Meet the Team

Dr Tanya Beetham is a critical feminist psychologist and a counsellor and psychotherapist. She gained her PhD from the University of Stirling in 2020, and her doctoral research used a feminist narrative methodology to explore young women’s transitions to young adulthood after experiencing domestic abuse in childhood. Tanya currently works at Teesside University.

Broadly, her research is centred around trauma, social justice, inequalities, and mental health/wellbeing. Tanya has been involved in domestic abuse research since 2013, and is particularly interested in childhood experiences of domestic abuse, and reflexive feminist methodologies that centre survivor voices and stories. Tanya has published in this area, and is pleased to be currently working on publications from her doctoral research.

In practice, Tanya works primarily with people who have experienced trauma, and she integrates a feminist intersectional approach to working with people in psychotherapy, counselling, and trauma-informed yoga.

Lois Donnelly is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Worcester, on the subject of the use of special measures to protect victims/survivors of intimate partner abuse in Family Courts in England and Wales.

She completed her BSc in Psychology and MSc in Social Psychology at the University of Kent. Her undergraduate dissertation on street harassment and self-objectification was published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, and she has since published in the areas of intersex and gender activism. Her special areas of interests are gender inequality, gender violences, sexual objectification, social justice, language, and the use of quantitative methodology in feminist research.

She has a particular interest in the nexus between research and policy-making, and completed a Fellowship at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. She also has an interest in the history of feminist psychology in the UK, and has published on the experiences of feminist academics navigating activism and academia. She is currently involved in a project to archive the history of the Psychology of Women and Equalities Section of the British Psychological Society, of which she is a committee member.

Dr Lisa Lazard is a Senior Lecturer at the Open University. She currently conducts research around sexual harassment which has been concerned with intersectional victim politics arising from the galvanisation of the #MeToo movement in 2017.

She has also worked as an consultant on gendered and sexual harassment in UK Parliament and in other organisational settings. Her interests in gender and intersectional inequalities also underpin her research interests in the curation of self and identities online, particularly through posted digital photography. This work stemmed from a concern around how young women in particular were routinely pathologised in popular discourse for engaging in the well-established and ubiquitous practice of selfie-taking. This pathologisation has extended more recently to parents, particularly mothers, who post family pictures online.

Her academic interest in gendered relationships has facilitated the long-standing involvement she has had in the Psychology of Women & Equalities (POWES) Section of the British Psychological Society. She is currently Chair Elect for the POWES section.

Dr Lucy Thompson is a feminist psychologist who works in the fields of critical, feminist, and organizational psychology.

Her current work is interested in understanding the personal-political nexus of institutional violence and trauma. Her broad areas of interest include feminist psychological perspectives on work and organizations, institutional perspectives on identities, power, violence, and qualitative psychological research methodologies. In 2021, she published the article ‘Toward a feminist psychological theory of “Institutional Trauma”’ in the journal Feminism and Psychology. She currently has a book forthcoming with Routledge on the same topic. Lucy earned her PhD in Organizational Psychology from the Gender and Sexualities research program at Leeds Beckett University in 2014.

She currently works as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Michigan State University. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at Michigan State University’s Center for Gender in Global Context and co-director of Psygentra.

Dr Emma Turley is a Senior Lecturer in Criminology, and a Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society.

She has a diverse range of interdisciplinary research interests that span psychology and criminology. Emma is a critical feminist psychologist with specialist areas of interest including gender, social justice, inequalities, sexualities, and the digital world. She is also interested in subculture, gendered violence, LGBTQI+ issues, and community. Emma has published in the areas of sexualities particularly marginalised sexual cultures, subculture, gendered violence and social media, gender inequalities, women’s wellbeing, and activism.

She is co-editor of the British Psychological Society's Psychology of Women & Equalities Review, a biannual publication focusing on increasing awareness and action around gender and inequality issues and editorial advisory board member for British Mensa's Androgyny journal. Emma is based in Brisbane at Central Queensland University.