GUDTP Annual Conference 2026 | Abstracts

The ongoing war in Gaza has created an urgent humanitarian and mental health crisis, yet adolescence is often overlooked as a distinct developmental period within conflict research and intervention efforts. Adolescents are navigating repeated loss, uncertainty, and disruption at a critical stage. Understanding how adolescents make sense of these experiences is essential for developing appropriate and effective support. To address this gap, this talk reflects on the process of planning a qualitative study exploring how adolescents (12–17) experience and interpret loss in the context of ongoing conflict. The study involves interviews with adolescents and their caregivers, focusing on trauma-related cognitive processes such as memory, meaning-making, identity, and coping. Planning this research highlights how the Gaza’s context reshapes conventional qualitative approaches. Reliance on humanitarian organisations for recruitment, risk of perceived coercion in aid-dependent environments, and constraints on privacy and safety all complicate the research process. These challenges are further shaped by the need to manage participant distress, ensure culturally appropriate and trauma-informed methods, and navigate researcher positionality. In such contexts, “fieldwork” becomes an ongoing ethical practice requiring reflexivity, flexibility, and collaboration with local stakeholders. Attending to adolescence within this setting therefore requires approaches grounded in local realities and developmental context.

This legal geography study examines the legal and political barriers to criminalising ecocide in England post-Brexit. Using thematic analysis, it explores how ecocide is discussed in Parliament, drawing on speeches and interviews with Members of both Houses. The research explores how ecocide is framed in parliamentary discourse, the extent of legislative support and the reasons it remains excluded from UK criminal law despite growing ecological urgency.

There is a growing interest among humanitarian agencies to support the transition to sustainable energy in refugee settlements. Along side this global movement, community-based organisations are doing the production and distribution of energy products in their small ways. Using a case study of Kyaka II refugee settlement in Uganda, I ethnographically explore how interactions and contestations between the international humanitarian energy governance and the community-based agenda shape the energy outcomes for households in settlements. I draw upon the conceptual framework of Barnett and Duvall (2005) to unpack how power mediates these interactions and shapes the emergence of a settlement-level energy regime. Preliminary findings reveal a struggle among energy actors to harmonise their diverse interests, rendering non-humanitarian actors humanitarian and occasioning technological failures of improved cookstoves, a process I call ‘humanitarianization of energy’.  I also argue that, during the process of exchange humanitarian actors command institutional power over refugees; and while refugee-led organisations have the potential to fill gaps in the provision of cooking solutions, they run the risk of being co-opted.  Humanitarianization of energy makes critical contribution to the understanding of the processes of how ‘power produces power’ (Rosenberg-Jansen, 2022) and mirrors the wider processes of humanitarian cooperation.

Queer methodology shapes every aspect of my thesis on LGBTQ+ university student experiences in England, including both my writing process and its outputs. In this presentation, I conceptualise ‘queer’ as a verb and demonstrate how I queer academic conventions in my writing, for example, by explaining critical ideologies using metaphors. I draw on specific scholars and queer media as influences. I explore tensions between queer writing practices and academic expectations, which relates to the challenge of balancing my researcher identity with the formal requirements of a thesis. More broadly, I reflect on how personal values, interests, and theoretical commitments are interwoven with research processes and writing, and when that interweaving is useful or potentially distracting for both authors and readers. Finally, I consider how queer writing practices may increase or limit the accessibility and impact of my research. This reflection encourages playing with writing processes and styles and exploring opportunities that can be gained from doing so.

Forthcoming

This PhD project seeks to investigate the potential of community football clubs in England as catalysts for sustainable development and wellbeing. Due to their unique capacity to engage communities, football clubs have long been used by governments as a vehicle for achieving non-sporting objectives. Yet, the potential of football to contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals remains critically underexplored, with existing literature offering limited insights.

The research adopts a multi‑phase mixed‑methods design, with Phase One comprising a national mapping survey of clubs competing across Steps 1–6 of the English National League System. The survey captures data on club characteristics, governance arrangements, values, decision‑making priorities, sustainability practices, community and wellbeing activities, resource capacity, and perceived challenges. Particular attention is paid to how clubs understand sustainability across human, social, economic, and environmental domains, and how they navigate trade‑offs between sporting performance and wider community objectives.

Findings from the mapping survey will establish an empirical baseline for understanding the diversity of the non league game. This baseline will underpin subsequent qualitative phases of the research, which explore in greater depth how sustainability and wellbeing are negotiated, prioritised, and sustained within community football contexts.

We tested Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius) using a three-container task (Mody & Carey, 2016). One reward was hidden in a single cup, and another in one of two paired cups. When allowed to choose only one cup, the optimal strategy is to select the singleton, which always contains a reward, whereas each of the pair contains a reward with 50% probability. In Study 1 (N = 9), jays chose the singleton above chance (61% vs. 50%). To examine the basis of this performance, we assessed sensitivity to alternative possibilities through additional measures. Study 2 (N = 6) measured search duration and exploratory behaviour using sand-filled cups, including empty trials. On empty trials, jays searched longer after choosing a singleton (28.88 s) than a paired cup (9.43 s), consistent with violated expectation. Study 3 (N = 9) replicated this pattern. Study 4 (N = 9) examined posture. Jays showed increased head movements before choosing from the pair, suggesting greater uncertainty, and more head movements after unrewarded singleton choices, indicating surprise. They also bent more deeply when inspecting empty singletons. Across studies, jays preferred the singleton and exhibited converging behavioural markers of distinguishing certain from uncertain outcomes.

Camden Council has developed a missions-driven strategy that seeks to address key challenges facing the London Borough of Camden through a relational approach to engagement. Central to this agenda are efforts to rebuild networks of social infrastructure across the borough. This presentation draws on participatory action research conducted in collaboration with council staff and local residents to examine how these ambitions are being enacted in practice. Focusing on the Kentish Town neighbourhood, the research traces the development of a youth action forum designed to engage young people aged 16–25 who are not in education, employment, or training (NEET).

Critical Border Studies has brought to light that borders are not just places but practices and processes that create, maintain and reproduce them. By conducting a year-long ethnography at the rural intersections of the Republic of Cyprus, the de-facto Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, the United Nations and the British Overseas Territories administration, I demonstrate the processual condition of borders at a micro, village level in Cyprus. I exemplify how the core values of tight-knit village communities, such as deference to kinship, seniors, death and rituals impact border operations. Thus, I emphasise how values inform the practices through which borders are maintained, domesticated and incorporated into everyday life. I explore neglected questions around adaptation to the challenging conditions of protracted borders and propose a spatial broadening of border studies in Cyprus by moving away from Nicosia, often exceptionalised as the last divided capital in Europe.

Since the Global Financial Crisis, macroprudential policy has emerged as one of the most prominent instruments for safeguarding financial stability and shaping the dynamics of both the financial sector and the broader economy. Despite a growing body of research, important questions remain regarding its optimal design in environments where sovereign risk is non-trivial. This paper contributes to the literature by examining the macroeconomic impacts and optimal conduct of macroprudential policy in the presence of significant sovereign default risk. To this end, we develop a two-country heterogeneous agents model featuring financial frictions and endogenous sovereign default. The framework captures the interplay between private borrowing decisions, cross-border financial linkages, and the fiscal vulnerabilities that can amplify systemic risk. Within this setting, we characterise the optimal macroprudential policy and explore how the threat of sovereign default shapes the regulator's incentives and instruments.

In England, longitudinal cohort studies and hospital admission data indicate a marked deterioration in young people’s mental health over the past two decades. Over the same period, access to social media platforms has expanded rapidly, prompting concern that digital technologies may be contributing to worsening mental health. However, robust causal evidence has been hampered by methodological challenges, leaving many to wonder whether social media causes poor mental health or whether young people with poor mental health simply use social media more. This project exploits the rollout of 3G mobile internet coverage across England to estimate the impact of high-speed internet access on adolescent mental health. We will first examine changes in mental health outcomes across local authorities over time. We will then assess heterogeneity in effects across key sociodemographic groups, including age and gender, to identify potential inequalities in how digital technologies influence mental health.

