Dr Tanya Frances

Tanya is one of the founding members of LEED and a Lecturer in Psychology and Counselling based at The Open University in the UK. Tanya has an interest in trauma, gender-based violence, domestic abuse, social inequalities, and critical approaches to exploring eating disorders/eating distress. More broadly, Tanya is interested in engaging with how personal lived experiences and stories intersect and are shaped by broader socio-political structures and systems. Tanya is interested in feminist and narrative approaches to research that centre victim-survivor voices, lived experiences, and that attend to personal-socio-political intersections.

Tanya is also a counsellor and psychotherapist. In practice, she integrates humanistic, feminist, compassion-focused, and mindfulness approaches. Tanya is a member of the Intersectional Violences Research Group, an international group of researchers who work to address issues around gender-based violence from a feminist psychological perspective. She also sits on the committee of the British Psychological Society’s (BPS) Psychology of Women and Equalities Section.

Tanya’s own lived experience of an eating disorder underpins her interest in research around bodies, eating-related distress, and our relationships with food and our bodies. When not working, you can find Tanya out in nature, on her yoga mat, with family and friends, or curled up with her cat, Orla, a coffee, and a good book

• Understanding the use of BMI as a referal and treatment criteria for Eating Disorders: Qualitative study (LEED Project).
• UNDER CONSTRUCTION

Not necessarily a complete list

• Frances, T. (2024). Listening for what is unsaid. A trauma-informed storytelling approach could help young adult clients process the effects of childhood domestic abuse. Therapy Today. October 2024.
• Frances, T., Turley, E., Donnelly, L. C. (2024). Guest editorial. Coercive control: A decade later. Psychology of Women and Equalities Review, 7(1), 2-5. https://doi.org/10.53841/bpspowe.2024.7.1.2
• Frances, T. (2024). A dialogical narrative approach to transitions and change in young women’s lives after domestic abuse in childhood: Considerations for counselling and psychotherapy. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069885.2023.2292747
• Frances, T., & Lucas, S. E. (2023) Participatory research with women in the perinatal period: Considerations for reflexive, community-oriented and power-sensitive research practices. Qualitative Social Work. 10.1177/14733250231214203
• Frances, T., O’Neill, K., & Newman, K. (2023) “An extra fight I didn’t ask for”: A qualitative survey exploring the impact of calories on menus for people with experience of eating disorders. British Journal of Health Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjhp.12685
• Thompson, L., Turley, E. L., Frances, T., Donnelly. L. C., Lazard, L., Bassra, S., Castellino, C., Christie, D., Hubbard, K., Jia, X., Keating, G., Lobban, R., Luo, T., Mishra, A., Moore, N., & Smith, B. (2023). Doing Feminisms on the Ground: Challenges and Opportunities for Critical Feminist Psychologies. Psychology of Women and Equalities Review, 6(1), 5 – 19.
• Frances, T. & Carter, G. (2023). Negotiating power, choice and agency: Working towards centralising children’s voices in the domestic violence and abuse intervention evidence-base, in Taylor, J., and Bates, E. Eds. Children and adolescents’ experiences of violence at home: Current theory, research and practitioner insights . Routledge.
• Frances, T. (2022) “It’s just kind of this thing that I need to navigate”: Young women’s stories of recoveries after domestic abuse in childhood. Violence Against Women, 29(11), 2127-2146. DOI: 10.1177/10778012221125498
• Frances, T. (2022) Feminist listening and becoming: Voice poems as a method of working with young women’s stories of domestic abuse in childhood. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 20(1), 52-73. DOI: 10.1080/14780887.2022.2071785
• Beetham, T., Turley, E., Lazard, L., Thompson, L., & Donnelly, L. C. (2021). An intersectional feminist response to the UK government’s Violence Against Women and Girls 2021-2024 Strategy consultation. Psychology of Women and Equalities Review (4): 2.
• Beetham, T., and Pope, K. (2020) Sustaining selfhood and embracing ‘selves’ in psychology: Risks, vulnerabilities and sustaining relationships, in Randall, J. Eds. Surviving Clinical Psychology: How to make the most of your journey to qualification. Routledge.
• Frances, T., Gabriel, L., and James, H. (2019) Young children’s narrations of relational recovery: A school-based group for children who have experienced domestic violence. Journal of Family Violence, 34, 565-575. DOI: 10.1007/s10896-018-0028-7
• Beetham, T. (2019) Intersectionality and Social Justice. Therapy Today
• Gabriel, L., Tizro, Z., James, H., Cronin-Davies, J., Frances, T., Corbally, A., Moreno-Lopez, E. and Hill, S. (2018) “Give me some space”: Exploring youth to parent aggression and violence. Journal of Family Violence, 33(2): 161-169. DOI 10.1007/s10896-017-9928-1
• Gabriel, L., James, H., Tizro, Z., Cronin-Davies, J., Beetham, T., Hullock, A. and Raynar, A. (2017) Reflexive research with mothers and children victims of domestic violence. Counselling and Psychotherapy Review, 17 (2): 157 – 165. doi.org/10.1002/capr.12117

Not necessarily a complete list