Paula Reavey
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 643707 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Paula Reavey |
| NOMBRES | Paula |
| APELLIDO | Reavey |
| FIRMA | REAVEY P |
| AFILIACIONES | London South Bank University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0903-9097 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 50 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 218 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 48 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1997 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Gaps and opportunities in mental health support for young people
Background Young people aged 16–25 are reporting rising rates of poor mental health, exacerbated by service gaps. Key life transitions such as moving from school to college, or into the workforce can increase vulnerability. Method A mixed-methods evaluation was conducted of a multi-component, mental health intervention in the East of England. The evaluation aimed to: (1) Assess the fidelity, dose, and reach of the intervention; (2) Understand the…
Displacing Problems
Research indicates that pornography is not inherently harmful for the individual; however, many users consider their use to be problematic. The majority of research concerning problematic pornography use (PPU), often referred to as pornography addiction, discusses nomenclature rather than having an applied focus. Given the lack of theoretical development in this area, a constructivist grounded theory was undertaken with the aim of creating an und…
Involving lived experience in regional efforts to address gambling-related harms
Integrating a range of LE perspectives in a public health approach to gambling harms reduction requires local access to involvement for people with LE via diverse routes that are free from stigma and present people with LE with options in how they can engage and be heard in decision-making, and how they operate in relation to industry influence. Involving LE in gambling harms reduction requires enabling people to develop the affective and critica…
Vitality and nature in psychiatric spaces
Choreographies of sexual safety and liminality
Medium secure forensic psychiatric units are unique environments within the broader "post asylum" landscape of mental health services. Length of stay is much greater and restrictions on behavior, including sexual behavior, are legally and institutionally legitimated, due to concerns regarding risk. As a result, sexuality is rarely explored experientially with service users and no official policies on sexual conduct and sexual safety have yet been…
Drinkers like us? The availability of relatable drinking reduction narratives for people with alcohol use disorders
Narratives around alcohol are important in determining how people decide who or what qualifies as problematic alcohol use. Narratives draw on common representations that are subject to influences including historical and normative influences. We argue that there are two dominant narratives that relate to how alcohol use disorder (AUD) is identified and addressed. The first is the historically embedded narrative of alcoholism as disease, and the s…
The privatisation of remembering practices in contemporary inpatient mental healthcare
In this paper, we consider changes to memorial practices for mental health service users during the asylum period of the mid-nineteenth up to the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. The closing of large asylums in the UK has been largely welcomed by professionals and service-users alike, but their closure has led to a decrease in continuous and consistent care for those with enduring mental health challenges. Temporary…
Peripheral recovery
Sitting between the psychiatric and criminal justice systems, and yet fully located in neither, forensic psychiatric units are complex spaces. Both a therapeutic landscape and a carceral space, forensic services must try to balance the demands of therapy and security, or recovery and risk, within the confines of a strictly controlled institutional space. This article draws on qualitative material collected in a large forensic psychiatric unit in …
A Handbook of Visual Methods in Psychology
Sexuality, risk, and organisational misbehaviour in a secure mental healthcare facility in England
Sexuality in secure mental healthcare has been overlooked in both clinical praxis and academic research. In the UK, there exist no formal policies to inform staff approaches to managing inpatient sexuality. The limited research that has been undertaken in this field has found that often, prohibitive approaches are favoured, which may affect how inpatients conceptualise and experience their sexuality in the long-term. The aim of this study was to …
Organizing the sensory
How are relations of care and security between hospital staff and patients organized through sound? This article argues that a shifting distinction between meaningful sound and noise is fundamental to the lived experience of immersion in an organizational acoustic environment. Based around a qualitative study of listening practices and ‘ear-work’ at a medium-secure forensic psychiatric hospital, using interview and photo-production methods, the a…
Visual Methods in Psychology
Multimodality, visual methods and lived experience