Educational differences increasingly structure political attitudes, but whether they also structure political trust remains underexplored. Two obstacles to answering this question are the limited existing causal evidence and the difficulty in disentangling the varied effects of education. We address these challenges by analysing compulsory schooling reforms. We propose three mechanisms through which educational reforms may influence trust: by extending the duration of schooling, by altering the structure of educational tracking, and by revising the curriculum. Using a staggered difference-in-differences design, we examine a large-scale Swedish reform that simultaneously changed all three dimensions. We then draw on a comparative dataset of compulsory schooling reforms across Europe to separately test each mechanism. Our findings suggest that well-designed educational reforms could alleviate political distrust. 

The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the use of the telephone to provide bereavement support, and this is now being provided annually to thousands of bereaved people.  However, there is limited evidence concerning its role and impact in the context of support.  My presentation will therefore addresses an under-researched area, focusing on service providers’ perspectives on the use of the telephone to provide bereavement support. 

Cruse Bereavement Support (the UK’s largest bereavement support charity) made a dramatic shift by moving much of their in-person support provision, to telephone and online support.  Therefore, online semi-structured interviews have been initially conducted with ten Cruse support volunteers, who have provided telephone support to bereaved men.

Reflexive thematic analysis was used to engage with the data. Findings reveal the importance of personal motivation and experience, induction, training, group supervision, and the fostering of togetherness within groups of volunteers.  

These interviews are part of a wider research piece currently underway that is my PhD, which aims to understand how telephone support influences the grief experience of bereaved men.  The aim is to use learning derived from the research, to consider how bereaved men  can be better supported using the telephone.

Simulating dynamics on networks is an important approach to studying how information evolves in social systems, which is widely used to analyze collective behaviors and evaluate interventions in processes such as belief diffusion, influence propagation, and political polarization. However, most existing models rely on fixed, rule-based assumptions about how individuals update their attitudes and social ties, which limits their ability to capture the contextual and language-based nature of real social interactions. While recent work has begun to use large language models (LLMs) to simulate social agents with richer and more flexible behaviors, the problem of how to design effective interventions based on such simulations remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce a general optimization framework for designing intervention strategies in LLM-based network simulations. In particular, we formulate the intervention as a sequential decision-making problem and train a surrogate model to predict the reward from different intervention actions. The proposed framework is model-agnostic and can accommodate different objectives, networks, and intervention mechanisms without requiring explicit knowledge of the underlying dynamics. In the experiments, we evaluate our framework with different LLMs and network structures on a diverse range of real-world topics, and the results demonstrate its effectiveness and strong generalizability across varied simulation settings.

Who is to blame if children regularly miss school? In the 2024/2025 academic year, almost 500,000 penalty notices were issued against parents, and 38,439 prosecutions were carried out nationwide. Prosecutions can lead to three months’ imprisonment or a fine of up to £2,500 under section 444 of the Education Act 1996 - in circumstances where parents may not possess the ordinary minimum requirements for criminal responsibility. The strict liability section 444(1) offence punishes parents in circumstances where they lack both a guilty act (actus reus) and a guilty mind (mens rea). My 10-minute presentation introduces a fresh perspective on procedural justice theory in the "truancy" context, examining both defendants’ and decision-makers’ perceptions of process alongside each other. At the local level, I plan to conduct interviews and observations with Oxfordshire County Council’s attendance team, and state school headteachers and school attendance champions. I will also conduct a national survey of parents to better understand parent-defendants’ perceptions of these processes, and whether these perceptions have affected their relationships with local state organisations. I would like feedback on the research design of my project, and whether this design effectively incorporates my theoretical framework (and vice versa). 

