Professor Rose Capdevila

Professional biography

My current research focus is on gender in digital spaces.  This includes research from how young women make sense of themselves and curate their identity online through the use of selfies to mothering on and offline and practices such as ‘sharenting’.  I take a intersectional feminist approach to my research with a theoretical focus on the construction and transgression of discursive boundaries around identity - in particular political and gender identities. Moreover, I am interested in the role and politics of methodology in psychology and how these impact on minoritary groups.

I am currently involved in four conceptually related projects.

• GEiO - Gender Equitable Interactions Online is a European Union funded (CHANSE/ESRC) project with Germany, Iceland and Spain looking at the use of videoconferencing. (CoI)
• Supporting children’s mental health through familial online relationships funded by eNurture/ESRC looked at how children make sense of their parents/carers social media use. (PI)
• Networking Families Research Group takes a critical psychological perspective to examining the phenomenon of social media practices through the lens of gender and relationships.  http://fass.open.ac.uk/research/groups/networking-families
• Intergenerational familial relationships: Playing digitally across distance with partner FUNdamentally Children.

I am also involved in a longer term project around the History of Feminist Psychology in the UK with Katherine Hubbard (Surrey) and Lois Donnelly (Worcester) and the team from Psychology's Feminist Voices that has been funded by the BPS. 

Selected Publications

Zurbriggen, E.L. & Capdevila, R. (eds.) (2023). Palgrave Handbook of Power, Gender, & Psychology. Palgrave/Springer.

Lazard, L., Capdevila, R., & Turner, J. (2023). Calling it out? A Q Methodological Study of Sexual Harassment Labelling. Violence Against Women, 0(0). Online first.

Frith, H., & Capdevila, R. (2022). A Feminist Companion to Research Methods in Psychology. McGraw-Hill Education.

Capdevila, R., Dann, C., Lazard, L., Roper, S., & Locke, A. (2022). # mothersday: Constructions of motherhood and femininity in social media posts. Feminism & Psychology, 32(3), 336-356.

Donnelly, L., Hubbard, K. & Capdevila, R. (2022). POWES is pronounced “feminist”: Negotiating academic and activist boundaries in the talk of UK feminist psychologists. Feminism & Psychology.

Locke, A., Capdevila, R., & Lazard, L. (2022). Digital families: Gendered relationships in online spaces. Feminism & Psychology, 32(3), 310-317.

Capdevila, R. & Lazard, L. (2021). The big picture: Using visual methods to explore online photo sharing and gender in digital space. In: Reavey P (ed) A Handbook of Visual Methods in Psychology. London: Routledge.

Lazard, L. & Capdevila, R. (2021). She’s so vain? A Q Study of Selfies and the curation of an online self. New Media & Society

Roper, S. & Capdevila, R. (2020). Hapless, helpless, hopeless: An analysis of stepmothers’ talk about their (male) partners. Feminism & Psychology. 30(2)

Lazard, L., Capdevila, R., Dann, C., Locke, A. & Roper, A. (2019). Sharenting: Pride, affect and the day-to-day politics of digital mothering. Social & Personal Psychology Compass; e12443. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12443

Capdevila, R., Hubbard, K. & Donnelly, L. (2019). Standing still whilst ‘looking back and moving forwards’: the personal accounts of POWS members in the here and now.  Psychology of Women & Equalities Section Review

Stenner, P., & Capdevila, R. (2019). Q methodology. SAGE Research Methods Foundations

Capdevila, R. (2015). Negotiating health, mothering and ‘choice’.  Psicologia della Salute, 1: 9-29.

Roper, S., Capdevila, R., Lazard, L. & Roberts, A. (2015). How is this feminist again? Q as a feminist methodology. Psychology of Women Section Review, 17: 3-12

Capdevila, R. & Lazard, L. (2015). Psychology of Women. In Parker, I. (ed) Handbook of Critical Psychology. London: Routledge.

Johnson, S. & Capdevila, R. (2014). That’s just what’s expected of you … so you do it’: Mothers discussions around choice and the MMR vaccination. Psychology & Health. Online first, 1-16.

Rutherford, A., Capdevila, R., Undurti, V. & Palmary, I. (2011). (eds.) Handbook of International Perspectives on Feminism. Book Series: International and Cultural Psychology. New York: Springer.

Lazard, L., Capdevila, R. & Roberts, A. (2011). Methodological pluralism in theory and in practice: the case for Q in the community. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 8(2), 140-150.

Articles in The Conversation 

Capdevila, R. & Lazard, L. (15 June 2022) Board games: how playing them online can bring grandparents and grandchildren closer together. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/uk

Lazard, L., Capdevila, R., Dann, C., Locke, A. & Roper, S. (9 March, 2018) Sharenting: why mothers post about their children on social media. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/uk

Capdevila, R. & Lazard, L. (12 April, 2017) Selfie culture isn’t the root of all evil. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/uk

Capdevila, R. & Lazard, L. (7 March, 2017) International Women’s Day: yes, we still need to protest this shit. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/uk

For full listing a repository of research publications and other research outputs can be viewed at The Open University's Open Research Online.

I was chair for DE100 Investigating Psychology 1  from 2019 to 2021 and for DE200 Investigating Psychology 2 from 2015 to 2018. These are the first two of three core modules for the Psychology qualification and two of the largest modules at the OU.  I was also production co-chair for DE200 (2013-2015) for which I produced an open access online resource that maps the history of psychology through people, contexts, perspectives and methods. You can access the resource at open.edu/openlearn/chip

Media

• Supporting children’s mental health through familial online relationships with our partner Parent Zone. This talk is from the eNurture Showcse for funded research projects
• Playing across generations This short film reports the results from a study into online family relationships conducted by The Open University with Fundamentally Children. 
• Are you sharing too much online? (BBC Ideas, 2020) – academic consultant & contributor. This short film explores the impact of parental online sharing of their children’s images and activities and had 30,000 views in the first month
• Social Influencers (Inside out, 2019) – interviewee. This episode investigated the impact of being a social media influencer
• Selfies are not the root of all evil (OpenLearn, June 2018) – academic consultant & contributor.  his OU production examined the ‘selfie’ phenomenon and was based on my research on young women’s use of social media to curate their online identity.
• Digital mothering (Student Hub live, 2018) – interviewee. A panel discussion of digital mothering in which I participated with two colleagues as part of the successful Student Hub live series.

Public engagment

        Research based Interactive displays as part of the award-winning OU 50^th Anniversary celebrations: 

• OpenFest (October 2019)
• TedX (November 2019)

OpenLearn modules

• Are selfies a terrible thing? 
• Investigating Psychology: CHIPs 
• Making sense of ourselves 

International team of Psychology's Feminist Voices

International collaborator of SeGReVUni