psychology research internationally, Rose was one of the co-editors of the award-winning Handbook of International Feminisms, co-editor of the Palgrave Grade Handbook of Power, Gender and Psychology, and the co-author of A Feminist Companion to Research Methods in Psychology. She's currently working on two new projects on gender in online environments, the first gender equitable interactions online is a European and ESRC-funded project on video conferencing. The second with the Centre for Protecting Women Online is funded by research England and will launch later this year.

Pulling on all that work, pulling on all of that experience, all of that contribution to psychology as an academic discipline, Rose’s lecture this evening is entitled - “It sounds like a whisper”: feminist psychology and the gendering of power. Professor Capdevila congratulations on your achievement. Enjoy your inaugural lecture and over to you.

Rose Capdevila: Thanks so much for being here and thanks to the OU for hosting this event. So for the next 40 minutes or so, I'm going to talk a bit about my research, and how I see it connecting up in various ways with the personal, social, empirical and societal concerns that I've had over the years, and I think have been shared by many of my friends and colleagues. So the talk will follow a loosely chronological order through the three main areas in which I've been working across my academic career. So these are my early research on women and activism, which I explored in my PhD thesis, a number of projects on the history of psychology, particularly the history of feminist psychology in the UK, and my research over the last decade on gender in digital spaces, primarily in social media, but also the online environment more broadly.

A couple of months ago we published a book I co-edited with Eileen Zurbriggen on power, gender, and psychology. In my work, power and gender have always been inextricably interwoven and I've never managed to be able to sense make when trying to hold these concepts as separate. So you won't be surprised to guess that this is a thread, or maybe better a bit of interwoven yarn, that runs through my research.

But first, I'd like to set up the context of my academic career, so to speak, because my research is primarily in social media these days. What came to mind was the how it started, how it's going memes, it was around everywhere in 2000 onwards. So the basic concept of this meme is to show surprise about how things have changed over time. So usually, you have this image of sometime in the past, and then a surprising second photo. So in my case I started at the University of Toronto, now I'm at The Open University, not very surprising, but the path hasn't been that straightforward.

So how it started. My first degree was in politics at the University of Toronto. I then headed off to the University of Barcelona to do a diploma in Hispanic Studies. After that I worked outside of academia for about eight years, and then I began my PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Reading. My PhD was on women's involvement in single issue movements which aren't gender related. I was desperate to study women's gendered experiences of politics. This was partly inspired by reading Margaret Atwood's ‘The Handmaid's Tale’. That book has gained a lot of notoriety now because of the Hulu series and some recent quite disturbing resonances with current events in the US and elsewhere, but also from visiting my aging aunt at a care home when I lived in Spain. So on my visits I would sit in the common room with my aunt and her contemporaries and just listen to them reminisce. These were women who were young during the 1920s and 30s, and the turmoil in the build up to the Spanish Civil War. Many of them activists by choice or by necessity. They told stories of their adventures in what would now be understood as feminist activism. However, they also told stories of how it was thwarted in the decades that followed after the triumph of the Franco dictatorship. As they spoke their daughters, only a generation behind them, would shush them and their tales of rebellion and their descriptions of what Lynne Segal has more recently referred to as ‘a collective joy’. I became keenly aware of the fragility of women's political gains around equity and rights. So my question was, what was it about women's power, women's identities as legitimate political subjects that wasn't able to stabilise or stick, so to speak.

So it was then through my friendship with colleagues in social psychology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, that I came to meet a critical figure in my academic journey, Beryl C Curt. As it explains in her book, ‘Textuality and Tectonics, Troubling social and psychological science’, Beryl C Curt suffered from congenital acarparality, and so her writing was made possible only through the efforts of a group of devoted amanuenses. So in plain English, Beryl had no body. She was instead brought to life by a group of critical psychologists, mostly associated with the University of Reading and also The Open University. They, and later on we, were responsible for making sure Beryl’s thoughts and critiques were written down and published. Enticed by Beryl I came to the UK to join her and to begin my PhD in the psychology department at the University of Reading under the supervision of Rex Stainton Rogers, one of these aforementioned amanuenses. Others to note, I’m going to do some names now, Wendy Stainton Rogers, Emeritus Professor here at The Open University, Paul Stenner, also at The Open University, Steve Brown, temporarily at The Open University but gone now, Lindsay O’Dell at the OU and others, Nick Lee, Karen Stenner, Kate Leeson, Carol Owens, and importantly, Marcia Worrell who passed away in the early days of Covid lockdown. Marcia was an incredibly special person, as many here will know. She was one of the embarrassingly few black women professors in the UK. She obtained her PhD at the OU and her name is now associated with a FASS award for students from a black, Asian and minoritised ethnicity background. So now as a small aside I’d just like to say a few about this group of people who have been absolutely fundamental to my work and my sense of belonging from the earliest days when I arrived in the UK. Beryl’s critical approach to sense-making and importantly to the role of theory and methodology in this sense-making has informed every single project I have been involved with since. My supervisor Rex tragically passed away just as I was writing up my PhD but his ability to guide without directing was one valued by his former students. Most of us have endeavoured to replicate that process with varying levels of success, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

