Psychology of Women and Equalities Section Annual Conference 2024

Professor Lisa Lazard is a feminist social psychologist at the Open University who broadly works in the areas of gender in digital spaces and gendered violence. She was initially particularly interested in the taking and posting of selfies. Based on this work, she co-developed a new methodology – Processual Selfie Completion - for the studying of selfie practices. Lisa extended her interest to parental, particularly mother's sharing practices around their children and family. Alongside the study of women's digital lives, Lisa continues research around sexual harassment which began with PhD studies for which she received the POWES Postgraduate Prize. Since that early work, she has been concerned with intersectional victim politics on which she based her 2020 book "Sexual Harassment, Psychology & feminism". Lisa is the co-founder of two major research initiatives. The first – The Networking Families Research Group – has developed several programmes of research around the digital lives of mothers, families and young people. The second -The Intersectional Violence Research Group - develops evidence on how intersecting discriminations impact knowledge, understanding and the experience of sexual violence to inform strategy and policy. Lisa has been involved with the Psychology of Women & Equalities Section for 20 years and is past chair, former POWER editor and current committee member. She has been inspired by the work and support of this valuable community.

"You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time": The digital lives of mothers on social media

The title of this talk is taken from the now celebrated monologue from Barbie the movie that has aptly captured how women and girls are forced to walk thin lines between social acceptability and disapproval in the everyday. One area of experience that has long been subject to scrutiny and criticism is mothering. This is perhaps not surprising given that, for at least a century, women have been tasked with the job of not only ensuring that their children thrive but also to nurture 'happy' and 'productive' model citizens. The task is rooted in the well-entrenched discourse around motherlove that drives women to centre the needs of their children. Indeed, motherlove is at the heart of intensive mothering standards in which mothers are set the unrealistic goal of having to be relentlessly child-focused and self-sacrificing. The impossibility of living up to these standards means that mothers are easily subject to problematisation. In this talk, I explore how such problematisation of women offline has creeped into their digital lives in new and reformed ways. In particular I focus on the phenomenon of sharenting, a term that has entered into popular discourse over a decade ago, and has steadily gained traction as a pejorative to describe mothers sharing practices around their children and family on social media. More recently, with the acceleration of contemporary concern around children's right to consent, privacy and information security in relation to parental sharing, the problematisation of sharenting has intensified in both popular and academic arenas. This can be seen in recent claims that sharenting is a form of child abuse akin to Munchausen's by Proxy disorder. In contrast, this talk describes my research around mother's sharing on social media  as complex affective-discursive practices through which they manage the thin lines of acceptability and expectation that they are obliged to tread.

Dr Deanne Bell is an Associate Professor of Critical Psychology and Decolonial Studies.

Her research and scholarly commitments are to exposing and dismantling colonial systems of knowledge and exclusion. Her scholarship confronts coloniality in higher education and in historically marginalised communities in the global South and North. She approaches her commitment to the practice of social transformation primarily in two ways—through decolonisation of curricula within the westernised university and by working alongside communities, using participatory methodologies to explore phenomenologies of dehumanisation in modernity. This has included working with members of the Tivoli Gardens community in Jamaica in the aftermath of a historic, political atrocity in 2010.

Building on her inquiry into colonially produced indifference to racism and classism she is currently working to understand psychosocial mechanisms through which indifference becomes internalised. In response to the dearth of understanding how inequalities are structured and systematised in higher education, she is also exploring academic inequalities from the perspective of historically marginalised students.

Deanne's scholarship finds application in epistemic justice in the westernised university. She has founded multiple 'decolonial infrastructure' projects in the academy including creating a new pedagogy for a university community to begin to understand systemic racism, creating opportunities for decolonial PhD research, and is the founding director of NTU's Decolonial Research Collaborative.

Where Power Resides: A Decolonial Feminist Meditation on the Psychology of Voice

In a time of muscular patriarchal power in the world a turn toward radical, Black, queer, feminist thought might offer us much needed psychological breakthroughs. Paired with anticolonial thinking and insights from critical psychology, possibilities exist for us to think through the effects that patriarchy and misogyny are having on knowledge—of ourselves and the world. Through a montage of decolonial feminist thought I address possibilities for us to liberate knowledge we have and build a 'psychology of voice' as a way to surpass forces that seek to make women small.

Annadís Greta Rúdólfsdóttir is an associate Professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Iceland. She studied at the London School of Economics and Political Science and completed her PhD in Social Psychology in 1997. She was the Studies Director of the United Nations University Gender Equality Studies and Training Programme (UNU-GEST) between 2009-2015. Dr Rúdólfsdóttir has done extensive research on gender and specialises in qualitative research methods. In her research she has used affective discursive approaches to analyse constructions of gender, young femininities, feminist movements and motherhood. Her latest publications have been in Journal of Gender Studies, Feminism and Psychology, Social Science and Medicine and Gender Work and Organization.
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0473-2762

Motherhood is a feminist issue: A discursive affective perspective.

In 1976 Adrienne Rich wrote about motherhood and how as a patriarchal heterosexual institution it continually found mothers wanting and as she put it wrenches at their experiences. She pointed out how in the institution of motherhood certain cultural and ideological representations of motherhood are preferred over others and set the norms mothers are measured against. She also wrote about mothers' complex experiences and ambivalent feelings towards motherhood; the joy and love as well as the frustration and rage. Rich provided me with the critical lens I needed in the early nineties to explore the importance motherhood had in discursive constructions of femininities in Iceland and continues to inspire
my work. The data I have collected in the last 3 decades consists of interviews, printed material like obituaries and newspaper interviews with mothers and qualitative surveys. In this talk I revisit my past work on motherhood and more current analysis (with Auður Magndís Auðardóttir) and ask some feminist questions. My focus will be mostly, but not entirely, on constructions of motherhood in Iceland. One of the questions I ask is how motherhood as a patriarchal institution continues to reinvent itself. In Iceland as in the Nordic countries childcare is provided as part of the welfare system and the working mother is the norm. The availability of high quality and affordable childcare and focus on shared parenting is not least due to the efforts of the women's movement that has wanted women to have the same opportunities for self development as men. I trace how neoliberalism and discourses of intensive mothering have gained traction in Icelandic society and how they pull in subjects and regulate them in and through their emotions and desires. Mothers in modern Iceland describe feelings of guilt for attending to their own needs, enjoying their work outside the home and arranging for childcare. To follow Adrienne Rich's lead we need to take mothers' feelings and personal experiences seriously but also question how motherhood as an institution conjures up and uses discursive truths against their well-being.