Paula Reavey is Professor of Psychology and Mental Health at London South Bank University. This interview took place at the Qualitative Methods in Psychology (QMiP) and History & Philosophy of Psychology (HPP) joint 2019 conference at Cardiff Metropolitan University, where Paula led a workshop on visual methods and delivered a keynote speech. Best known for her pathbreaking work on visual methods and multimodality (Reavey, 2011), she has also dis…
Never drop without your significant other, cause that way lies ruin’
Building visual worlds
One challenge facing psychological studies of affect and emotion is how we can capture the situated, located assemblage of practice involved in affective experiences: the where, how, when, who, and what of affective meaning making. Here we argue for a place for map making in the methodological toolbox of qualitative psychology. Participatory mapping is a well-established technique used in geography, planning, and community development, with a gro…
Vital spaces and mental health
The impact of social and material conditions on mental health is well established but lacking in a coherent approach. We offer the concept of 'vitality' as means of describing how environments facilitate 'feelings of being alive' that cut across existing diagnostic categories. Drawing on the work of Stern, Fuchs, Worms and Duff, we argue that vitality is not solely a quality of an individual body, but rather emerges from attunements and resonance…
Affect theory and the concept of atmosphere
The concept of atmosphere is a way of emplacing affect and affect theory. Work in contemporary social geography has done much to demonstrate how elemental forces become enveloped in atmospheres. However, it tends to under-theorise the role of historically structured socio-cultural forces and the modes of engagement of persons with the atmospheric. In this paper we identify core themes in the literature – the inbetweeness of atmospheres, tuning sp…
Agents and spectres
The atmosphere of the ward
The climate or atmosphere of a ward in secure psychiatric care is typically studied by examining the relationship between social and environmental factors. However the experiences of patients are irreducible to a set of discrete dimensions or factors. Drawing on recent work in affect theory and architectural studies, we argue for an approach to atmosphere that places it 'in-between' persons and space, as a 'spatially extended quality of feeling' …
Affective Inequalities in Intimate Relationships
Katie Anderson, Paula Reavey and Zoë Boden analyse interviews with couples in mixed-sex relationships, in which women (unlike men) are usually expected to perform emotional labour. The authors question the traditional approaches of drug studies by asking whether in some cases the joint use of MDMA (ecstasy) as a couple might actually enhance partners’ affective capacities. It may help to overcome affective inequalities that stem from discrepant e…
Living ‘in between’ outside and inside
False memories and real epistemic problems
The dichotomy between ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ in relation to memory is difficult to clearly sustain. The veridicality of memory is typically established by drawing on the local, normative procedures that operate in a given setting (e.g. legal, clinical, social). Since all procedures are strictly relative, all memories are technically either ‘relatively falsified’ or ‘relatively as-yet-unfalsified’. False memory studies claim to be able explain the …
Scenic memory
Storytelling is at the heart of how we remember, with others as much as in solicitude, via internal \nimaginings. Narrative is recognised by many as a formative way in which acts of remembering are \norganised in experience, making reconstruction and reconsolidation more attainable - as individuals \nand collectivities. Yet the experience of memory pushes beyond narrative alone and emerges \nfrom specific scenes or settings, as much as time perio…
The ward as emotional ecology
Dark organizational theory
Institutions and organizations are defined by competing sociomaterial logics. Divergence between the 'visible' and the 'hidden' side of organization invites a critical work of 'unveiling'. But such critique does not enable understanding of how coherency is accomplished between different modes of reason. This is performed in emergent third spaces, where parasitic relations are enacted. During moments of 'crisis' or 'breach', contradictions are bot…
Painting pictures of embodied experience
This paper is based upon the work of an ongoing, collective research project that is concerned with embodiment. The co-researchers have used a variety of methods, including memory work and the analysis of discourse, in order to trace the ways in which meanings are constructed and lived, with and through the body. These methods have relied solely on transcripts of text as data. Growing awareness of the limitations this imposed on the research, par…
Affect theory and the concept of atmosphere
The concept of atmosphere is a way of emplacing affect and affect theory. Work in contemporary social geography has done much to demonstrate how elemental forces become enveloped in atmospheres. However, it tends to under-theorise the role of historically structured socio-cultural forces and the modes of engagement of persons with the atmospheric. In this paper we identify core themes in the literature – the inbetweeness of atmospheres, tuning sp…
The scenes and spaces of anxiety