With the level of generosity I’m not sure I appreciated at the time, Erica Burman because my supervisor for the last final stage of my thesis. I learned an enormous amount from Erica during that period that has strongly impacted the work I have done since. Like Rex, Erica also led a group of critical scholars, the Discourse Unit, which she had founded with Ian Parker, based in Manchester. The Discourse Unit describes itself as ‘A trans-intuitional collaborative centre which supports a variety of qualitative and theoretical research projects contributing to the development of radical theory and practice’. In retrospect, I was extremely fortunate to find myself with these two networks, and what I believe to be two of the best supervisors I've ever come across. So these two networks that took critical and for the most part discursive approaches to psychology became the environment in which my PhD research developed.

As I alluded to earlier, my PhD project drew on the idea that while instances of women's involvement in politics are prevalent, both historically and cross-culturally in fact and in fiction, as far back as Aristophanes ‘Lysistrata’, we have accounts of women intervening in politics, most memorably as leaders, Cleopatra, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen Elizabeth the First, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meier, Margaret Thatcher, Benazir Bhutto, Corazon Aquino, and Angela Merkel, to name but a few. On a more grassroots level, women were prominent actors in the Spanish Civil War, as I noted earlier, in the anti-slavery movement in the 19th century, and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s in the US, in the Greenham Common protests in the United Kingdom, in the worldwide movement of Women in Black against war, the Zapatistas in Chiapas in Mexico, and also less visibly in the current violence taking place in Gaza and Israel.

However, as we know, the involvement of some women in political life has not always produced greater access to political power for women in everyday life. So my focus was on political activism in everyday life, to look at the co-construction of gender and political identities. So drawing on the work of Erica Berman, Judith Butler, Beryl Curt, Donna Haraway, Henriques, Hollway, Irwin, Venn and Walkerdine, Ian Parker, Jonathan Potter, Margaret Wetherell, also from the OU, to name but a few. My focus was on a theorisation of identity that prioritised contexts and relationships, rather than the production or categorisation of stable variables. So rather than looking for who people really are, I attended to what became recognised as a legitimate identity. So what was it that people recognised as such?

I focused on three movements that were not explicitly gender-related, as I said, so the environmental road protest. It was the Newbury bypass at the time, some time ago. Irish republicanism, it was just before the Good Friday Agreement was signed, and the pro-fox hunting lobby which was a big thing at the time with the Countryside Alliance organisation. I collected data primarily through published texts, in situ interviews, and a key methodology study around environmental activism. I analysed these thematically, discursively and narratively.

I probably shouldn't have been surprised, but the data was dominated by discourses of motherhood. Mothers as a gender identity and activist as a political identity were brought together in several ways, which included motherhood as in conflict with political involvement. So “I can't go fight because I have childcare.” Motherhood as an explanation for political involvement, “I don't have kids so I can go fight” or “I must go fight for the sake of my children”, or motherhood as a political identity.

So I'm just going to talk a little bit about that. Because interestingly what I found in my data was that the idea of motherhood as political identity was not just for women. In one interview with women involved in the Irish Republican movement, a participant argued, I'm so not going to do an Irish accent, so I apologise for that. “I would advocate really strongly that men are missing out. Those men who do not take on a share of some responsibility for the basic fundamental family unit... They don't have those basic insights and concerns and responsibilities, and that's, that’s a very fundamental sort of error that's going on in our society… So I would say that men not taking responsibility for the childcare issues… It's very sad. Unfortunately, they are the losers. They are losing out.”

So this extract may appear to indicate that the participant is arguing that mothers have some kind of special contribution. You know, you can’t hug kids with nuclear arms and slogans like. However, I would posit that the point is broader than that. It's not only that mothers should be involved in politics, but that the men involved in politics should be ‘mothers’ in a sense.

They need to share the concerns and feelings that the participant associates with motherhood. Not taking responsibility for childcare leads to a lack of basic insights and concerns and responsibilities. It's not that involvement in childcare is in conflict with or an explanation for political involvement, but rather that it's necessary to it. The construction of these two identities is separate. The participant sees it as a very fundamental sort of error that's going on in our society. So in the thesis I argued that we can reach a more useful understanding if we do not address identities as fixed or pre-existing, but rather as a shifting of multi determined products. Specifically, I suggested that a productive way forward for understanding the relationship between gender and politics could be the tracing of identities, how they come into relation with each other, and with their context to become stable, recognisable, and so legitimate. How do these identities resist, or how are they resisted by certain elements? I argued that this was not a question of looking for clearly separate and incommensurable identities, variables that are understood as stable as I said, but rather how these are kind of woven through each other. I guess what I've taken away from it is that this weaving that orders relations of power as a result also orders relations of gender.

