Dr Madeleine Pownall

Profile

I am an Associate Professor in the School of Psychology. My research and teaching centre around three main areas: (1) pedagogical interventions aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, (2) efforts to improve the robustness, rigour, representativeness, and transparency of (psychological) science, and (3) feminist social psychology, with a particular focus on gender inequality and equity in research and practice.

I am passionate about designing inclusive, evidence-based educational practices that promote global citizenship and psychological literacy. In my Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence (LITE) Fellowship, I worked on a collaborative project with Dr Richard Harris and Professor Pam Birtill titled “Global Citizenship in the Curriculum,” which aimed to embed critical, socially conscious pedagogy into university teaching. My work also examines psychological literacy, which is the notion that psychology education can prompt students to consider their role as global citizens.

I am committed to advancing open and transparent science, and collaborate with the Framework for Open and Reproducible Research Training (FORRT) on initiatives to make open science more accessible, equitable, and reflexive. I have served on several national and international committees, including the Executive Committee of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science and the Psychology of Women and Equalities Committee. I was also an Associate Editor for The Psychologist magazine and previously led the Voices in Psychology programme.

I am the co-author of the award-winning textbook A Feminist Companion to Social Psychology (Pownall & Stainton-Rogers, Open University Press, 2021) and the forthcoming popular science book Absent Minds: Reclaiming the Missing History of Women in Psychology (Pownall, 2026; Headline Publishers).

Responsibilities

• Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence Fellow (2022-2024)
• Welcome, Induction, and Transitions Academic Lead

Research interests

In my pedagogical research, I am interested in work which offers critical or creative ways of thinking about rigour student engagement, student achievement, and success in Higher Education. I am a member of Research in the Psychology of Student Education (RitPOSE) Group at Leeds; with this group, I am currently involved in projects exploring undergraduate transitions, educational gain, and assessment and feedback.

More broadly, I am a critical feminist metascientist and psychologist and all of my work is through this lens. As part of this, I am interested in how psychological science can use teachings from feminist psychology to be more diverse, welcoming, inclusive, and critical. I also have an interest in feminist pedagogy and creative approaches to teaching and learning.

I am an advocate for open scholarship and try to embed this into my teaching and research. I am particularly interested in ongoing debates and discussions surrounding the future of open science. More recently, my work considers how open science can be more inclusive, including to diverse methodologies and different groups of academics, and how open science conversations can strive to be more constructive. I am particularly interested in advovating for appropiate standards of rigour for qualitative researchers.

Current Postgraduate Researchers:
Palupi Palupi: Muslim parents’ mediation of children’s internet use in Indonesia and their children’s perspective
Wahyu Jati Anggoro: The development of a situational judgement test to measure psychological literacy: assessing psychology graduates' employability
Idei Swasti: Evidence-based psychological interventions to promote Indonesian university students' self-regulated learning post-pandemic
Clare Copley: Exploring sex and gender differences in growing up with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD): Impact upon diagnosis, mental health and progression into Higher Education
Ellen Frost: Centring LGBT+ women’s experiences of endometriosis: A critical mixed-methods analysis
Noor Aqsa: Mobilising students for disaster response in Indonesia: A psychological first aid education programme

Qualifications

• PhD in Social Psychology
• Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA)
• Psychology BSc (First Class Hons), University of Lincoln

Professional memberships

• Society for the Teaching of Psychology
• European Association of Social Psychology
• Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues
• The Psychology of Women and Equalities Section of the British Psychological Society
• Association of Women in Psychology

Student education

My module, Feminist Social Psychology PSYC3549, runs in the second semester of third year. teach on a range of modules and programmes, including Research Skills 1, 2, and 3, Social Psychology, and Advanced Social Psychology.

I also co-teach the first year core module Psychology of Student Life.

Teaching Awards
2022 University Early Career Teching Award, University of Leeds
2021 Wilbert J. McKeachie Teaching Excellence Award, Society for the Teaching of Psychology
2020 DART-P PsyPAG Teaching Award