Economic coercion has taken center stage as one of the most pressing challenges facing modern geopolitics. From the tariff war, to the weaponization of critical minerals, sanctions, and the strait of Hormuz, economic tools are a source of immense power for large and small states. Amongst these tools, sanctions occupy a major role, however they are deeply misunderstood by policymakers and scholars alike. This talk will address some of those misconceptions. It will begin by offering a brief history of sanctions, before introducing a framework to understand whether an economic measure is a sanction based on the purpose of the measure. The question of effectiveness is intimately linked to any discussion on sanctions, so I will end my talk by introducing an alternative framework for understanding the effectiveness of sanctions based on the distinction between coercion and capacity degradation. I will link my introduction to sanctions, and my claims about it, to real-life examples like the sanctions against Russia, Iran, and others. 

In this presentation I will discuss how I am utilising storytelling, as a method, to understand the psychological experiences of birthing while Black in England. I will illustrate how I am currently utilising elements of Decolonial Critical Participatory Action Research (DCPAR), as a methodology, to engage with a community of Black women to learn and support acts of resistance and liberation within the Black reproductive health space. In the presentation I will also explore the importance of community engagement and collaboration within diasporic communities. I will end the presentation by highlighting the ways in which I have attempted, through my research, to use stories to (re)build the connection between a collective of Black women and research/academia.

This presentation will be exploring the political and philosophical underpinnings of UK government policy in the areas of Higher Education and the Creative Industries. Although substantively different, both share similarities in the way neoliberalism has subtly shaped how we conceptualise these areas of public life. With research that focuses on graduate experiences in the Creative Industries and responds to renewed policy attention on university and creative output, a substantial part of my research is understanding the policy space, associated discourses, and their impact on public perception and experience. Marketisation, instrumentalisation, and individualisation are all political approaches rooted in capitalist structures that enforce the need for utilitarian decision-making and the entrepreneurialism of the self. Investment of time, and resources into something, whether that be studying a degree or contributing to the making of art, must also be economic justified under this model, with an emphasis on self-motivation to succeed rather than state or community-based support. Despite policy efforts such as widening participation schemes and targeted support for underprivileged groups, this has had striking consequences for both diversity and wellbeing, which I will unpick and explain, underscoring why inequalities persist and why graduates in this space are facing such an uncertain future. 

My fieldwork examined how international Building Back Better (BBB) policies shaped political dynamics in Nepal's post-2015 earthquake reconstruction. My thesis combines Political Settlement Analysis, elite theory, and critical disaster studies to analyse the political impact of reconstruction governance. BBB strengthened incumbent political elites and left Nepal's political settlement largely intact, yet simultaneously generated emergent changes, which erupted in Gen-Z protests in September 2025. This paradox reflects different temporal scales and analytical levels at which post-disaster politics operates. At the macro-level, the settlement remained stable as mainstream political parties controlled reconstruction resources and used them to reinforce patronage networks. At meso- and micro-levels, reconstruction seeded longer-term shifts through new elite configurations and transformed state-citizen interactions.
The thesis demonstrates that BBB operated as "state-driven, owner-funded" reconstruction—devolving responsibility to citizens while centralising state regulatory authority. Rather than catalysing political transformation, reconstruction provided new rent sources that stabilised the settlement. Despite lacking organisational holding power, diaspora returnees formed alliances with politically embedded youth, creating hybrid elite formations that may eventually reconfigure Nepal's political landscape. The study contributes theoretical insights on why disasters often consolidate rather than disrupt elite power, and how international frameworks are strategically appropriated through domestic political settlements.

Introduction: Underserved communities and neurodivergent individuals face significant barriers to participating in early years services and research. Our previous work alongside caregivers from minoritised backgrounds identified preferences for peer-led and relationship-centred engagement. However, evidence on the feasibility and acceptability of peer-support models in sensitive research contexts remains limited.

