Profile
Valerie Walkerdine
Birth:
1947
Training Location(s):
PhD, University of Bristol (1975)
MA, Institute of Education University of London (1972)
Primary Affiliation(s):
Cardiff University (2003 - present)
Transart Institute for Creative Research (ongoing)
Psychology’s Feminist Voices Oral History Interview:
Other Media:
Career Focus:
Subjectivity; critical psychology; psychosocial; class and gender; feminism; arts, culture and media; cultural and social theory.
Biography
Born to a working-class family in Derby, England, Valerie Walkerdine was the first of her family to pursue higher education. Initially wanting to be an artist, she couldn’t equate art with a job and thought that going to university to study a subject unless there was a job at the end of it, wasn’t possible. Walkerdine pursued a 3-year primary school teacher’s certificate from Goldsmiths, where she was introduced to the field of Psychology. Fascinated by the subject, Walkerdine pursued an Academic Diploma in Education with a specialisation in psychology at The Institute of Education, University of London, followed by a master’s degree in psychology. With limited financial resources at her disposal, Walkerdine worked full-time as a research assistant to fund her graduate studies, undertaking a dissertation on fear of success in women – a topic chosen by Principal Investigator. It was during this time—against the backdrop of second wave feminism—that Walkerdine recalls: “I became caught up in what I would have called then ‘socialist feminism’, especially in relation to the intersection of class and gender.”
As she advanced to her PhD at the University of Bristol, Walkerdine observed that very few of her peers were women or working class. As she recounts, this made seminar participation particularly challenging; surrounded by men who were comfortable taking up space in the academy, it took time for Walkerdine to feel confident enough to speak her mind “…without caring what anybody else thought and to not allow…particular men to dominate”.
In response to the rise of feminism as well as continental Marxism after May 68, Walkerdine developed a network of critically-minded scholars such as Nikolas Rose, Diana Rose (formerly Adlam), Couze Venn, Angie Salfield, and Julian Henriques. Together they founded the journal Ideology and Consciousness, which advanced both a distinctly feminist perspective and a radical critique of mainstream psychology. This experience had a significant impact on Walkerdine’s views of Psychology and on the field in general, being followed up by Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn and Walkerdine Changing the Subject, 1984, a pathbreaking challenge to mainstream psychology.
It was at this time Walkerdine started publishing work which referred to her own experience. Specifically, in Dreams from an Ordinary Childhood (1985) - a chapter of British feminist journalist Liz Heron’s book Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties, Walkerdine reflected on her experience as a working-class woman in academia, at that time a tiny minority, with more affluent feminists often having a very large back-story in which they could claim to ‘be somebody’, unlike what she then referred to as her ‘ordinary’ childhood.
After completing her PhD in 1975, Walkerdine was lecturer at North East London Polytechnic, which afforded her the freedom to teach explicitly critical and feminist approaches to psychology, in addition to focusing more on her writing and research, moving to take up an SSRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Education in 1976, leading to a lectureship and then reader, with research funding for her work on girls’ socialization, girls and mathematics and reasoning. During this time, she published Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (1984), Girls and Mathematics (1985), Democracy in the Kitchen (1985), and The Mastery of Reason (1988). These works covered themes of girlhood, womanhood, and their intersections with class, incorporating insights from feminist, social and cultural theory. She first became a professor in 1987 and went on to become Professor of the Psychology of Communication at Goldsmiths, Foundation Chair of Critical Psychology in the University of Western Sydney and Distinguished Research Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University. She has written over 20 books and very many journal articles, is on the editorial board of many journals and, as well as having edited Ideology and Consciousness, she founded and edited the International Journal of Critical Psychology (Lawrence and Wishart) and Subjectivity (Springer). She has received considerable research funding, run two research centres and received an ESRC Fellowship for work on gender and video games as well as a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship based on a reworking of her data from the 4/21 project that worked with working and middle class girls and their families from 4 to 21. She is well known for her distinct theoretical approach, as well as her work as a feminist and working class public intellectual. Valerie is also an artist, specializing in performance and multi-media installations.
Presently, Valerie Walkerdine is a Distinguished Research Professor at Cardiff University. For feminists wishing to enter psychology, Walkerdine has the following advice: “Have courage. If you have things that you care about, that you think have to be said no matter how frightened you are in saying them, find the courage…Because there will be others who feel the same”.
by Michael Stead (2022)
To cite this article, see Credits
Selected Works
Walkerdine, V. (2022). “I Just Wanna Be a Woman”: Some Not So Simple Ways: Families, Femininity and/as Affective Entanglement. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(10), 998–1006.
Walkerdine, V. (2017). Of dinosaurs and divas: Is class still relevant to feminist research? Subjectivity, 10(1), 1-12.
Walkerdine, V. and the Girls and Mathematics Unit (1985/2012). Counting girls out. Virago/Routledge.
Henriques, J., Hollway W, Venn, C., Urwin, C., & Walkerdine, V. (1984/2003). Changing the subject: Psychology, social regulation and subjectivity. Routledge and Kegan Paul/Routledge.
Walkerdine V and Jimenez L (2012) Gender, work and community after deindustrialisation: a psychosocial approach to affect, Palgrave Springer
Walkerdine V (2006) Children, gender, video games, Palgrave Macmillan
Walkerdine, V., Lucey, H., & Melody, J. (2001). Growing up girl: Psychosocial explorations of gender and class. Palgrave Macmillan.
Walkerdine, V. (1998). Daddy's girl: Young girls and popular culture. Palgrave Macmillan and Harvard University Press.
Walkerdine, V., & Lucey, H. (1989). Democracy in the kitchen. Virago.
Walkerdine, V. (1988). The mastery of reason: Cognitive development and the production of rationality. Taylor & Frances/Routledge.