Seeking fluid possibility and solid ground
Dis/Locating Blame
This article examines issues of sexuality and identity for women who have been sexually abused as children. It is based on five in-depth semi-structured interviews with women who were `identified' as survivors of childhood sexual abuse, a study which, in turn, forms part of a larger project exploring social constructions of sexual abuse in childhood (in therapeutic and self-help settings). A discourse analytic approach is used to explore how vari…
Heterotopias of control
Building visual worlds
One challenge facing psychological studies of affect and emotion is how we can capture the situated, located assemblage of practice involved in affective experiences: the where, how, when, who, and what of affective meaning making. Here we argue for a place for map making in the methodological toolbox of qualitative psychology. Participatory mapping is a well-established technique used in geography, planning, and community development, with a gro…
Agents and spectres
Vicarious and post‐memory practices in adopting families
In this paper, we explore how adoptive parents manage and order visual information relating to their adoptive child's birth or foster family. More specifically, our task is to make sense of the ways in which the memories that children have of their past families are (re)constructed and managed within the context of present adoptive parental concerns. Life story books have become a dominant way in which narratives of the child's past family are fo…
Zip me up, and cool me down”
Constructions of `Culture' in Accounts of South Asian Women Survivors of Sexual Violence
The aim of this article is to explore some of the ways in which British South Asian women survivors of sexual violence (in particular, those who are either British born or have lived in the UK for most of their lives and are fluent English speakers) construct the effects of `culture' within their accounts of sexually violent experiences. We present a discursive analysis based on semi-structured interviews with eight English-speaking women of Sout…
How can we help when she won't tell us what's wrong?’ Professionals working with South Asian women who have experienced sexual abuse
In this paper, we explore some of the issues facing professionals in the UK currently involved in providing services for South Asian women who have experienced sexual abuse. The study describes part of a wider Economic and Social Research Council funded project, based upon interviews and focus groups with both professionals and women survivors of sexual abuse. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews and two focus groups with 37 professionals includ…
What do You do for a Living Then?' The Political Ramifications of Research Interests within Everyday Interpersonal Contexts
Turning around on experience
In this article, we argue that emergent interests in social interaction, wider context and culture with regards to memory have united formerly disparate approaches within the discipline of psychology, namely, that from the discursive and experimental cognitive paradigms. Here, we develop the argument on the centrality of interaction and continuity and present an expanded approach that is best able to incorporate distressing events, which we call …
Transformations of self and sexuality
Forensic mental health inpatients in medium-secure settings have a limited capacity for sexual expression during their stay in hospital. This is due to a number of factors, including a lack of willingness on behalf of staff to engage with sexual issues, as a result of safety fears and ambiguity regarding the ability of the patient to consent. Furthermore, UK forensic medium-secure units do not provide conjugal suites for patients to have sexual r…
Footprints in a Toxic Landscape
This article discusses the emotional intensity of reflexive supervision of a reflexive method, Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI), and the necessity of that intensity for insightful analysis of interview data. Two supervisors were involved in the work of validating interpretations in interviews with domestically abusive men. The different ways they chose to engage the material was partly their reaction to the toxicity of the material, an…
The atmosphere of the ward
The climate or atmosphere of a ward in secure psychiatric care is typically studied by examining the relationship between social and environmental factors. However the experiences of patients are irreducible to a set of discrete dimensions or factors. Drawing on recent work in affect theory and architectural studies, we argue for an approach to atmosphere that places it 'in-between' persons and space, as a 'spatially extended quality of feeling' …
Living ‘in between’ outside and inside
He's a good-looking chap aint he
The ward as emotional ecology
Dark organizational theory
Institutions and organizations are defined by competing sociomaterial logics. Divergence between the 'visible' and the 'hidden' side of organization invites a critical work of 'unveiling'. But such critique does not enable understanding of how coherency is accomplished between different modes of reason. This is performed in emergent third spaces, where parasitic relations are enacted. During moments of 'crisis' or 'breach', contradictions are bot…
Vital memories
