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This article provides an account of using reflexive participatory methods including study advisory group membership to evaluate a perinatal wellbeing service in an economically deprived area of Scotland. There is little qualitative research that explores the experiences of women accessing perinatal mental health services. This article draws on feminist values and narrative theory to explore the practice, process and ethics of using participatory methods with women in the perinatal period. We explore the blurring of intervention and research group boundaries to consider the service and study advisory group as a space which provided the conditions for collective care and re-storying the self. We explore the study advisory group as an extension of the intervention itself, highlighting the role of community in research practices and in interventions, for women who experience perinatal mental health difficulties. We reflect on the ‘sticky’ practice of navigating epistemic and decision-making power in participatory research, including the dual positionalities of being two academic researchers who come to research with therapeutic training in counselling, psychotherapy and social work. We call for reflexive, community-oriented and flexible approaches when using participatory methods with populations that might be considered vulnerable, marginalised or stigmatised.

Objectives The UK government made it mandatory for large restaurants and cafes in England to display calorie labels on menus. Existing evidence identifies minimal potential for benefit, but significant potential for harm to those with eating disorders. To date, only one published study has directly explored the impact of this legislation on those with eating disorders. This study explores the impact of calorie labelling on menus on adults with experience of eating disorders in England. Design A qualitative online survey was designed and distributed, and 399 adults with current or past experience/s of eating disorders completed the survey. Methods Reflexive thematic analysis was used, informed by a critical realist approach. Results Six themes were developed: (1) impacts on relationships, (2) exclusion and increased isolation, (3) restricted freedom, (4) dis/embodiment, (5) anger and frustration at the perpetuation of diet culture and (6) we are all responsible for ourselves. Most participants felt calorie labels on menus is detrimental to their eating disorder and/or recovery. People are navigating multiple opposing cultural narratives around health, bodies and eating disorder recovery that can put additional barriers in place to developing a relationship with food and body that they would like. Conclusions Calorie labelling on menus is likely to adversely impact those with eating disorders. Menus with calories should be available separately but should not be the first or only one provided. People with experience of eating disorders should be directly involved in the development of public health legislation and policy that is likely to affect them.

Participant Authors (listed alphabetically): Simran Bassra, Celine Castellino, Danielle Christie, Katherine Hubbard, Xintong Jia, Gabby Keating, Rosemary Lobban, Taoyuan Luo, Ankita Mishra, Nikki Moore, Becky Smith. Feminist psychological perspectives remain peripheral in mainstream psychological spaces and broader applied settings. This can make it difficult to do feminist psychological work. In this article, we discuss key challenges facing a group of feminist psychologists working in various specialist areas of theory and practice. The discussion was generated from a roundtable session facilitated by the authors at the Psychology of Women and Equalities Section Annual Conference in July, 2022 in response to the conference theme of ‘Doing feminism on the ground’. The roundtable aimed to create space for participants to discuss the challenges of doing feminist work. The roundtable also aimed to generate shared strategies for resisting these challenges. Here, we were guided by Sara Ahmed’s call to ‘stay with the difficulty’ of feminist work in order to learn from this. Challenges included professional exclusion, isolation, epistemic erasure, and self-censorship. Strategies included ‘rewriting the questions’, refusing to engage with over-simplistic requests, and (re)centering power and its implications. Roundtable participants are listed as participant authors, and their words co-construct and flow through this account. This article therefore presents a collaborative account of the challenges and opportunities facing this group in their efforts to do feminisms on the ground.

Those who experience parental domestic abuse in childhood are affected in multiple ways, but existing research uses a narrow lens, relying on psychotherapeutic and neuroscientific understandings. This article uses a dialogical theory (Hermans, 2001) to explore women’s recovery stories. Interviews were conducted with ten women in England and a voice-centred narrative analysis was used. This article attends to gendered, psychotherapeutic, and neoliberal narrative resources that shaped participants’ stories. It concludes that recoveries after domestic abuse in childhood can be considered as dynamic processes that are individual, as well as shaped by social, political, and relational contexts that shape storytelling practices.

Domestic abuse in childhood is seriously impactful, but very little literature uses a critical lens to consider implications for counsellors and psychotherapists working with young adults following domestic abuse in childhood. This article draws on research that explored 10 young women’s accounts of transitions to adulthood after domestic abuse in childhood. Interviews with young adult women in England were conducted and a feminist dialogical narrative analysis was used. Findings suggest that socio-cultural structures and ideologies that shape dominant discourses about what growing up after domestic abuse in childhood means, and what “successful” adult femininity looks like, shaped how women made sense of their experiences. This has implications for counsellors and psychotherapists working with this client group. This article concludes that storytelling could be a powerful therapeutic tool, and attention to power, ambiguity and tensions when working with this client group might facilitate and generate important meaning-making and knowledge in therapy.