The rising prevalence and complexity of online harms, particularly those disproportionately affecting women, demand urgent, interdisciplinary, and socio-technical responses. Despite increasing awareness and policy action, current responses remain fragmented across disciplinary silos, limiting the development of cohesive and effective interventions. This paper presents our efforts to co-create a comprehensive Gender-aware Ontology of Online Harms as a shared knowledge structure to bridge disciplinary perspectives and inform practice across sectors, including policing, law, behavioural science, and technology. Our ontology aims to capture the full spectrum of gender-based online harms, their sociotechnical enablers and inhibitors, and their manifestations in online contexts. The development process employs a co-creation approach grounded in collaborative ontology engineering and iterative stakeholder engagement. It has been driven by discipline-specific Personas and Competency Questions to ensure relevance, usability, and impact across diverse domains. We argue that this work represents a crucial step toward formalising a shared understanding of online harms to support policy reform, technological innovation, and survivor support.

Online violence against women (OVAW) is a growing global problem with deepfakes in gender-based violence as one manifestation of this that has recently attracted considerable attention. This scoping review aims to explore emerging complexities in current academic understandings of deepfake in relation to its use in gender-based violence. The review considers how these issues impact and shape what is currently known about deepfakes in relation to OVAW. Articles were collected between July and September 2024 and then filtered drawing on the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Review guidelines. Six research databases were searched using 12 search terms compiled by three of the article authors. This resulted in a total number of 3148 articles that were filtered to identify 397 articles that were reviewed in full. The subset was further filtered in order to focus on psychology and the social sciences resulting in a total of 64 articles for analysis. As psychology and the social sciences begin to capture the implications of deepfake creation and dissemination, in the context of online sexual violence, there is a need to investigate how deepfakes are used to silence women in public spaces online, as well as empirically acknowledging the inherent gendered systemic discriminations within deepfake technology and its uses. While important, research must move beyond perceived credibility and detection techniques of deepfakes and toward an analysis of intersectional power dynamics at play in this form of gender-based violence.

The public condemnation of high-profile men accused of gendered violence in 2017 resulted in an upsurge of women labelling past experiences as sexual harassment. This study used Q methodology to explore understandings of sexual harassment in the UK. Forty participants sorted 62 statements into quasi-normal grids which were factor analyzed (by person). Eight factors were identified which were titled: Sex Not Sexism, Sexualized Discriminations, Victim Voice, Sameness and Difference, Power/Sex, Repeated Power Abuse, Personal Boundaries, and Masculinity and Heterosexism. Taken together, they signal that feminist efforts to articulate the experience of sexual harassment have gained ground during this period.

This Special Issue sets out to consider gendered family relationships in digital spaces. These spaces, including social media, digital media, streaming services, and web pages, have increased access to family-focused content online. Drawing on critical feminist psychological perspectives that question the prioritisation of essentialist and normative conceptualisations of family and gender, this special issue examines the phenomenon of digital mothering within families (Lazard, 2022). Through a feminist lens focusing on gender and relationships, it considers the manifold ways in which mothering is embedded in familial constructions, practices, and representations. Engagement in digital spaces has notably subject in both academic and popular arenas. sel e posting practices typically whilst posting ” social and ’ these linguistically gender-neutral characterisations obscure the fact that these practices are, in the context of online platforms, highly gendered and feminised et al., 2015).

Images and representations of parenting, and particularly mothering, have become commonplace on social media platforms over the past decade. These displays, however, take place in the context of popular contemporary discourses around gender and parenting that are in many ways prescriptive. This paper explores the constructions of mothering online through an analysis of posts about mothers on Mother’s Day from 2018 to 2020. Data were collected from Instagram and Twitter using hashtags such as #mothersday, #happymothersday and #motheringsunday. Both content and thematic analyses were conducted. This paper will consider three main themes that were identified in the data: “Beauty & biology”; “Grief & loss” and “Care (& COVID)”, with a focus on constructions of gendered parenting and family through the explicit celebration of the lives and roles of mothers. The findings provide insight into normative constructions of gender and how these are mediated through the affordances of social media platforms in a neoliberal context.

