Dr Tanya Frances

Professional biography

Tanya (she/her) is a Lecturer in Psychology and Counselling based in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS). She joined the OU as a central academic in 2022. Tanya is a Chartered Psychologist, counsellor, and psychotherapist with a deep commitment to social justice and anti-oppressive research and practice. Her work bridges academia, psychotherapy, and embodied approaches to therapeutic work, including as a trauma-informed yoga teacher. Her research expertise lies in narrative, feminist, and qualitative methodologies. She actively seeks creative, collaborative partnerships across academia, lived experience, and clinical practice that challenge dominant paradigms and centre lived experience.

She is a founding member of the Intersectional Violences Research Group, an international collective addressing violence and abuse through an intersectional feminist lens. She is also a founding member of the Lived Experiences of Eating Disorders Research Collective, which focuses on lived experience-led, trauma-informed, and anti-oppressive approaches to eating disorders research. Broadly, her research investigates epistemic (in)justice and the enactment of epistemic violence, with a focus on developing more ethically attuned and epistemically just systems of care. She is particularly committed to improving institutional responses across healthcare, mental health, and criminal justice settings, with the goal of reducing harm and improving the experiences of survivors, patients, and service users. Over the past decade, she have contributed to these fields through a sustained body of research and writing, especially in relation to domestic violence, gender based violence and mental health.

Tanya brings a breadth of research experience across projects focused on trauma, mental health, and social justice. Her work includes examining the impact of public health legislation on individuals with lived experience of eating disorders, and critically exploring weight-based treatment and referral criteria in eating disorder services. She has also contributed to the evaluation and development of services for those affected by domestic abuse, perinatal mental health challenges, child sexual exploitation, child trafficking, and for care-experienced children and young people. Tanya has been engaged in domestic abuse research since 2013, with particular interest in childhood and young adult experiences of abuse, transitional life stages, and reflexive feminist methodologies that centre victim-survivor narratives and engage with the personal, social, and political dimensions of harm and healing.

In her counselling and psychotherapy practice, Tanya works primarily with individuals who have experienced trauma. Her approach is integrative, drawing on humanistic, feminist, compassion-focused, and mindfulness- and embodiment-based practices. She is especially interested in power-conscious and feminist frameworks that attend to the socio-structural conditions in which psychological distress is rooted and reproduced. Tanya is also a certified trauma-informed yoga teacher and is currently undertaking further training in yoga therapy.

Research interests

Tanya’s research interests span eating disorders, gender-based violence, trauma, social inequalities, and intersectionality. Her work is grounded in critical, feminist, and anti-oppressive frameworks that foreground the personal-political nexus and interrogate the socio-structural conditions that shape experiences of violence, the systems that sustain it, and the ways in which individuals make sense of and speak about harm.

She has contributed to a range of research projects evaluating, developing, and exploring experiences of services related to eating disorders, domestic abuse, perinatal mental health, child sexual exploitation, child trafficking, and care-experienced children and young people. Across these areas, she is particularly committed to advancing accessible, anti-oppressive, and epistemically just approaches to care, centering lived experience, questioning dominant narratives, and recognising the knowledge of those historically marginalised or silenced within systems of care. 

Currently, Tanya is engaged in research focused on gender-based violence and the accessibility and equity of eating disorder treatment. Her current work critically examines the role and epistemic implications of weight-based treatment and referral criteria within specialist services. She is especially interested in the intersections of epistemic justice, embodiment, and the development of trauma-informed, power-conscious, and ethically attuned approaches to care.

Teaching interests

Tanya's current contributions are to the presentation of D241 Exploring Mental Health and Counselling and to the production of D230, a new counselling module. Previously, she contributed to the production of D120 Encountering Psychology in the Everyday by writing content on lifespan development and qualitative methods. She also co-authored a short CPD counselling course, DGXS004 Trauma-Informed Counselling.

Tanya's teaching interests include qualitative methods, particularly narrative methods, reflexivity, ethics, feminist methodologies, and participatory approaches. She is also interested in teaching critical approaches, critical mental health, and domestic abuse. In relation to counselling and psychotherapy and clinical practice, her teaching expertise is around person-centred, humanistic and trauma-sensitive approaches, issues around accessibility and diversity, epistemic trust, and the integration of embodiment practices in counselling and psychotherapy. 

Impact and engagement

In collaboration with the Intersectional Violences Research Group (IVRG), Tanya has been involved in providing consultation for the UK government's 2021 Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy. Publications relating to this consultation work can be found in our article in The Coversation , in a BPS blog post as part of a media campaign, and in the BPS Psychology of Women and Equalities Section (POWES) blog post.

External collaborations

Tanya is a founding member of the Intersectional Violences Research Group (IVRG), an international research group which takes a critical psychological approach using insights from feminist, queer, anti-carceral and trans approaches to the study of sexual and domestic violence. Tanya is also a founding member of the Lived Experiences of Eating Disorders Research Collective. This is a collective group of clinicians and academics who are working in the eating disorders field. We aim to work towards a better understanding of a diverse range of eating disorders and to contribute to developing the evidence base for better care for all who need it. We are particularly interested in building evidence that centres the voices and perspectives of people with lived experiences. Tanya is also currently providing external consultation for the BACP.

Tanya was awarded the 2022 PCCS Books Research Award, in collaboration with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP).