The Team

Networking Family team members

Prof Abigail Locke

is a Professor of Psychology at Keele University as well as being Head of the School of Psychology. Abigail is a critical social/health psychologist, often applying a discursive lens to her research and has interests around gender, identity, parenting, social media and health. Much of her research work focuses on societal constructions of ‘good’ motherhood’ and ‘good fatherhood’, and she has applied this lens to issues around stay-at-home-dads, advice to parents and infant feeding. Externally, Abigail is Chair of the BPS Psychology of Women and Equalities Section (POWES), Secretary of the International Society for Critical Health Psychology (ISCHP), as well as being a founding member of the newly formed European Association for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology. (EQuiP).

Dr Charlotte Dann

is a Senior Lecturer in Social and Developmental Psychology at the University of Northampton. She received her PhD from the University of Northampton in 2018, exploring the regulation, conformity, and resistance of tattooed women in the UK. She is currently working on two main projects – one, a multi-university project exploring aspects of parenting practices online, and the second, a funded project focusing on issues of diversity in higher education. She is an editorial assistant for Psychology of Women & Equalities Review, and a committee member for the Psychology of Women & Equalities Section.

Dr Lisa Lazard

is a Senior Lecturer at the Open University. Her research interests include 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. She also currently conducts research around sexual harassment which has been concerned with intersectional victim politics arising from the galvanisation of the #MeToo movement in 2017. Her academic interest in gendered relationships has facilitated the long-standing involvement she has had in the Psychology of Women & Equalities Section of the British Psychological Society which has included, for example, serving as the Editor-in-Chief of the Psychology of Women & Equalities Section Review (POWER).

Dr Rose Capdevila

is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology at The Open University. Her research focus is social media and gendered 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’. She takes a critical feminist and poststructuralist approach to her research with a theoretical focus on the construction and transgression of discursive boundaries around identity - in particular political and gender identities. Moreover, she is interested in the role and politics of methodology in psychology and how these impact on minoritary groups. She is co-editor of the journal Feminism & Psychology and Chair of the Psychology of Women & Equalities section of the British Psychological Society.

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.