The Psychology of Women and Equalities Section (POWES) of the British Psychological Society (BPS) accounts for much of the feminist action in British psychology and beyond. In this qualitative study, we use discursively informed thematic analysis to examine a set of eleven in-depth interviews to explore the everyday experiences of feminists within academic spaces in and around the discipline of psychology in the United Kingdom. Three research questions addressing the boundary between activism and academia; the provision of support; and differing approaches to knowledge production were investigated. Our findings highlight the role of POWES as a feminist community as well as the conceptual importance of notions of home, work, and fun. Moreover, the paper examines the ways traditional conceptions of scientific rigour continue to haunt feminist spaces, as does the invisibility of emotional labour. Overall, our findings indicate that the place of feminist academic communities remains vital to sustain critical thought and action: having an intellectual “home” is pivotal to the survival of feminist psychology as well as feminists in psychology.

Selfie posting is now a well-established practice, particularly for young women. However, it is nevertheless much maligned in popular discourses. As a counterpoint to digital narcissism, selfie posting is also constituted as relational. This Q methodological study explored how young women make sense of selfie practices. Twenty-seven young women aged 18–23 sorted a set of statements about selfies into a quasi-normal grid. These sorts were factor analysed to identify shared patterns. Four factors were identified which were subsequently analysed qualitatively, producing a narrative for each. These included (1) ‘Presenting . . . Me!’, (2) ‘I am what I am’, (3) ‘Sharing is caring’ and (4) ‘The In-crowd – beautiful and popular’. The complexity of identity curation evidenced in this study highlights the importance of moving beyond both polarised characterisations and the pathologisation of young women selfie takers in order to explicate the interplay between normative femininities and the digital self.

Feminism & Psychology ( F&P) was launched in 1991 with a sense of possibility, enthusiasm and excitement as well as a sense of urgent need – to critique and reconstruct mainstream psychology (theory, research methods, and clinical practice). Thirty years have now passed since the first issue was produced. Thirty volumes with three or four issues have been published each year, thanks to the efforts of many. On the occasion of F&P’s 30th anniversary, we, the present and past editors, reflect on successes, changes and challenges in relation to the journal. We celebrate the prestigious awards accruing to the journal, its editors, and authors, and the significant contributions the journal has made to critical feminist scholarship at the interface of feminisms and psychologies. We note some of the theoretical and methodological developments and social changes witnessed over the last three decades. We highlight challenges facing feminist researchers in academia as well as international feminist publishing. We conclude that the initial enthusiasm and excitement expressed by the then editorial collective was justified. But, there is still much work to be done.

Memorializes Rhoda K. Unger (1939-2019). Unger was a feminist empiricist psychologist who advocated for the importance of asking the right questions. Her academic work, her activism, and her engagement with psychology as a discipline were all informed by a heartfelt and enduring commitment to social justice. Laudably, she mentored, encouraged, and supported countless early career feminist scholars as they found their way in the discipline. In 1998, Rhoda became professor emerita after almost 30 years at Montclair State University and joined Brandeis University as resident scholar at the Women's Studies Research Center. Across her career, she maintained a commitment to activism within psychology. She served as president of the American Psychological Association (APA) divisions the Society for the Psychology of Women (1980 -1981) and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPPSI; 1998 -1999) and was the inaugural editor of the SPSSI journal . (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The identity of stepmother is, in many ways, a troubled one – constructed as “other” and often associated with notions of “wickedness” in literature and everyday talk. This paper reports findings from a study on the difficulties faced by stepmothers and how they use talk about their (male) partners, often constructing men as hapless, helpless or hopeless, to repair their “troubled” identities. The data were collected from a web forum for stepmothers based in the UK and 13 semi-structured face-to-face interviews with stepmothers. The analysis took a synthetic narrative-discursive methodological approach, underpinned by feminist theory with particular attention to the discourses that were drawn on by participants and the constraints that these imposed. This paper presents these findings in relation to three constructions of their partners through which repair work was attempted: men as in need of rescue; men as flawed fathers; and men as damaged. The paper concludes with some suggestions for supporting stepmothers by challenging dominant narratives around families in talk, in the media and in government and institutional policies.

The coming together of parenting and routine posting on social networking sites has become a visible and recognisable theme, and the term "sharenting" has found a place in everyday talk to describe some forms of parental digital sharing practices. However, while social media has undoubtedly provided a space for parents to share experiences and receive support around parenting, sharenting remains a contestable issue. Thus, one reading of sharenting would be as a display of good parenting as mothers "show off" their children as a marker of success. However, the term also can be used pejoratively to describe parental oversharing of child-focused images and content. In this paper, we explore the practice of sharenting in terms of pride, affect and the politics of digital mothering in a neoliberal context to conclude that sharenting can be best understood as a complex affective and intersectional accomplishment that produces motherhood and family as communicative activities within digital social practices.