Purpose: This co-produced, mixed-methods research explores: (1) the feasibility and acceptability of using peer-supporters to engage minoritised caregivers of children with connections to autism and ADHD in early years research; (2) barriers and enablers to support-seeking in the early years for families connected to autism and ADHD as reported by caregivers and key stakeholders. 

Method: Participants (caregivers and service stakeholders) will be recruited via purposive and snowball sampling. 120 caregivers will complete a series of questionnaires exploring attitudes and barriers to support-seeking. Parent-peers from the local community will also conduct semi-structured interviews with 40 parents exploring experiences with early years services and attitudes toward sharing sensitive data in a research context. Stakeholders will take part in focus groups led by a researcher. Qualitative data undergoes framework analysis; quantitative data is analysed using R.

Results: We will report on recruitment outcomes, participant demographics, and preliminary thematic and quantitative findings of common barriers to support-seeking for underserved parents and acceptability of engagement via parent peers. 

Conclusions: Findings will inform evidence-based recommendations for responsible, trust-building research engagement practices with vulnerable communities. This work addresses critical gaps in understanding how to ethically engage minoritised families in early years and neurodivergence research whilst building community research capacity.

Keywords: Peer support; neurodivergence; minoritised communities; early years; participatory research

This talk explores how primary school children imagine and articulate justice through participatory action research on school space. It draws on doctoral research concerned with spatial justice in education and with the methodological possibilities of working collaboratively with children as interpreters of their own educational worlds. The talk focuses on a photobook developed with Key Stage 2 pupils in Bristol through a series of creative workshops involving photography, mapping, writing, and collective story telling and discussion. Rather than treating children’s images as simple reflections of experience, the talk approaches the photobook as a site of knowledge production through which children identified spatial inequalities, expressed attachments and exclusions, and imagined alternative arrangements of school life. In doing so, the study asks what children’s spatial imaginaries of justice make visible about the everyday organisation of education, and what participatory visual methods can offer to critical educational research. The paper argues that the photobook did more than document children’s views: it enabled a collaborative and materially grounded form of inquiry into how justice is lived, sensed, and anticipated in school space. By foregrounding children’s visual and narrative work, the talk contributes to debates on participatory methodology, childhood studies, and spatial justice, and suggests that children’s engagements with school space can open important methodological and political questions for educational research.

My study explores the experience of students admitted to two academically selective universities in England through contextual admissions, one in London and one in the North of England. Positioned within the wider frame of higher education access and participation regulation, contextual admissions policy is intended to secure fair access to university for students who are underrepresented as a consequence of individual, socioeconomic and/or educational disadvantage.

Semi-structured interviews with 36 participants, all second year undergraduates, took place in autumn 2024. Applying a multi-dimensional conceptual framework to analysis, I show how participant narratives reflect complex and nuanced intersections of identity, agency and belonging in the context of their university. I will present summary findings from thematic analysis of participant narratives, focusing on how their identity influenced their application to university, their experience of settling in, and the factors that influence their sense of belonging. I will highlight the usefulness of Yuval-Davis’ ‘deconstructive theoretical approach to identity’ (2010: 264) for addressing a key methodological dilemma for my analysis. 

Reference: Yuval-Davis, N., 2010. Theorizing identity: Beyond the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomy. Patterns of prejudice, 44(3), pp.261-280.

The effective and safe integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into clinical practice depends not only on technical performance but also on the cognitive and organisational processes that shape how clinicians engage with these tools. Although these factors are increasingly recognised as critical for adoption and use, comparatively little attention has been paid to the psychological mechanisms that underpin clinician–AI interaction in real clinical environments. This PhD addresses this gap by synthesising established psychological literatures and examining their relevance across diverse clinical settings. The thesis begins with a narrative review of three core domains in decision-making psychology—trust, advice-taking, and group-based decision-making—to identify mechanisms through which clinicians interpret, evaluate, and use AI. This synthesis underpins empirical work at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, combining evaluation of Ambient Voice Technologies with ethnographic case studies in dermatology and intensive care, and a case study of a kidney transplant decision-support system examining clinician involvement.