Valerie Walkerdine
Birth:
1947
Training Location(s):
PhD, University of Bristol (1975)
MA, Institute of Education University of London (1972)
Primary Affiliation(s):
Cardiff University (2003 - present)
Transart Institute for Creative Research (ongoing)
Psychology’s Feminist Voices Oral History Interview:
Other Media:
Career Focus:
Subjectivity; critical psychology; psychosocial; class and gender; feminism; arts, culture and media; cultural and social theory.
Biography
Born to a working-class family in Derby, England, Valerie Walkerdine was the first of her family to pursue higher education. Initially wanting to be an artist, she couldn’t equate art with a job and thought that going to university to study a subject unless there was a job at the end of it, wasn’t possible. Walkerdine pursued a 3-year primary school teacher’s certificate from Goldsmiths, where she was introduced to the field of Psychology. Fascinated by the subject, Walkerdine pursued an Academic Diploma in Education with a specialisation in psychology at The Institute of Education, University of London, followed by a master’s degree in psychology. With limited financial resources at her disposal, Walkerdine worked full-time as a research assistant to fund her graduate studies, undertaking a dissertation on fear of success in women – a topic chosen by Principal Investigator. It was during this time—against the backdrop of second wave feminism—that Walkerdine recalls: “I became caught up in what I would have called then ‘socialist feminism’, especially in relation to the intersection of class and gender.”
As she advanced to her PhD at the University of Bristol, Walkerdine observed that very few of her peers were women or working class. As she recounts, this made seminar participation particularly challenging; surrounded by men who were comfortable taking up space in the academy, it took time for Walkerdine to feel confident enough to speak her mind “…without caring what anybody else thought and to not allow…particular men to dominate”.
In response to the rise of feminism as well as continental Marxism after May 68, Walkerdine developed a network of critically-minded scholars such as Nikolas Rose, Diana Rose (formerly Adlam), Couze Venn, Angie Salfield, and Julian Henriques. Together they founded the journal Ideology and Consciousness, which advanced both a distinctly feminist perspective and a radical critique of mainstream psychology. This experience had a significant impact on Walkerdine’s views of Psychology and on the field in general, being followed up by Henriques, Hollway, Urwin, Venn and Walkerdine Changing the Subject, 1984, a pathbreaking challenge to mainstream psychology.
It was at this time Walkerdine started publishing work which referred to her own experience. Specifically, in Dreams from an Ordinary Childhood (1985) - a chapter of British feminist journalist Liz Heron’s book Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the Fifties, Walkerdine reflected on her experience as a working-class woman in academia, at that time a tiny minority, with more affluent feminists often having a very large back-story in which they could claim to ‘be somebody’, unlike what she then referred to as her ‘ordinary’ childhood.
After completing her PhD in 1975, Walkerdine was lecturer at North East London Polytechnic, which afforded her the freedom to teach explicitly critical and feminist approaches to psychology, in addition to focusing more on her writing and research, moving to take up an SSRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Education in 1976, leading to a lectureship and then reader, with research funding for her work on girls’ socialization, girls and mathematics and reasoning. During this time, she published Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity (1984), Girls and Mathematics (1985), Democracy in the Kitchen (1985), and The Mastery of Reason (1988). These works covered themes of girlhood, womanhood, and their intersections with class, incorporating insights from feminist, social and cultural theory. She first became a professor in 1987 and went on to become Professor of the Psychology of Communication at Goldsmiths, Foundation Chair of Critical Psychology in the University of Western Sydney and Distinguished Research Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University. She has written over 20 books and very many journal articles, is on the editorial board of many journals and, as well as having edited Ideology and Consciousness, she founded and edited the International Journal of Critical Psychology (Lawrence and Wishart) and Subjectivity (Springer). She has received considerable research funding, run two research centres and received an ESRC Fellowship for work on gender and video games as well as a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship based on a reworking of her data from the 4/21 project that worked with working and middle class girls and their families from 4 to 21. She is well known for her distinct theoretical approach, as well as her work as a feminist and working class public intellectual. Valerie is also an artist, specializing in performance and multi-media installations.
Presently, Valerie Walkerdine is a Distinguished Research Professor at Cardiff University. For feminists wishing to enter psychology, Walkerdine has the following advice: “Have courage. If you have things that you care about, that you think have to be said no matter how frightened you are in saying them, find the courage…Because there will be others who feel the same”.
by Michael Stead (2022)
To cite this article, see Credits
Selected Works
Walkerdine, V. (2022). “I Just Wanna Be a Woman”: Some Not So Simple Ways: Families, Femininity and/as Affective Entanglement. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(10), 998–1006.
Walkerdine, V. (2017). Of dinosaurs and divas: Is class still relevant to feminist research? Subjectivity, 10(1), 1-12.
Walkerdine, V. and the Girls and Mathematics Unit (1985/2012). Counting girls out. Virago/Routledge.
Henriques, J., Hollway W, Venn, C., Urwin, C., & Walkerdine, V. (1984/2003). Changing the subject: Psychology, social regulation and subjectivity. Routledge and Kegan Paul/Routledge.
Walkerdine V and Jimenez L (2012) Gender, work and community after deindustrialisation: a psychosocial approach to affect, Palgrave Springer
Walkerdine V (2006) Children, gender, video games, Palgrave Macmillan
Walkerdine, V., Lucey, H., & Melody, J. (2001). Growing up girl: Psychosocial explorations of gender and class. Palgrave Macmillan.
Walkerdine, V. (1998). Daddy's girl: Young girls and popular culture. Palgrave Macmillan and Harvard University Press.
Walkerdine, V., & Lucey, H. (1989). Democracy in the kitchen. Virago.
Walkerdine, V. (1988). The mastery of reason: Cognitive development and the production of rationality. Taylor & Frances/Routledge.