My work around the production of gender through power brought me into another scholarly network. This time the Psychology of Women and Equality section, or the Psychology of Women section as it was then known, of the British Psychological Society, which had been recommended to me by Erica Berman who was at the time not yet my supervisor. POWES became very much my intellectual home, and it's to that conference that I return year after year, present my work, have my ideas challenged, introduce my PhD students, see friends, design new research projects, and have a lot of fun, all at the same time. For me, POWES is a space of radical intellectual engagement, and I'll come back to that in a bit. So my teaching and my research have always fed into each other. I know it's a bit simplistic, but they're kind of both about learning. So a feminist approach to psychology has been an important pillar in that relationship. The way feminists have made sense of psychology and the importance of history to this process has informed much of my work and publications, both those for peers and colleagues, but also those for students.

This has informed my co-editorship with Sarah Riley and Hannah Frith in the Feminist Companions to Psychology book series. Hannah and I, as well as editing the series authored the Feminist Companion to Research Methods in Psychology as Adrienne mentioned earlier. We have an upcoming volume on developmental psychology that's being authored by Charlie Dann and Lindsay O'Dell. The first volume A Feminist Companion to Social Psychology by Maddie Pownall and Wendy Stainton Rogers has just won the BPS Book Award, which we're very proud of. The third one, A Feminist Companion to Conceptual and Historical Issues in Psychology by Katherine Hubbard and Peter Hegarty will be published very soon.

Now I go to the work that I've been doing with Katherine Hubbard who did that, because CHIP is really, really close to my heart and so is history. So I met Katherine when we needed a consultant for a CHIP project on one of our modules about 10 years ago. I really wanted to talk about that CHIP project, but there is no time. Since then, Katherine and I, with Lois Donnelly, have been bringing together our interest in feminist psychology and conceptual and historical issues, exploring experiences of POWES and feminist activism in psychology, primarily in the UK. We first started talking about this in 2017, which was the 30th anniversary of POWES. As Ros Gill has pointed out, despite a wealth of work on reflexivity, the actual everyday experiences of academics have largely gone without critical attention until very recently. So we knew that the POWES journal was collecting reflections from past Chairs and founding members and we thought it would be interesting to collect some data about peoples just everyday experience of POWES and how they felt about it. I think you may have noticed there's a theme here, I am quite interested in the relevance of the everyday, sometimes actually, even in the mundane. I really want to stress one thing, how much the three of us worked on this very much together. So this is not something I've done on my own.

The research was fascinating in so many ways. We've published our findings about that. We've very much attempted to embed all that into the existing feminist literature. So we've argued with Sara Ahmed in her wonderful book, ‘Living a Feminist Life’, that, “Citation is feminist memory. Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from paths we were told to follow.” A couple of key take aways have particularly stuck with me from that study. So one is about the importance of having an academic home and community, a sense of belonging. For activists in academia having a place where you can go to where the world's a bit safer, and having a space that values equity and collaboration can have value beyond the immediate.

At the same time, we found maybe a more surprising pattern in our data. So we were interviewing members of a deliberately supportive feminist community that attempts to actively resist gendered approaches within academia. Yet our participants continued to measure the community against a highly masculinised, adversarial academic tradition, a kind of counterpoint approach, the notion that clever ideas need to be tested through this kind of gladiatorial style engagement where sides battle their way to epistemological domination. So that's a bit of an exaggeration, but basically that's the idea that comes across. There was a recurring concern across a number of interviews that the nurturing environment of POWES may be making it all too comfortable. So the word ‘nice’ was one of the most common descriptors in our interviews. It was used 67 times, and often it was used as a concern. So one participant, “I worry a little bit that it's got too nice, if that makes any sense.” Or “Umm, there's part of me that feels that maybe it's slightly too cosy.” and this quote, “I mean this in the nicest possible way, but it's a little bit too nice. It's very, very, very safe and I'm not sure if that potentially damages our academic credibility.”