In South Africa—which has one of the largest HIV epidemics globally—adolescent girls and young women face intersecting social and structural challenges that increase their vulnerability to both early unintended pregnancy and HIV acquisition. Younger maternal age has been associated with higher rates of mother-to-child (vertical) transmission of HIV and poorer treatment outcomes. Yet, there remains limited research on how adolescent mothers engage with HIV vertical transmission prevention services: who is most at risk of discontinuing care, and when? Using data from a cohort of n=1,028 adolescent mothers and their children in the Eastern Cape, South Africa, I quantified attrition at each step of the prevention and care 'cascade', as outlined in national clinical guidelines. Then, I used multivariate logistic regression models and marginal effects analysis to determine which maternal sociodemographic factors were associated with care disengagement. Results showed that young mothers from rural areas, living with family in formal housing had double the predicted probability of postnatal care continuation than those in urban areas, living alone or with a partner in informal housing (85% vs 37%, p<0.001). These findings support the need for youth-friendly health policies that are responsive to their unique social and structural contexts. 

“Economic trade” describes a set of universal procedures involving the exchange of goods, fundamental to societal welfare and global markets but also necessary for daily life (The UK’s Trade Strategy, 2025). At its most basic level, trading occurs between individuals. From a neuroscientific perspective, it constitutes a paradigm of complex social cognition: the successful completion of a trade requires (i) subjective valuations of available goods (e.g., different foods), (ii) perspective-taking for social trading partners, and (iii) integrating reward valuations for self and other to determine a mutually acceptable exchange. Application of economic theory allows mathematical linkage of these pieces and estimation of optimal choices. However, the neural mechanisms underlying such economic trading decisions remain unknown. This study observed human brain activity (fMRI) and behaviour while participants exchanged goods during realistic, social trading experiments. Despite differences in individual preferences, most trades were successful and increased overall utility. Analysis of fMRI data will identify brain areas encoding key information and establish the validity of using neural signals to predict trading outcomes in naturalistic situations. These findings demonstrate patterns in human trading behaviour consistent with economic theory and may provide insights into the cognitive strategies shaping trade decisions.

Financial conservation incentives have become central to the contemporary nature recovery agenda. Despite their increasing prominence in practice and discourse dominance multilaterally, these economic incentives have struggled to consistently deliver financially competitive, ecologically permanent and socially equitable nature recovery. Debate remains polarised between advocates who see private finance as indispensable and critics who reject financialisation of nature altogether. However, the rapid growth in policy and practice related to biodiversity finance has not been matched by critical, contextualised and empirical analyses of how different institutional models for deploying biodiversity finance shape heterogeneous outcomes and pose different implications for socially equitable nature recovery governance. I address this gap in the English context by shifting analytical attention from the macro-level of this financialised nature recovery regime to the middle (meso) governance level where biodiversity finance is operationalised as a heterogeneous governance field composed of cross-sectoral, multi-level, and multi-stakeholder collaborations that bridge between policy incentives and actor responses. The project examines how diverse institutional models in biodiversity finance navigate (i) financial viability, (ii) multi-dimensional social justice, and (ii) governance dynamics impacting ecological permanence. By taking a comparative case study approach supported by documentary analysis, narrative interviews, and participatory institutional mapping, I consider stakeholders perceived justice across different governance arrangements in of biodiversity finance; alternative locally strategic models, and how the public sector’s role in biodiversity finance governance has evolved in its contemporary institutionally complex post-Global Biodiversity Framework regime. Theoretically, the project brings critical institutionalism and multi-dimensional justice into dialogue with organisation management scholarship underpinned by a science-policy coproduction research approach characterising my collaborative studentship project.

Peace education aims to equip people with the knowledge, skills, and values to prevent or transform conflict and build more just societies, but what does it actually look like in practice? In India, this is a particularly difficult question to answer. Unlike more established areas of education, peace education is a scattered and diffuse field: different groups and individuals carry out related work under many different labels, sometimes without any clear signpost at all. This fragmentation makes the field hard to see, and harder still to advocate for.

