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Professor Rose Capdevila

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Profile summary

  • Central Academic Staff
  • Associate Dean (Research)
  • Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences
  • School of Psychology & Counselling
  • Psychology
  • rose.capdevila

Professional biography

I joined the OU in September 2009 after having been a student and/or academic in universities in Canada, Spain and the UK. I completed my first degree in Political Science & Psychology at the University of Toronto in Canada followed by a diploma in Hispanic Studies from the University of Barcelona in Spain. I came to the UK in 1994 to pursue a PhD in Psychology at the University of Reading. My thesis investigated women’s accounts of single-issue social movements. I lectured at the University of Reading and the University of Northampton before coming to the OU. 

My academic work and my engagement with psychology as a discipline are informed by an enduring commitment to social justice which resonates well with the OU mission. My current research focuses on gender in digital spaces. My teaching has been focused on the first two of the core psychology modules offered by the university (DE100 & DE200). I served as Director of Research for the School of Psychology and Counselling from 2016 to 2019 and am currently Associate Dean of Research, Enterprise and Scholarship in the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences.

I have been an active member of a number of professional societies in my discipline, including the British Psychological Society (BPS) which I joined as a postgraduate. From 2020-2021, I was Chair of the Psychology of Women & Equalities Section (POWES). I am a member of the Association of Women in Psychology (AWP), the International Society for Theoretical Psychology (ISTP), the International Society of Political Psychology (ISPP), and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI). I served as co-chair (with Rhoda Unger, Brandeis University, USA) for an American Psychological Association (APA) Division 35 Task force on Feminist and Political Psychology.

I was on the editorial board of the international journal Feminism & Psychology from 2001 to 2021. In 2013, I became co-editor along with Catriona Macleod (Rhodes University, South Africa) and Jeanne Marecek (Swarthmore College, USA). F&P was awarded the Distinguished Leadership Award by The Committee on the Women in Psychology of the APA on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. It recognised the leadership of the editorial team for “encouraging, supporting and showcasing cutting edge transformative feminist theory and research”.

Research interests

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.

Teaching interests

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

Impact and engagement

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 50th Anniversary celebrations: 

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

OpenLearn modules

International team of Psychology's Feminist Voices

International collaborator of SeGReVUni