So this discourse which we called ‘Too nice to be smart’ was always drawn on tentatively, almost apologetically. The construction of these dichotomies is interesting, perhaps especially in a feminist community, as they mirror conceptualisations of academic prestige which are often gendered along multiple axes, but primarily because they present traditional adversarial approaches as somehow more rigorous. Our data includes many examples of the value of reflexive approaches to knowledge production. As we know, both debate and reflection have long and respected traditions within the history of knowledge production. They also resonate strongly with long-standing and commonly gendered conceptual dichotomies, such as active passive, with women commonly assigned to the latter. My point would be that one of the critical differences between adversarial and reflexive knowledge production is the difference in how they engage power. Getting a better understanding of how these competing epistemologies play out in academia, and how gender and power are enrolled in them is a question that I continue to explore. Most recently, I'm going to confess, in relation to the Barbie movie, but that's for another day.

To return to the project, once it was complete Katherine, Lois and I thought, “Well, we really enjoyed doing that, but really, should we be doing more than just writing academic papers?” They're great, but you know, so that kicked off our history of feminist psychology in the UK project, which was funded by POWES and the BPS, with some help from The Open Psychology Research Centre, I must acknowledge OPRC. It was an archival and oral history project which we completed in partnership with the BPS History of Psychology Centre, and the online oral history website, Psychology’s Feminist Voices.

We've been working with Psychology’s Feminist Voices for some time. It's a fantastic resource and I would recommend anyone with an interest in psychology, history, feminism, academia, activism, to have a look. Last week we were able to launch our virtual interactive exhibit based on the project. It's entitled ‘Lasting Legacies and Feminist Futures’. Go have a look, it's quite nice actually. The exhibit draws on the oral histories and archival material we collected to explore the entrance of feminism into psychology, hear about the history of POWES and provide some advice for future feminist psychologists. The beauty of this exhibit is that because it's online it's accessible for anyone with an internet-enabled device and a data signal, which I know is not everyone.

That takes me to the third context for my research, which is the online environment and specifically gender in digital spaces. So the online environment has provided step change for feminism by allowing new ways of doing politics and in particular activism, and so of accessing power. It has contributed to a growth in feminism and a backlash against feminism. Social media in particular has been widely implicated in the rise, if not the production of problematic issues, fake news, trolling, cyberbullying, narcissism, lots of other problematic practices, yet social media has also become an integral part of our everyday lives. Importantly, our everyday lives have become embedded in social media in many ways.

Our research in social media encompasses a number of projects. I'll obviously only talk about a few here. I’ve been carrying out this research over the past decade or so with my colleague, partner in crime, Lisa Lazard. Here's a selfie of us with a silly filter. This is where it all started with the selfie sometime in 2013 with our first project, Picture Perfect.

So as early as 2008 Sonia Livingstone was suggesting that, “It seems that for many creating and networking online content is becoming an integral means of managing one's identity, lifestyle and social relations.” She foresaw the future really well. What we wanted to explore was what young women were doing when they were taking, editing and posting selfies. The media, and frequently academia actually, had already deemed these young women as narcissistic, superficial, inauthentic, desperate for attention. They were being trivialised and pathologised even, and maybe even particularly, in the psychological literature.

Some consideration needs to be given to how we make sense of young women more generally. There is very little value allotted to their priorities and their choices. Young women are criticised for what they wear, what they don't wear, how they do their makeup, what they eat, what they don't eat, what books they read, what shows and films they watch, what music they listen to, how they speak. There’s very little they can do to get it right. Most recently we've seen the aggression directed, mostly by middle-aged men, at young women like Malala and Greta Thunberg, who have attempted to access political power and influence.

So feminist research in social psychology has told us that women are encouraged in many ways to view themselves from an outsider's perspective, to produce themselves in line with normative beauty standards, and to understand themselves as part of an ongoing ‘betterment’ project. All of these, of course, shaped by parameters of social acceptability.

So there's an element of judgment here always. It is worth noting that the literature in this area asks questions that tend to polarise the functions of social media, either as a space for new, empowered and autonomous meanings for girl and womanhood, “We're going to take over the world in social media”, or alternatively as this site of surveillance, putting pressure on girls and women to reproduce feminine identities in markedly narrow ways.

In endeavouring to move away from these polarisations, what we wanted to know was what they were doing when they Snap and share. In light of this context, the focus of our research became the ways in which women and girls were using the technologies of social media to tell the story of who they are, to control and curate their identity both on and offline. We used a number of methods. In our research we did interviews, we did focus groups, we used key methodology, a favourite of ours. They all told us something. But Lisa and I were looking for a method that gave us more context, which was less of a snapshot. We needed something slightly different.

So for this, we drew on Aaron Hess’s notion of the selfie assemblage. For Hess a selfie is constituted through at least four overlapping elements. So self, place, device, and network. From this starting point, based partly on both photo elicitation interviews and also story completion methodology, we developed what we refer to as Processual Selfie Completion. We asked our participants to talk us through the production and audiencing of a selfie in situ, to allow for discussion based in their practice. So a focus on the everyday again, what we were interested in was the procedure itself, the order and the timing of each step and the discussion from beginning to end. This allowed us a unique insight into the process, as well as the production of the selfie. So as an example I'm going to show you a short video, a short clip, typical of the data that we saw.