I look at how peace education is taught and adapted across India's diverse regional and cultural contexts through the perspectives of those doing the work. Drawing on in-depth interviews with practitioners and stakeholders, I highlight how educators reshape or reinterpret theoretical frameworks through lived experience and local knowledge, and how they work around obstacles such as limited institutional backing, scarce funding, and uneven recognition. Understanding peace education India, I argue, requires looking closely at how it is lived, not only how it is theorised.

Language comprehension involves retrieving previously encountered linguistic representations when they become relevant for interpretation. Evidence from general memory research suggests that successful retrieval depends on internal selective attention that selects and prioritises relevant representations. Whether such attentional selection mechanisms are engaged during language comprehension remains unclear. Across three preregistered experiments, we tested whether anaphoric expressions (e.g., the former/latter) function analogously as internal attentional cues, prioritising goal-relevant words held in working memory. Participants read sentences, followed by anaphoric expressions that referred to one of two target words contained in the sentence. Subsequently, participants were prompted to identify which target word had been referred to. The first two experiments manipulated the predictability of the anaphoric expression (Experiment 1A: predictive; Experiment 1B: non-predictive) and showed improved response performance for cued words, even when the anaphoric retrocue was non-predictive.  In the third experiment, eye tracking revealed gaze biases time-locked to the onset of the anaphoric retrocue, directed toward the prior spatial locations of cued words. These gaze biases provide online evidence of attentional orienting within memory, independent of response-stage decision processes. Together, our findings refine retrieval-based accounts of language comprehension by demonstrating that internal attention supports the selection of language content maintained in memory.

This research examines the social and economic impact of parental alienation on women in Northern Ireland from a zemiological (social harm) perspective. Although empirical evidence supports its recognition as a harmful post-separation form of abuse (Hine, 2024), parental alienation remains societally misunderstood and contested by women’s organisations in Northern Ireland as “a dangerous and harmful concept” (Birchall, 2021).

By situating maternal alienation within Northern Ireland’s post-conflict society, where gender-based violence is epidemic (Lagdon et al., 2023), this research highlights structural harms that enable alienation as coercive control. Drawing on matricentric feminism (O’Reilly, 2016) and assemblage theory (Reveley, 2019), this study examines the fragility of motherhood to explain how the erasure of women in their mothering role can be so readily enacted and legitimised.

This study will map the economic and social harms experienced by alienated mothers in Northern Ireland, using Korosi’s (2021) framework of stigma and stigma consciousness, and analyse how institutional practices within family courts and social services exacerbate these harms. A mixed-methods approach will be used, comprising a survey to assess the prevalence of parental alienation and the gender divide among alienated parents in Northern Ireland, and semi-structured interviews to capture the voices and experiences of alienated mothers.

The prevalence inflation hypothesis suggests rising mental health awareness efforts are contributing to increased reports of common mental health problems. However, few studies have tested this to date. In this talk, two experiments (N = 271, N = 611) with UK-based young adults (aged 18–24) are described. Participants were exposed to Instagram posts from UK mental health charities which normalised and shared relevant psychoeducational information about mental health problems in general (Experiment 1) or anxiety disorders specifically (Experiment 2). Relative to Instagram posts from UK cycling charities (control group), exposure to mental health or anxiety-related content predicted significantly higher state and trait anxiety and a wider concept breadth of mental disorder, whilst adjusting for baseline outcomes. Exploratory analyses found those with higher baseline trait anxiety were more sensitive to the effects of exposure on state anxiety but less sensitive to the effects of exposure on concept breadth. Noting small effect sizes, these results indicate brief exposure to mental health awareness efforts can affect in-the-moment anxiety and how young adults view symptoms within themselves and others. Mental health awareness efforts may therefore be one factor contributing to increased reports of mental health problems. Recommendations for future research will be discussed.