The focus on the practice of remembering has been highly productive for memory studies, but it creates difficulties in understanding personal commitment to particular versions of the past. Autobiographical memories of difficult and distressing past episodes – or ‘vital memories’ – require extensive and ongoing management. We describe the issues that arise when vital memories are expressed across a range of specific interactional contexts. Seven t…
Spatial markings
In this article, I argue that material locations (spaces) are not simply peripheral to acts of remembering but central to how the ongoing flow of memory and agency is constituted and experienced by individuals in their practice of memorial self-interpretation. This argument, however, can only be accepted when selfhood is treated as a form, a process, as opposed to a determinate substance. Examples from autobiography, psychological research, ficti…
Moving beyond the surface
This article examines experiential accounts of young women's embodied experiences in everyday life, using a narrative and visual approach. The life history interview was aided by the use of photographs as a means to access specific memories of embodied experiences, rather than generic accounts of ‘the body’. In so doing, young women constructed two versions of embodied experiences: ‘the female body as surface’; and ‘being an embodied self through…
Organizing the sensory
How are relations of care and security between hospital staff and patients organized through sound? This article argues that a shifting distinction between meaningful sound and noise is fundamental to the lived experience of immersion in an organizational acoustic environment. Based around a qualitative study of listening practices and ‘ear-work’ at a medium-secure forensic psychiatric hospital, using interview and photo-production methods, the a…
What do You do for a Living Then?' The Political Ramifications of Research Interests within Everyday Interpersonal Contexts
Dis/Locating Blame
This article examines issues of sexuality and identity for women who have been sexually abused as children. It is based on five in-depth semi-structured interviews with women who were `identified' as survivors of childhood sexual abuse, a study which, in turn, forms part of a larger project exploring social constructions of sexual abuse in childhood (in therapeutic and self-help settings). A discourse analytic approach is used to explore how vari…
Painting pictures of embodied experience
This paper is based upon the work of an ongoing, collective research project that is concerned with embodiment. The co-researchers have used a variety of methods, including memory work and the analysis of discourse, in order to trace the ways in which meanings are constructed and lived, with and through the body. These methods have relied solely on transcripts of text as data. Growing awareness of the limitations this imposed on the research, par…
Transforming Past Agency and Action in the Present
A weakness of contemporary ‘forensic’ models of memory is their reliance on the belief that ‘a chain of successive memories’ creates a sense of continuity and stability in the self. This literal presentation of memory forecloses an attending to its practical use (in specific contexts and moments in time) and the subsequent ambivalences individuals experience when trying to make sense of past episodes of child sexual abuse. Drawing variously on Ha…
How can we help when she won't tell us what's wrong?’ Professionals working with South Asian women who have experienced sexual abuse
In this paper, we explore some of the issues facing professionals in the UK currently involved in providing services for South Asian women who have experienced sexual abuse. The study describes part of a wider Economic and Social Research Council funded project, based upon interviews and focus groups with both professionals and women survivors of sexual abuse. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews and two focus groups with 37 professionals includ…
Mental health teaching to UK psychology undergraduates
One of the limitations on developing more progressive applied psychology training is the teaching received by students at undergraduate level. In this study, we focus on the provision of teaching about mental health or its equivalents (e.g. abnormal psychology and clinical psychology) on UK undergraduate psychology programmes. Most students who go on to train as clinical psychologists will have received teaching on modules like these. A survey qu…
Vicarious and post‐memory practices in adopting families
In this paper, we explore how adoptive parents manage and order visual information relating to their adoptive child's birth or foster family. More specifically, our task is to make sense of the ways in which the memories that children have of their past families are (re)constructed and managed within the context of present adoptive parental concerns. Life story books have become a dominant way in which narratives of the child's past family are fo…
The scenes and spaces of anxiety
On Psychology and Embodiment
The Mediating Role of Objects in Recollections of Adult Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse
Recollection of child sexual abuse involves complex issues of agency—both in the past and in the present. Adult women survivors face the further obstacle of ingrained cultural tendencies to question women’s testimony. Ambiguity and ambivalence are found in adult women’s accounts of their past abuse and present particular dilemmas. Drawing on social remembering approaches developed in memory studies, it is argued that recollections have to negotia…