[video]

“So if you were going to take a selfie now, looking your lovely, beautiful self, what would be the first thing you would do?

The first thing I would do is I would just get my phone camera up. I could use the camera app, or I've actually got a range of other photo apps that add different filters and effects, you've got the little Snapchat filters as well. I can use any one of those, but as I say, I might just decide to use my camera. Then I would hold it up, get the right angle, so that I've got the light going directly onto my face so there aren't any inconsistencies visible on the skin or any shadows across my face. Just move around a bit and try and find the best spot, don’t look too shiny. Sort hair out, have a little bit in front, a little bit behind. Take a couple of photos just pulling different faces. So smiling, smiling with teeth, probably do a couple with flash, or tongue out, whatever. Go back to the photos, look at them and see if there's anything I don't like. I've noticed that I'm a bit too far to the side in this photo so I'm going to change that so I am in the middle. Just continue doing this and looking back and going “Okay, what do I need to do now?” until I’ve probably got far too many of them, and then just sort through them and edit them.”

Our research told us really clearly that we needed to be attending to more than the social media good/bad dichotomy. There was so much more going on than the simple dichotomy allows. When we looked at what young women were doing when they posted selfies we found considerable evidence that they were doing much more than simply being narcissistic or superficial. Their technical know-how was impressive, their impression management skills outstanding. They were carefully curating their identity, communicating their values and endeavouring to build communities in what is effectively, as I mentioned earlier, a context that continues to problematise them both on and offline, a very uncomfortable environment for young women, unfortunately.

For us, processual selfie completion made visible the interplay between photo sharing, representations of the self and image, of gender and generation within a broader relational analysis. What we found was that the ways in which these young women were engaging serve to both resist and reinscribe existing hegemonic and patriarchal power structures. It was complex. It was nuanced, and for us, it was deserving of serious feminist attention.

To summarise our findings, we argued that while online life may show us at our best, how women feel about this is much more complex than simply being narcissistic or inauthentic. As simple as a selfie might seem, we need to acknowledge that how they are being used and understood can tell us about the complex and nuanced social worlds in which young women go about their everyday lives.

In doing that, working with women in this research primarily, we found colleagues who shared an interest in similar questions, primarily around POWES. So with Charlie Dann, Abi Locke and Sandra Roper, Lisa and I set up the Networking Families Research Group. As a team we further explored the experiences of women in digital spaces. We started by building on a study initiated by Lisa on digital mothering. Focusing on many of the same processes we’d identified in young women’s posting, we looked at how mothers were similarly being positioned in their own posting. This led to our work around families, and how online sharing played out in those relationships. This included looking at the phenomenon of ‘sharenting’. For those who are not familiar with the term ‘sharenting’, it is defined as ‘the habitual use of social media to share news, images etc, of one’s children’ and that's not in a nice way. It's a very pejorative term. We made a lovely BBC Ideas film on this a couple of years ago, if anyone is interested, I don't have rights to show it.

I want to talk briefly about our work around ‘sharenting’, digital parenting, and children's experiences of their parents sharing, before moving on to introduce the two projects that Lisa and I are now working on. So the first project was on digital mothering. It involved photo elicitation interviews with mothers about how and why they posted about their children and families. So we worked with similar questions about curation and identity that we had with the young women. Across three data collection points, two of which took place during Covid, we asked mothers to talk us through a set of photos that they identified as meaningful in relation to their parenting. We also asked them about their experiences of looking at other people's images. Funnily enough, much of the experiential research around social media just fails to look at audiencing, even though most of the time we spend on social media isn't posting, it's actually looking at other people's posts. Most of the research seems to not include that. So we did ask about that and we've asked about that in all our projects which is interesting in itself.

The lockdown that took place in the early days of the Covid pandemic was a particularly fascinating time for this study as mothers were put under enormous amounts of pressure to perform mothering and caring more intensely in that period of social turbulence. Research identified almost immediately that working mothers did not get more done when they were at home. That actually working from home didn't make life easier which earlier had seemed to be a thing that people believed. When homeschooling came into play, it became really, really clear that the homeschooling was being done mostly by mothers and not by fathers. What we found in our research is that mothers were subject to competing emotional and practical demands which required careful negotiation. They're expected to devote a disproportionate amount of their time and labour, be it emotional, practical, financial, to guaranteeing that their children not only thrive, but excel in relation to their peers. They must be self-sacrificial, and child centred. Furthermore, parents, but particularly mothers, are expected to invest in the success of their children, and so are required to publicly enact responsibility and care. So here's where social media comes in. Because the online environment provides a space where this enactment can take place, the traditional kind of keeping practices of mothers that historically kept photo albums of families and could bring out pictures of whatever had happened in the past, has moved into cyberspace. So our data was incredibly rich and some of the people who were involved in that study are here. We're still delving into the depths of that data. But I'm limited in what I can say.

