By Rachel Fox
Rachel Fox explores how doctor-writer narratives often depict fat people in dehumanising and hurtful ways, and argues they need to be reframed with empathy.
Continue readingFat Pain is Not Your Profundity
Blogs
Reframing Online Sperm Donation through the lens of Reproductive Justice
By Francesca Taylor
When I first started my PhD- an exploration of recipient experiences of online, unregulated sperm donation- I became fixated on trying to understand why people would choose this route to parenthood. Most of the things I’d read about online sperm donation were fairly sensationalist news articles which portrayed a ‘black market’ and an online ‘underworld’ where people were going to search for and donate sperm. I felt that in order to design a study where I could encourage people to tell their stories free from stigma and shame, I needed to first have some idea of the context of donor insemination in the UK, including who was choosing online sperm donation and their reasons for doing so. Why weren’t people choosing, for example, donor insemination at a fertility clinic? What were the benefits and drawbacks of online sperm donation? How did the social, cultural, and economic context of donor insemination in the UK inform what was happening online?
Continue readingEmbracing Critical Theory in Quantitative Research
By Ági Szabo
It was 2017, my postdoc fellowship was coming to an end and I was looking for opportunities to stay in academia in Aotearoa/New Zealand. A permanent job was advertised at the university I was working at: Lecturer in Health Psychology. The focus of the position was clear, applicants needed to be critical health scholars. I had spent two years doing critical health research, publishing in the top journals of my field, so I was confident I fit the job description. I mentioned to a colleague that I was planning to apply for the role. She told me not to apply. Her advice, kindly meant, was: “Don’t bother, you are wasting your time. They will never hire a quantitative researcher. You won’t even get shortlisted.” I was taken aback by her comments.
Continue readingResisting the Darwinian Phallocracy
By Wendy Stainton Rogers
“Resisting the Darwinian Phallocracy” – Don’t you just love the language?! It’s from a new book out by Lucy Cooke, Bitch: A Revolutionary Guide to Sex, Evolution & the Female Animal and is full of sass like that. With a Masters in Zoology and tutored by Richard Dawkins, she explains:
Continue readingI was taught that this apparently trivial disparity in our sex cells laid cast-iron biological foundations for sexual inequality. “It is possible to interpret all other differences between the sexes as stemming from this one basic difference,” Dawkins told us. “Female exploitation begins here.”
Male animals led swashbuckling lives of thrusting agency. They fought one another over leadership or possession of females. They shagged around indiscriminately, propelled by a biological imperative to spread their seed far and wide. And they were socially dominant; where males led, females meekly followed. A female’s role was as selfless mother, naturally; as such, maternal efforts were deemed all alike: we had zero competitive edge. Sex was a duty rather than a drive.
And as far as evolution was concerned it was males who drove the bus of change. We females could hop on for a ride thanks to shared DNA, as long as we promised to keep nice and quiet.
Lucy Cooke
‘Porn Literacy’ is a great idea… right?
By Siobhán Healy-Cullen
When I embarked on my doctoral research in 2018 I was interested in how young people made sense of gendered images in online pornography. I was also interested in what caregivers and teachers thought about young people’s pornography use. A new, in vogue, term called “porn literacy” caught my eye. In those early stages of the project, I thought “Sounds good… Why not talk to young people about pornography!? It’s clearly something many young people engage with, and to ignore or censor it would be like other prohibitive interventions, which haven‘t worked!” However, as I explored the notion of “porn literacy”, it became plain to me that the ways pornography, young people and their pornography viewing are thought about invariably shapes porn literacy as an educational response.
Continue readingShould academics do unpaid work to share their research? if so, when and how?
This is a guest post from Dr Anna Bull, Lecturer in Education and Social Justice at the University of York and co-director of research and campaign organisation The 1752 Group.
Less ‘prestigious’ journals can contain more diverse research, by citing them we can shape a more just politics of citation.
Drawing on their recent analysis of journals in the field of Higher Education Studies, which shows that journals with lower impact rankings are more likely to feature research from diverse geographic and linguistic contexts, Shannon Mason and Margaret K. Merga argue that researchers should adopt more careful citation practices, as a means to broaden and contextualise what counts as ‘prestigious’ research and create a more equitable publishing environment for research outside of core anglophone countries.
Continue readingHow Dance, Gestalt and Idiographic Research Contribute to Critical Health Psychology
By Natalia Braun
Truth is in the eye of the beholder .
– Ruth Hubbard.
