‘Feminist psychology has its own little language… I find it beautiful and honest’

Can you tell me about your background and what led you to pursue a career in psychology?

I studied Psychology at university because I hated Psychology at A-level. Hated it. I thought the way that the sub-disciplines were split up into separate units that didn't speak to each other was odd, and thought that there surely must be more to understanding humans than this slightly weird, compartmentalised view. I applied to the University of Lincoln and, there, I very quickly fell in love with the discipline. Properly, head-over-heels, match-made-in-heaven in love. I remember sitting in a lecture about social psychology and social constructivism and feminism and thinking, yes! This is it! 

The more I learnt about psychology, the more I wanted to try and make connections between the theories I was learning and my other ideas. I have always been really into writing and poetry, and so soon enough I started to think about how psychology has a place in all of this. I wrote my first little piece for The Psychologist ('Slam Science') when I was in the first year of my degree, and I always think this is where I first found my 'voice'. 

Emboldened by the new-found confidence of writing my first thing, from that point on, I became hungry to learn more. I was, and indeed still am, especially keen to find new and exciting connections between psychology and other parts of my life. Throughout my time at Lincoln, I wrote a lot, read a lot, drank a lot of coffee. Eventually I started a PhD at the University of Leeds, which had a 40 per cent teaching component as part of the funding arrangement. It was here that I realised that I enjoy educating as much as I enjoy writing. I've now been at Leeds for over six years and I'm on a Teaching and Scholarship track, which I'm proud of. My job is really cool, I think. I care about feminist psychology, pedagogical research, meta-science, and how all of this can be brought together. So, in a nutshell, I teach research, and I research teaching!

Why academia? 

Academia is a funny place. I was initially drawn to my job because of how transformative and beautiful my time at Lincoln was, rather than because I had an area of research that I was desperate to pursue. My PhD was about experimental social psychology, and I used fairly mainstream methods to examine how stereotypes about people impact how they behave on different tasks. It was interesting to me and meant that I got to work with clever people, but it never felt like my 'calling' or anything dramatic like that. 

When I started teaching, I really found the joy in academia. Seeing the gleam of excitement when a student finally 'gets' the statistics we've been wrestling with, or watching a student figure out their place at university and finally get into their stride, or helping someone to take an initial half-baked idea and develop it into a fully-formed project – those are the highlights of my week. That's the fun stuff. 

I'm also aware that academia can be a lonely and difficult place. Particularly for women, who have all kinds of tensions and contradictions to contend with. But I always say that academia is a Team Sport. In 2019 I went to a teaching conference in Utrecht, and there I found the world's greatest collaborators, Dr Richard Harris and Dr Pam Birtill. Our teaching research trio has made academia feel doable and exciting. It can be difficult if you're trying to do it all alone, but there is joy in the collective, I think.  

What was your experience of completing your PhD in Social Psychology like and what has it been like navigating an academic career as a woman?

Navigating academia as a woman can be challenging. I remember the first time I ever taught a lecture, I spent more time planning my outfit than I did planning my content. I was so acutely aware of how important it is to 'perform' femininity properly as a woman in academia – be friendly enough that students find you approachable, but not so friendly that you lose all credibility and can't be taken seriously. I contended with this for years and found it almost impossible.

There's plenty of research to back this up too. My experience is essentially the crux of Susan Fiske's Stereotype Content Model, which I used in my PhD. This model shows how women tend to be stereotyped on two dimensions: warmth and competence. Generally speaking, women are perceived to be either warm, lovely, kind, and not very credible. Or they are credible, capable, smart, but cold. At the start of my teaching career, I found the push-and-pull of these tensions exhausting. I've made the decision now to lean into the bits of myself that feel the most authentic. There's something quite powerful in teaching advanced statistics with a wrist full of Taylor Swift friendship bracelets, I think. 

You're really passionate about feminism and women in psychology. Where does your interest for this stem from, and how does it come together in your work? 

My interest in feminist psychology comes partly from my own lived experience of navigating the world, and partly from those early days of learning psychology at Lincoln. The world can be a hostile place for women, and that isn't lost on me. I had a lot of reminders of that growing up, and it sticks with you. I remember saying to a student once that being a feminist psychologist is not a choice for me, it's baked in. It's like a certain lens through which you learn to view the world. Once you've experienced misogyny and hostility, you can't unsee it. 

When I was in the first year of my undergraduate degree, I discovered Sue Wilkinson's edited collection Feminist Social Psychologies. I found it in the feminist section of the library and sat, cross-legged with an iced latte, pouring into it all afternoon. I learnt words like 'positionality' and 'intersectionality' and 'reflexivity'. Words that were new to me, but that made me so happy. 

I love feminist psychology because it has its own little language like that. I find it beautiful and honest. They're not ashamed to acknowledge that they are psychologists, educators, women, daughters, friends. They are people as well as scholars, and I loved how different this kind of writing felt to the more sanitised and detached writing that I was accustomed to. Feminist psychologists are good at writing in a way that suggests they want people to read it. I get so tired of academic writing that is so dense and verbose that it is impenetrable. I often have students upset in my office because they can't make sense of their reading, to which I usually reply 'it's not you, it's them!'.

The founding mothers of feminist psychology, especially women like Carolyn Wood Sherif and Helen Thompson Woolley, write in a way that is personal. They don't detach themselves from their opinions and succumb to the academese; instead, they write from the heart. Their writing makes me laugh, cry, and hope. One of my big life missions is to become the kind of psychologist who can do that for people. 

Tell me about your book A Feminist Companion to Social Psychology. 

This book was coauthored with Professor Wendy Stainton-Rogers, a hero of critical health psychology. The book was written to act like us as a little psychologist pal sitting alongside students in social psychology lectures, whispering in their ear 'you know, there's another way to look at that…'. We wrote it with the core British Psychological Society's syllabus for social psychology in mind, but it's designed to give another perspective. I started to really enjoy learning social psychology when I looked beyond the core reading on my undergraduate course and went to hunt out critical, creative, feminist alternatives. The book is designed to give more students that experience. 

I'm currently writing my next book, Absent Minds, Reclaiming the Missing History of Women in Psychology, and that has been equally joyful, but doubly difficult. This book is designed to be an accessible book to everyone, not just psychologists and not just students, to celebrate the history of women in our discipline. I am motivated to write it because I'm learning so many stories of women who have done clever and important work but are credited in the records as the 'assistant' of their husbands, women who have shaped the discipline but never been awarded a PhD due to their gender, or women who have been the brains behind important experiment but were forced to publish under pseudonyms. Every story likes this pumps me up to reclaim more of this history so that we can celebrate the history of our discipline properly. 

Can you share a piece of work or research that has really changed or shaped your practice?

The concept of 'psychological literacy' has shaped everything I do. Women like Jacky Cranney in Australia, Susan Nolan in the US, and Julie Hulme in the UK have really pioneered this language to articulate the function of a psychology degree. I feel really strongly that undergraduate psychology education can do amazing things, above and beyond 'learning stuff about psychology', because it has shaped my life so much. Psychological literacy provides a foundation for a lot of my work now, and I think it's a really neat way of conceptualising what we're trying to achieve as psychology educators. 

What advice would you give to others who are interested in pursuing a career in academia? 

Find the fun in everything you do. Prioritise joy and authenticity. Write in a way that feels personal. Tell people you love their work. 

• Explore Fauzia's other interviews here.