I'm going to just briefly mention three themes that were prominent in our data around the first Covid lockdown. They were constructions of the ‘good’ mothers, the ‘good’ teacher and the ‘good’ citizen. So in their posts and their narratives, mothers endeavoured to both enact and trouble all three of these valued identities. They posted pictures of happy families, children doing their homework diligently with mum looking on. There are also many posts and discourses which produced the women as good citizens with images of children painting rainbows for their windows, or these images of ‘clap for carers’ events, which I am so guilty of, as my children know, I posted them every week.

Mothers who felt they were not quite keeping up with the impossible demands could post images to repair this troubled identity by showing they were successfully performing good mothering or good teacher or good citizen identities. Needless to say mothers also talked about mothering fails, calling into question the demands of always being good. They would sometimes post pictures that exemplified stereotypically bad mothering in a humorous way, and displaying what sometimes has been referred to as the ‘slummy mummy’. In general, our analysis evidenced that social media was used as a place where mothers could trouble, but also importantly, they could repair mothering identities.

So having explored mother’s experiences of their posting about families, we started wondering how their children might feel about this. We all feel sorry for those kids whose parents are constantly posting pictures about them, don't we? We were lucky enough to get some funding from eNurture, a UKRI ESRC network, which aim to foster new collaborations to promote children and young people's mental health in a digital world. Their support is gratefully acknowledged. We worked with a non-HE partner, ParentZone, and the Networking Families team that I mentioned earlier. Our research question was - How do young people make sense of their parents and caregivers online sharing? Lisa and I made a short animation, like we just made it ourselves with the help of our children, so thank you to Aria and Jess for their help. So rather than me talking you through it, I'm going to play that animation now.

[Animation]

“Supporting children's mental health through familial online relationships explores children's experiences of their parents’ use of social media. When we think about social media, we often think about how young people use it, and what they post. There has been a lot of worry and concern about how young people use the internet, about screentime and the risks and dangers in what they post about themselves. But young people are not the only ones that post about their lives on social media. Adults and especially parents post about young people too. But how do young people feel about this?

We know that everyday family relationships and interactions are important for children and young people, and for supporting their development and mental health. Since lots of family interactions are now happening on social media, we designed a study about how young people make sense of their parents and caregivers posting.

As this was during the Covid-19 lockdowns, we conducted the interviews online. We interviewed five families with children, and the children were between 13 and 17 years old. In total we conducted 21 interviews.

We spoke with them together about their experiences of family posts. We then talked with each member of the family about their own postings to see if they had anything else to share about any of the points for the family interviews.

We asked all of our participants to bring along posts that told us a bit about their families. So what did they talk about? Some of the main issues that seemed to come up in our discussions were about the platform being used, the age of the posts, how sensitive the parents were to the children's concerns, and the child-parent relationship.

Interestingly embarrassing photos of them as a child were fine with the young people, even when the relationship with their parents was a bit tricky. However, they were much less comfortable with recent photos. This changeover usually happened when the young people went through a transitional moment, for example, when they started secondary school or turned 13.

What platforms parents used also made a difference. Posts on Facebook and WhatsApp were more acceptable. Facebook because as the young people said, “it's for old people” and WhatsApp because it's more private and usually only seen by family and adult friends.

Parental posts on Instagram however were not okay as young people worried it would be embarrassing if their friends or classmates saw them. There is general agreement that parents should not be on Snapchat.

At some point as they get older, young people become concerned about their privacy and having a say as to what their parents might post about them. In families where there was a high level of trust this permission was assumed as young people were confident that their parents would post appropriately. They knew that their parents would ask permission to post if they weren't sure or they could talk to them about taking posts down if they felt uncomfortable.

In families where there was a lack of trust however, parents took photos of their children and posted them without permission, even when the young person had explicitly said they did not want them to. Young people were upset and annoyed when this happened to them. All of the young people were annoyed when this happened to their friends.

Our overall findings suggest that there is a point at which social media becomes a space that isn't just for adults but also for young people. How they feel about this has a lot to do with how they relate to and are positioned within the family. So while there has been a lot of talk about how young people use social media, it's really important that we pay attention to how the adults around them engage with and support them online. Our research indicated that this support relied on trusting familial relationships that acknowledged young people's space and expanding autonomy.”