Earlier this year, there was a paper published about the research that explored the influence of dance on embodied self-awareness and well-being (Braun & Kotera, 2021). The findings of this study provided evidence for dance as a booster of health, the way for coping with and prevention of stress, depression and loneliness, and enabler of individual and community transformations. This study was conducted applying the qualitative research method of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Often, research methods remain in the shadow when reporting about research. In this blog, I would like to shed more light on IPA that is a particularly useful method in exploring individual embodied experience with health and its impairment, and is rooted in idiography, phenomenology and hermeneutics (Smith et al., 2009).
Continue readingIn between feminist and critical health psychology: Finding myself, fitting in, and flailing
By Andrea LaMarre
This blog post has been adapted from one of Andrea’s presentation at ISCHP’s 12 Biennial Conference in September 2021. Andrea was one of the recipients of the emerging researcher award.
When I consider the question of what a feminist health psychology is, I can’t help but think of myself, wandering between disciplines and literatures, trying to find a place where I feel at home. I think about a young Andrea who, despite having embodied so many privileges, felt like her emotions were too much for everyone. I think about how shrinking myself and trying to please everyone have been strategies I’ve adopted to fit into societal ideas about who I should be. I think about how in graduate school, I began to embrace a louder, more outspoken feminism that encourages emotion, sensation, and commitment to filter through and drive what I do. I think about the theorists and scholars who taught me that being critical, and being feminist, might mean seeping outside of boundaries—corporeally, theoretically, methodologically.
Continue readingWhat this collaboration between artists and health-care leaders teaches us about living through COVID-19
Barbara Doran, University of Technology Sydney; Ann Dadich, Western Sydney University; Chloe Watfern, UNSW; Katherine M Boydell, UNSW, and Stephanie Habak, UNSW
A new project that spotlights the strain from COVID-19 on our health systems and the people who work in them has invited health-care leaders and artists to create artworks that illuminate what it has been like leading, working and living through the pandemic.
The culmination of this collaboration is Topsy Turvy, an interactive digital exhibition initiated by the Knowledge Translation Strategic Platform of Maridulu Budyari Gumal SPHERE (Sydney Partnership for Health Education Research and Enterprise) whose purpose is to change the future of health care.
Topsy Turvy is a random image generator that makes combinations from a bank of drawings and text inspired by experiences of COVID-19. Users can opt to keep, delete and resize until they feel they have an image that resonates.
Continue readingMeet our new blog co-editors
Our blog has been running since 2015 and had many people pitching in to keep it a blog for the Society by the Society. Our latest blog co-editors have just been announced at the latest ISCHP conference. As it happens, all three are kiwis studying health psychology at Massey University. You can read more about them in this post.
Strategies for effectively editing and proofreading academic writing
By Nick Hopwood
Article republished with permission.
When we think of academic writing, we often think of the painful, difficult process of getting words onto the page. But what about when we have a bunch of words down, what next? Does the act of writing get all the glory while we overlook editing and proofreading? Do we think about ourselves as writers too much, and as editors not enough?
Open access at no cost? Just ditch academic journals
By Abel Polese, June 2021
Abel’s post discusses the implications of Plan S, which requires scientists and researchers who benefit from state funding in member countries to publish their work in open repositories or in journals that are available to all (thanks, Wikipedia).
Continue readingTurning findings into policy: six tips for researchers
Anthony Idowu Ajayi, African Population and Health Research Center; Boniface Ushie, African Population and Health Research Center, and Caroline Kabiru, African Population and Health Research Center
There has been tremendous growth in the number of studies on sexual and reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa in the past two decades. Notably, there has been an increase in research documenting what works in improving adolescents’ health and wellbeing.
However, the use of findings from these studies to inform the development of policies is low. For example, research shows that educating young people about their sexuality and giving them access to contraceptive methods has lifelong benefits. But few sub-Saharan African countries have enacted laws or policies that follow through on the evidence.
As a result of this inaction, adolescents continue to experience early unintended pregnancy, unsafe abortion, and other poor health outcomes.
Continue readingIs coronavirus treatment fair? Not in an unequal society
By Alexis Paton, April 2021
An important notion underlying most clinical and ethical pandemic guidance worldwide is the concept of fairness; whether this is the question of how to make decisions to allocate limited health resources or the need for ethical guidance on how healthcare staff should make difficult decisions about care to ensure that regulations are standardised around the country.
But when it comes to health, “fair” is a misnomer. This is because the principle of fairness relies on the premise that good health is available to everyone equally, when we know it is not.
Continue reading