IV. Self-disclosure in Teaching Sexuality Courses
Constructions of `Culture' in Accounts of South Asian Women Survivors of Sexual Violence
The aim of this article is to explore some of the ways in which British South Asian women survivors of sexual violence (in particular, those who are either British born or have lived in the UK for most of their lives and are fluent English speakers) construct the effects of `culture' within their accounts of sexually violent experiences. We present a discursive analysis based on semi-structured interviews with eight English-speaking women of Sout…
Spatial markings
In this article, I argue that material locations (spaces) are not simply peripheral to acts of remembering but central to how the ongoing flow of memory and agency is constituted and experienced by individuals in their practice of memorial self-interpretation. This argument, however, can only be accepted when selfhood is treated as a form, a process, as opposed to a determinate substance. Examples from autobiography, psychological research, ficti…
Footprints in a Toxic Landscape
This article discusses the emotional intensity of reflexive supervision of a reflexive method, Free Association Narrative Interview (FANI), and the necessity of that intensity for insightful analysis of interview data. Two supervisors were involved in the work of validating interpretations in interviews with domestically abusive men. The different ways they chose to engage the material was partly their reaction to the toxicity of the material, an…
He's a good-looking chap aint he
Researching “experience”
In this paper, we explore some of the tensions involved in the process of engaging with embodiment research. Although a significant volume of discursive work on “the body” and its role in social relations now exists, there is little in the way of empirical research that moves the focus away from discourse alone to concentrate on other modalities, such as embodied feelings, sensations, and engagements with the world. We begin by briefly reviewing …
Moving beyond the surface
This article examines experiential accounts of young women's embodied experiences in everyday life, using a narrative and visual approach. The life history interview was aided by the use of photographs as a means to access specific memories of embodied experiences, rather than generic accounts of ‘the body’. In so doing, young women constructed two versions of embodied experiences: ‘the female body as surface’; and ‘being an embodied self through…
Visual Methods in Psychology
Pictures of our first day at school, a special birthday, holidays, weddings, friends, and new additions to the family; photograph albums capture particular moments in a life. In providing opportunities for storytelling, generating laughter over outdated fashions or changing hair-styles, and allowing the rehearsal and creation of family histories, photographs are also a site for constructing a sense of the past and creating a bridge between the pa…
Heterotopias of control
Embodying limb absence in the negotiation of sexual intimacy
Some people with physical disabilities experience difficulties in forming and maintaining intimate and sexual relationships ( Taleporos and McCabe, 2001 ). Individuals with physical impairments may variously be seen as inferior, ‘not up to scratch’ and can be less valued than those thought to embody the cultural ideal of ‘normality’ ( Edwards and Imrie, 2003 ). The loss of an anatomical part such as an arm or a leg can therefore set up a complex …
Vital memories
The focus on the practice of remembering has been highly productive for memory studies, but it creates difficulties in understanding personal commitment to particular versions of the past. Autobiographical memories of difficult and distressing past episodes – or ‘vital memories’ – require extensive and ongoing management. We describe the issues that arise when vital memories are expressed across a range of specific interactional contexts. Seven t…
Turning around on experience
In this article, we argue that emergent interests in social interaction, wider context and culture with regards to memory have united formerly disparate approaches within the discipline of psychology, namely, that from the discursive and experimental cognitive paradigms. Here, we develop the argument on the centrality of interaction and continuity and present an expanded approach that is best able to incorporate distressing events, which we call …
Transformations of self and sexuality
Forensic mental health inpatients in medium-secure settings have a limited capacity for sexual expression during their stay in hospital. This is due to a number of factors, including a lack of willingness on behalf of staff to engage with sexual issues, as a result of safety fears and ambiguity regarding the ability of the patient to consent. Furthermore, UK forensic medium-secure units do not provide conjugal suites for patients to have sexual r…
Seeking fluid possibility and solid ground
Zip me up, and cool me down”
Psychology (44 obras) · Sociology (39 obras) · Social Psychology (24 obras) · Computer Science (21 obras) · Epistemology (16 obras) · Social Psychology (16 obras) · Social science (16 obras) · Mental health (15 obras) · Political science (15 obras) · Psychiatry (15 obras)