Rose: So that's the research we we're doing. We got a letter published in The Guardian a couple of weeks ago which we're very excited about. Thank you Beth Hawking, our lovely FASS Comms colleague. But the main takeaway for us is that parental social media practices that take children's permission seriously and respect their space can reflect and importantly contribute to trusting family relationships. When this is the case, kids can be quite happy about a parental display of pride. That trust and respect is crucial though. We did some more work around building these online relationships actually with grandparents as well as parents, but again there's no time for that here. So due to the Covid lockdowns our research on families in digital spaces took place almost exclusively online.

So as I’ve mentioned, the Covid lockdown saw the unprecedented blending of home and family with working lives for many. So we became interested in the affordances of video conferencing software and I'm defining affordances far far too simply here, as what you can do with the tech and how it might shape behaviour in particular gendered behaviour. More widely the rise in video conferencing at work also saw growing public concerns around the use of platforms in general and gendered behaviour specifically.

Lisa and I started up the Gender Equitable Interactions Online project, GEIO, as we refer to it, and thanks to Sarah Crafter for that acronym, is funded by the European funding body CHANSE, which is a Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe. So we're also grateful to them. It is a consortium project so working with both academic and corporate partners in Iceland, in Spain and in Germany. So specifically in Iceland, we had Annadis Rúdólfsdóttir, Gyða Pétursdóttir̰ and Katrin Ólafsdóttir. In Spain, Adriana Gil-Juárez, Barbara Biglia, Sara Cagliero, Marta Castillo and Julia Nuño, and in Germany, Irmgard Tischner and Antonia Heil. Here in the UK, Lisa and I have been working with Alison Davies and Simone Arthur. The team brings expertise in gendered interactional dynamics in organisations and online in each specific country. What we’re hoping is it will allow us to build up transnational evidence across those. Together we're investigating the role of gender in online group meetings at work. We're specifically interested in how gendered intersectionally shaped power dynamics play out through meetings on video conferencing platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams. So we have a set of three studies that are building one on the other to bring that together.

So now I'm coming close to the end, I just want to say a few words about our most recent project which launches in the autumn. So Lisa and I have been fortunate enough to be part of a team led by Professor Olga Jurasz from FBL. We successfully bid for grant from Research England. This funding is going to allow us to build a centre around preventing online violence against women and girls. The new exciting project brings together many of the threads, bits of yarn, that are woven through my research, so the work around equity, the representation of women and girls, and the importance of the online environment. I think we're all quite excited about it.

So all the work I've done has been collective and collaborative, in line with the earlier discussion about my preference for knowledge production as reflexive and relational rather than adversarial. I'm aware that in this talk there have been times when it's just sounded like I'm listing off names, but there are so many more that I should have, could have mentioned, and to whom I'm incredibly grateful. I genuinely wouldn't want to work any other way. It’s in this collective labour to identify, make sense of, and improve situations of inequity that I find so rewarding in the current academic context, which is troubled in many, many ways.

So I want to return to a quote I briefly mentioned earlier in the talk from Lynne Segal, in her brilliant book, Radical Happiness: Moments of Collective Joy, where she says, “Those participating in resistance to or a process of collective deliberations on the harms of the present, sometimes trying to build alternatives, often do find in these strategies sources of fulfilment, resilience, even moments of shared joy.” So to bring the talk to a close, I would say that if women's activism, the history of psychology, and our current efforts to make sense of gender in online environments has taught us anything, it's that we need to demand better to aspire to Lynne Segal’s radical happiness. We have a whole history of troubles and struggles to evidence the fact that we have the capacity to create spaces that are equitable that are collaborative, and that are constructive and these spaces are where I hope that my research might make a contribution. Thank you.

Adrienne: Thank you Rose. Thank you colleagues. I think one important thing that an inaugural lecture can do is explain trajectory, motivation and commitment. I think that's been really clear in what you've shared with us tonight. Colleagues, we're now going to move into an opportunity to have a little bit more of a conversation. So as you gather your thoughts, gather your questions, Rose and I will move over to the ‘One Show’ part of the evening.

Colleagues in the room, it'd be really helpful if you have a question put your hand up and wait for the microphone to come to you. If you could say hello, who you are and ask your question. Colleagues online please use the email that is on the screen and we have a colleague monitoring that.

Arosha Bandara: Hi good evening. I'm Arosha Bandara, Professor of Software Engineering here at The Open University. Rose, a really brilliant talk, really nice to see how all those threads of yarn made the tapestry that you created at the end. So thank you for that talk. My question builds on something you pointed towards towards the end in the Zoom online meeting space. But I was wondering whether in your earlier work when you were looking at the selfies and the familials use of social media, whether there were other hints or things that you picked up that could inform the technologists who are building these platforms and technologies, in terms of how they minimise harms and promote good experiences for people, particularly for women and girls.

