wendy hollway | The Open University (original) (raw)

Papers by wendy hollway

Before the APS launch event, I had the opportunity to read and reflect on Sasha’s paper over seve... more Before the APS launch event, I had the opportunity to read and reflect on Sasha’s paper over several days. I made notes. I felt ambivalent about writing (typing) out a talk to be read, wanting to keep some spontaneity in my comments. On the occasion, as I sat at the front listening to Sasha’s presentation, able from there to look at the whole audience, my imagination was caught by the facial and bodily expressions. There felt to be, for example, moments of tension followed by relieved laughter, moments that were collectively experienced. Watching this, I felt that the audience was enacting something that I wanted to draw attention to in my comments about a methodology for psychosocial studies. I decided to leave aside my notes and trust to the fact that the main themes were already embodied ‘scenically’ 2 in my experience of Sasha’s presentation. An anecdote about Wilfred Bion’s comment before he was due to speak at a conference emerged in my mind and I decided to tell this to the a...

Journal of Psychosocial Studies, 2020

In this article we present an example of psychosocial practice – a visual matrix – which attempte... more In this article we present an example of psychosocial practice – a visual matrix – which attempted to address and embody carbon-lite research methods in the face of global heating. Combining virtual and face-to-face modes of presence and interaction generated insights as well as posing challenges. In the article we explore two ideas through a discussion of ‘interference’ and ‘inclusion/exclusion’. The article extends our understanding of the method to include an awareness of what comes before and after the matrix. By attuning ourselves to its materialities and the practices of care involved in staging a matrix and then digesting its affects and effects, we are alerted to the front and back stage of the method. Following this insight we discuss how a feminist engagement with psychosocial method can be used to connect ‘matters of concern’ such as global heating with situated practices of care that themselves may constitute a carbon-lite methodology. The article is polyvocal, generated...

Changing the Subject, 1998

This article stages a dialogue between two concepts from different social science traditions, mix... more This article stages a dialogue between two concepts from different social science traditions, mixedness and hybridity, both concerned with identities as a product of encounters and alliances across ethnic, cultural and racial differences. Applying a psycho-social perspective to empirical data on identity transitions amongst first time mothers in East London, we demonstrate how the reiterative formations, enfoldings and changes in subjectivity, within a broader multicultural setting, can contribute depth to the idea of intermingling in both concepts. Our three case examples derive from the Bangladeshi-heritage sub-sample of new mothers. We draw upon each case to investigate multifarious and differential surfaces of flow, incorporation and excess between the internal and external. The salience of affect and materiality within these processes cannot be preknown, we suggest, but they are variously sustained and constrained in relation to the particularities of the content, extents and the sites of mixing. We show how, when it comes to actual occasions, there is no separating the personal, cultural and material; rather what emerges is a relentless succession of encounters between desire and limit. A limit can be intransigently external and material, but is also a product of biography, with generational antecedents and imaginative acts that come from or through the subject. The paper argues that unconscious intersubjective and intercorporeal dynamics ensure that hybrid subjectivities are never simply a reflection of external hybrid culture. In the third, major, case analysis, we add psycho-social depth to questions of ethics, comfort and discomfort in research relations.

Studies in the Maternal, 2013

The accompanying audio track (one of a number of edits of differing lengths) provides a prose poe... more The accompanying audio track (one of a number of edits of differing lengths) provides a prose poem, written by me and spoken by an actor, based on a research project about women’s experiences of becoming mothers for the first time . This form of writing, which I call ‘rough verse’, deviates from the conventions of social science writing in order to communicate research participants’ experience in an emotionally replete way. I wrote Mum’s over the Moon using data from interviews and observations with one participant, whom I call Juhana. These took place over a period of approximately 16 months, starting soon after her baby’s birth. This chronology is represented in the structure of the prose poem and is consistent with the research’s focus on becoming and identity transition. The audio begins with the line ‘Mum’s over the Moon’, a phrase which Juhana used early in the first interview. It immediately places Juhana in the family setting which is so important in her story. In my work, the double attention to setting and affect in accounts of lived experience characterises psycho-social research; that is, research that reduces its perspectives to neither internal- nor external-world forces. To reproduce the vital qualities of voice, Mum’s over the Moon is performed by an actor, which also protects the anonymity of the new mother whose story it represents. The actor, Leah Whitaker, studied the audio interview record so that she could imitate, as faithfully as possible, Juhana’s phrases, voice rhythms, speech pattern, intonations and accent – in sum, her unique idiom. My unwrought verse (for this is what rough and its cognate term ‘raw’ mean) was fashioned mainly from Juhana’s words, either transcribed directly from the interview audio recording or from being noted down with precision by the observer. I selected passages from a much larger whole , and used Juhana’s words and phrasing in ways that accentuate the rhythm of her language and the meaning that it helps to convey. I have discussed and demonstrated elsewhere how a ‘scenic’ understanding (Lorenzer 1986) and presentation helps to unite the personal and the socio-cultural, the past and the present (Hollway and Froggett 2012; Hollway 2011a).

Work Psychology and Organizational Behaviour: Managing the Individual at Work

Childhood, 2014

How do emotions enter into children’s negotiated understandings and situated uses of categories o... more How do emotions enter into children’s negotiated understandings and situated uses of categories of identity? This question guided a revisit to an ethnographic study of a multi-cultural context in Oakland, California. A focus group discussion among four Chinese American girls just graduating from elementary school and an interviewer, also Chinese American, was chosen for closer study. This secondary analysis focuses on how the girls engaged in school events and how in the interview they shared experiences of being excluded and rejected by peers. Thus, both reports about life in school and lived life in the group discussion were analyzed in ways that followed the girls’ individual and collective emotional dynamics. Emotional tension between using and being used by categories drove their stories about belonging, exclusion and subordination, and resistance. The girls’ handling of social identities in relation to language use, required activities, and girly appearance in school demonstra...

