Prof Wendy Hollway

Professional biography

Now as Emeritus Professor, I work with Climate Psychology Alliance. I edit the Climate Crisis Digest, a monthly blog.   I give talks on Climate Psychology and run Climate Cafes.   I am a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and Honorary Fellow of the British Psychological Society. 

Research interests

I have researched and published on questions to do with identity, gender relations, parenting, the capacity to care, qualitative methodology and epistemology, history of psychology. A uniting theme is the development of a ‘psycho-social’ approach, that is one that does not reduce to exclusively sociological or psychological accounts of identity, experience and relationships. I make use of psychoanalytic ontology and epistemology to inform my psycho-social research, substantively and methodologically. Recent publications are in the area of Climate Psychology

My ESRC Fellowship “Maternal Identities, Care and Intersubjectivity” develops an earlier ESRC-funded study (with Ann Phoenix) under the Identities and Social Action programme about the identity transition involved when women become mothers for the first time. It is based on the unique data set derived from psychoanalytically-informed interview and observation methods. It takes further my work on theorising identity processes and new methodological approaches for researching identities. These constitute the themes for my recent book "Knowing Mothers".

Recent Books

1.  Hollway, W., Hoggett, P., Robertson, C. and Weintrobe, S. (2022) Climate Psychology: A Matter of Life and Death. London, UK: Karnac Books.

Hollway, W. Knowing Mothers: Researching Maternal Identity Change. London: Palgrave. (2015)

Hollway, W. and Jefferson, T. Doing Qualitative Research Differently: Free Association, Narrative and the Interview Method. 2nd ed. London: Sage. (2012). 

Hollway, W. (2006) The Capacity to Care: Gender and Ethical Subjectivity. London: Routledge.

Henriques,J. W.Hollway, C.Urwin, C.Venn and V.Walkerdine (1998) Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity. 2nd ed.  London: Routledge. 

Recent articles and book chapters

Manley, J., Hollway, W. and Pylatinska. H. (2024) ' Beyond the ego and towards complexity through social dreaming’, In Being a Therapist in a Time of Climate Breakdown, co-edited by Tree Staunton, Jenny O'Gorman, Caroline Hickman and Judith Anderson.  London: Routledge.

Hollway, W. (2022). Towards an Eco-Psycho-Social Analysis of Climate Change. In: Frosh, S., Vyrgioti, M., Walsh, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Psychosocial Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61510-9_28-1

Hollway, W., Kofoed, J., Ruch, G. Sims, L., Thomson, R. and Tonkin, L. (2020) ‘Carbon-lite collaboration: a virtual Visual Matrix.’ Journal of Psychosocial Studies 13(2), 135-149.

 Manley, J and Hollway, W. (2020) ‘Breaking the Shell, Rescuing the Seed’, New Associations, 32. Pp1-2.

Manley, J. & Hollway, W. (2019) ‘Social dreaming, art and climate change’, in Hoggett, P., Ed. (2019) Climate Psychology: On Indifference to Disaster. London: Palgrave.

Teaching interests

In 2024, with Dr Trudi Macagnino, I authored an OpenLearn course on Climate Psychology (free access, short course, introductory level).

Impact and engagement

I work with Climate Psychology Alliance, to help people face the difficulty of climate and ecologoical collapse.