Rose: Yes, so very much that's been part of the research. I didn’t talk about that because I'm not the person who does the tech. So that's been always a part from the very beginning, our research is meant to be able to apply to guidelines and the affordances of tech is something we really looked at, what is the tech allowing you to do. So there was something about, for instance, when the Instagram filters came out and they were all kind of beautification filters, they were slightly distorting. Then Snapchat came with their funny filters and that allowed a whole different discourse online. So it became about humour, it became about doing something quite different. So those kinds of affordances can make a big difference. So, that's something we look at very, very carefully and we're looking at it in the GEIO project as well.

Adrienne: Rose, in the middle part of your talk tonight you talked about self-reflexive questioning of the academic community POWES, and really reflecting on what it was to be an academic woman. I wondered, how do you want your new role, your new job, as a Professor of Psychology to impact on your discipline, to impact on your academic home?

Rose: Claire and I have worked very hard to make the job that we do about supporting precisely that kind of work, and we say it all the time don't we, we support research in an equitable and sustainable manner. That's what we want to do. We want to support that, to build those communities to allow people to do that work in a way that is fair, and a way that we can keep doing it.

Eleni Andreouli: Thank you Rose. That was inspirational actually, I am Eleni Andreouli in the same school as Rose, and there’s quite a few of us are here at the OU. Thank you so much, that was inspirational and that comes from me, and I know quite a bit about your work. But this gave me a nice overview and something to keep hold of for the next few years I suppose. So I think partly why I thought this was inspirational is the way that you talk about your academic trajectory, your professional trajectory and your intellectual contributions, and it feels like that has gone alongside personal self-development, relationships around you. I wonder how you can do that, I mean not you personally, how can one do that given that the two roles are very often conflicting. Obviously we are taught that what you do at home and what you do at work are very different things. So I wonder how you can make it work in a way that is productive, constructive, and recognisable by others in your field, which obviously you are a very well recognised scholar and I wonder is there a trick or a tip?

Rose: It's really interesting because the kind of things you’re saying is very much the thing that came up in my original research in my PhD with these women who were activists, some of them were very involved in politics. The Newbury bypass protests, they were literally living like in the way. They had their children there, they had everything there and talking about that different way that you tell that story and it's about the way you can narrate your life isn't it? If you can't narrate it in the way that you want to it can be immensely frustrating. So I think facilitating those narratives, creating those narratives, that's why I find Q really fascinating, it allows you to look at different narratives, making visible the narratives that allow that, that allow those lives that require less friction by the way you tell the story I think are what we want to promote and identify first and then promote, if we can.

Adrienne: I guess one of the things that in the current context is the challenge around cost of living. I wonder how that's playing on to a digital deficit and how that's cut. Is it cut in terms of gender? Is it cut in terms of class? Is there a geographical divide around about that? How does that economic access to the tools that you're talking about impact in a gendered perspective?

Rose: So I think it's interesting you say that because I think what happens a bit when you have the cost of living crisis, I don't think takes people away from that technology. I think it brings them to that technology. So I remember someone saying, I know this is slightly tangential, but I remember someone saying years ago, ‘Oh look at these refugees from somewhere, they've all got iPhones.’ I think, well if I was running away from somewhere the first thing I would take was my iPhone, like that's the thing I would take. So I think the cost of living maybe it's driven people more into that kind of connections, for good or ill.

Adrienne: Rose thank you. Colleagues we'll say a little more thank you to Rose in a second, but our next inaugural lecture will be by one of Rose’s colleagues that we heard a little bit about earlier on, Olga Jurasz. She is our new Professor of Law. Her inaugural lecture will be on the title, ‘Violence, women and the law’ on Thursday, 9^th May at 1pm. There's lots more information about that on The Open University Research website, and friends and colleagues, in this trailer.

[video]

“We know that the topic of violence is not alien to women, and neither are their encounters with the law. But how has the law dealt with violence against women? Has it contributed to the issue rather than resolving it? In my inaugural lecture I will explore this uneasy relationship between violence, law and women's lives. I will discuss this across three themes. Firstly, conflict-related sexual violence. Secondly, online and digital violence against women, and thirdly, the impact that withdrawal of certain rights and laws has on women's lives and the violence they are subjected to as a result.

Join me to have your say.”

Adrienne: So colleagues you can attend that on Thursday 9^th May at 1pm here and online.

Thank you for now for joining us today to celebrate the work of Professor Capdevila. Thank you Rose for your lecture and good luck in the next phase of your scholarly career. Friends and colleagues do help us improve these events by providing some feedback on the form that we'll send you in the next short while. Friends online, I'll say good evening to you now. Friends in the auditorium please join us downstairs to toast Rose and to celebrate her new job as Professor of Psychology at The Open University. Good night.