POWES is pronounced “feminist”: Negotiating academic and activist boundaries in the talk of UK feminist psychologists

Abstract

The Psychology of Women and Equalities Section (POWES) of the British Psychological Society (BPS) accounts for much of the feminist action in British psychology and beyond. In this qualitative study, we use discursively informed thematic analysis to examine a set of eleven in-depth interviews to explore the everyday experiences of feminists within academic spaces in and around the discipline of psychology in the United Kingdom. Three research questions addressing the boundary between activism and academia; the provision of support; and differing approaches to knowledge production were investigated. Our findings highlight the role of POWES as a feminist community as well as the conceptual importance of notions of home, work, and fun. Moreover, the paper examines the ways traditional conceptions of scientific rigour continue to haunt feminist spaces, as does the invisibility of emotional labour. Overall, our findings indicate that the place of feminist academic communities remains vital to sustain critical thought and action: having an intellectual “home” is pivotal to the survival of feminist psychology as well as feminists in psychology.

“There are lots of new faces this year… I’m not entirely sure when I became one of the old ones”: a psycho-ethnography of the self at #PoWESconf five years in

“…It is just as welcoming to new members, as it is to those who have been in attendance since its inception. These feelings have been shared widely by the members and delegate (see Capdevila et al, 2019 ; Donnelly et al, 2022 ), but the secret behind as to why this is, remains unknown or perhaps simply un-nameable (see also Bowes-Catton, 2023 ). A sound guess would be that it is the type of members who engage in a feminist community such as PoWES, which make the conference feel so different to most others.…”

Doing feminisms on the ground: Challenges and opportunities for critical feminist psychologies

“…These outcomes can be isolating and limiting for feminist psychologists doing work that destabilises and decentres dominant and normative understandings both within and external to the discipline. This difficulty is illustrated in the following excerpt: Donnelly, Hubbard, & Capdevila, 2022;Hare-Mustin & Marecek, 1990;Rutherford & Petit, 2015;Segalo & Kiguwa, 2015;Thompson, 2017;Weisstein, 1968;Wilkinson, 1997). This discipline was founded through the projects of positivism, colonialism, and bio-psycho-medical diagnostic interventionism (Mills, 2014;Tosh, 2016).…”