Digital Mothering

Professor Sarah Pedersen is a Professor of Communication and Media at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen. She also acts as the University’s Gender Equality Champion and leads RGU’s gender-balance strategy. The focus of her research is women’s engagement with the media, using both contemporary and historical sources. She researches and publishes on women’s use of both contemporary social media and daily newspapers at the turn of the twentieth century and is particularly interested in women’s use of media for political purposes. Her book, The Scottish Suffragettes and the Press, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017 and she is currently working on a book entitled The Politicisation of Mumsnet. In 2018 she was the chair of the organizing committee of Rise Up Quines!, a new Scottish festival celebrating women in politics. She is Associate Editor of the academic journal Women’s Studies International Forum.

Dr Lisa Lazard is a Senior Lecturer in Social Psychology at The Open University. Her research interests broadly focus on gendered and digital identities. Current research includes young women's construction of identities in selfies posted to social media networks; digital motherhood, parenting and online affect; sexual harassment and victim/perpetrator identities. She is currently the Editor in Chief of the Psychology of Women Section Review (British Psychological Society Publications).

Sharon Tugwell is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research explores the psychosocial significance of the phenomenon of breastfeeding selfies, particularly in relation to psychic life, desire, intersubjectivity, recognition, the symbolic capital of breastfeeding and the notion of a specifically maternal subjectivity.

Jacquie Bridgman is a Research Assistant at Societal and the LIST Institute at the University of Northampton. She graduated from a Joint Honours programme in Psychology and Social Care at the University of Northampton and has previous experience working in transportation for the Local Authority and in the advice sector. Her research interests include Transport Poverty, Social Exclusion, Ageing & Mobility and Gender inequality in transport.

Dr Sandra Roper completed her PhD at the Open University in 2017. Her main research interests are in families, parenting and qualitative methodologies. Her doctoral thesis was a critical feminist exploration of stepmothering and identity. She is herself a stepmother of many years and has spent the past decade researching stepmothering using a variety of methodological approaches. Sandra has experience of teaching psychology at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. She is now a lecturer in applied social studies at the University of Bedfordshire where she teaches on an undergraduate Child and Adolescent Studies degree and on a Masters in Childhood and Youth for which she is course coordinator.