Political Psychology, 1993

The Gendering of Organizational Research Methods-UNL Digital. Wendy Hollway, emeritus professor o... more The Gendering of Organizational Research Methods-UNL Digital. Wendy Hollway, emeritus professor of psychology at the Open University (UK),. The visual matrix method in a study of death and dying: Methodological reflections. Matrixial trans-subjectivity is only accessible to research in a form mediated by any specific meanings of social categories such as gender, ethnicity/race, ?Gender Differences in Self-Concept and Psychological Well-Being. Hegarty, Peter (2007) Getting dirty: psychology s history of power. History of (1989) Subjectivity and method in psychology: gender, meaning and science. (PDF) Feminism and Psychology Analysis of a Half-Century of. Objectivity and Gender in Science: Implications for Psychology. then examine the unique way in which the scientific method and the feminist objections to. mind cannot be defined until its inputs and outputs are fully understood) was objectivity and subjectivity, and many also correspond to "the continuing dominance of. Objectivity and realms of explanation in academic journal articles. From a standpoint which views knowledge as produced and reproduced within specific historical conditions and power relations, Wendy Hollway criticizes the almost intentional blindness of psychology to its own conditions of production. She describes her own method in her research Gender and Culture in Psychology: Theories and Practices-Google Books Result May 30, 2017 .

Qualitative Inquiry, 1997

A central feature of the fear of crime debate is the fear-risk paradox: the finding that those le... more A central feature of the fear of crime debate is the fear-risk paradox: the finding that those least at risk, namely, elderly women, are most fearful, and vice versa. This article argues that this paradox can be resolved theoretically by placing an anxious, defended subject rather than a rational, risk-avoiding one at the center of the debate, and explores some of the methodological implications of so doing, especially the importance of eliciting narratives. This methodological position, appropriately adapted for this study's rather different purposes, derives from the biographical-interpretive method first developed in Germany for the collection of life stories of Jewish survivors of the concentration camps. The authors outline the principles of this approach and the importance of eliciting concrete stories in a nondirective way in pursuit of the respondent's "gestalt," and then put this to work in attempting to operationalize their theoretical position into appro...

Feminism & Psychology, 1991

ABSTRACT Examines the way in which most feminist psychology (FP) contributes to traditional gende... more ABSTRACT Examines the way in which most feminist psychology (FP) contributes to traditional gender ideology, rather than challenging it. The author outlines this general argument and indicates alternative directions for an FP applying arguments in occupational psychology. She argues that the only difference between FP's use of femininity and masculinity and the old patriarchal psychology of sex differences is that FP has reevaluated femininity as superior. An approach in terms of gender differences recognizes that there are systematic, though not invariable nor determined, differences between women and men at the psychological level which, despite access to material equality, are not going to disappear overnight. The challenge is to be able to explain them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Feminism & Psychology, 1993

ABSTRACT Comments on a special issue of Feminism & Psychology (1992 [Oct] Vol 2[3]) on he... more ABSTRACT Comments on a special issue of Feminism & Psychology (1992 [Oct] Vol 2[3]) on heterosexuality, arguing that the absence of discourse on heterosexual women's desires, satisfactions, and pleasures in sexual relationships with men is due to the influence of radical feminism. The theoretical and political weaknesses of radical feminist analyses of sexuality stem from an inadequate conceptualization of power and signification in sexual practices. A poststructuralist, psychodynamic analysis is offered which conceptualizes the personal experiences of a heterosexual woman. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Feminism & Psychology, 2012

Using data examples, I re-approach Donald Winnicott's idea of primary maternal preoccupation ... more Using data examples, I re-approach Donald Winnicott's idea of primary maternal preoccupation (1984[1956]) through Bracha Ettinger's matrixial concept of transsubjectivity. I argue that Winnicott recognises the radical difference between the mental state that women will have occupied formerly and the state that the prenatal and postnatal infant will claim, if the mother is available to it. With the benefit of a matrixial perspective it is possible to see how this description need not pathologise women, nor reproduce misogynistic discourses. On the contrary it begins to do justice to the enormity of women's transition as they become mothers: enormity because it threatens to pitch them beyond the experience of being a self-contained autonomous individual, a position which is normalised in what Ettinger calls phallic logic. Feminists risk reproducing phallic logic if we dismiss on ideological grounds, and thereby pathologise, this radically other state characteristic of the ...

Knowing Mothers

This book’s exploration of identity transition, specifically the changes involved when women beco... more This book’s exploration of identity transition, specifically the changes involved when women become mothers for the first time, is framed by a methodological perspective: it asks how researchers know what we know from empirical data. It is based on the data from a funded research project.1 ‘A focus on mothers shifts our epistemological, political, social and psychic horizons’ claims Petra Bueskens (2014, p.4). Indeed, research into new mothers’ changing identities has shifted my knowledge horizons: it poses epistemological questions and methodological challenges because the experiences of women as they become mothers are partly beyond words. It is these challenges that provide the structure of the book, and it is in this sense that this is a book not only about new mothers’ knowing and its relation to their becoming, but also about methods adequate for researching such a topic.