Wendy is a health psychologist who has spent her life fighting against inequalities and injustices, both through her academic work and her dedicated volunteer efforts.
During the course of Wendy’s work, she has been instrumental in challenging societal norms, advocating for equity and diversity at a time when such conversations were still in their infancy.
Wendy is a self-described troublemaker, and it was a topic that came up a lot during our conversation together! It was such an interesting conversation, and we can’t wait for you to hear it.
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In Wendy’s own words: ‘I was brought up by parents who, unusually, thought that girls deserved the same educational opportunities as boys. At 78 I am the oldest of three sisters, and all of us have had academic careers. One big advantage of the job is that you can keep going well into retirement. I still help organise conferences, give lectures and write textbooks, and enjoy it immensely. It does help to keep me active and engaged.
My career was mostly at the UK’s Open University — still the only one in the country that offers degree level study to people who have no GCSEs, A levels or any other qualifications. It still does and if you ever feel you have lost out, do find out about courses you might like to study. There are lots of free short ’taster’ courses to try it out.
It was an amazing place to work as, from its beginnings, it strove to be accessible to everyone. It really was the “university of the 2nd chance” and even 50+ years ago it was very committed to fostering inclusion, equity and diversity. It was also the “university of the air” with A BBC production centre on its campus in the early years. Degrees are earned via distance learning, these days online but in my time courses were delivered by radio, TV and written units sent by post.
While there, though, I was a troublemaker, challenging the sexism women of my age faced and all sorts of other inequalities and snobberies. And I am a troublemaker still, battling with psychology’s establishment, demanding that it does something about the UK’s dreadful health inequalities and actively does its best to change peoples’ lives for the better. I got involved in Curious Motion as I recognised its brilliance at using dance to bring joy to the troubled, comfort to the sad and damaged, and hope to the downtrodden. I plan to use it in my latest book, as an example of how communities can work together to improve people’s life-worlds and wellbeing.’
Welcome back to Calder Navigation, where each episode serves as a compass guiding you through the vibrant tapestry of Calderdale. I’m Samantha McCormick, your host and Artistic Director of Curious Motion. I’m delighted to present Season 2 as part of our Culturedale Commission, celebrating Calderdale’s rich cultural heritage during the Year of Culture.
In this season, we continue to champion the voices of our remarkable neighbours, celebrating their resilience, diversity, and the shared experiences that bind us together. From intimate conversations to profound revelations, each episode is an invitation to connect, reflect, and celebrate the human experience. Season 2 of Calder Navigation is not just a podcast. It’s a celebration of community, culture, and the enduring spirit of Calderdale. Join us as we delve into the heart and soul of our community, exploring the myriad of stories that shape our shared experience.
Today, we have the pleasure of welcoming Wendy Stainton Rogers to the Calder Navigation podcast. Wendy is a health psychologist who has spent her life fighting against inequalities and injustices, both through her academic work and her dedicated volunteer efforts. As Professor Emerita of Health Psychology, she continues to contribute to the academic world despite officially retiring. Organising conferences, giving lectures, and writing textbooks, all of which she says keep her engaged and active.
Wendy was instrumental in challenging societal norms, advocating for equity and diversity at a time when such conversations were still in their infancy. True to her nature as a self-described troublemaker, she continues to challenge the psychology establishment to address inequalities in the UK. Wendy has also supported us at Curious Motion, which reflects her commitment to improving people’s wellbeing. We’re really excited to dive into her incredible journey and hear more about her work and ongoing impact on society.
Welcome, Wendy. Thank you so much for your time to have a chat today.
I’m really happy.
I’m excited to talk to you. I think we’re going to have a lot of very interesting things to discuss.
I’ll do my best.
So, can we start with just giving us a little bit more information about your background and your work?
Right. I’m 77. No, I’m 78. I’ve had a birthday. And that means that I was born just after the Second World War finished, and Britain was a very, very different place. I spent quite a lot of my early years at that point in Hull. And it was streets of house, house, bombsite, house, house, bombsite. That’s what I grew up to. So the world has changed enormously since then.
Yeah, wow.
But I think that gives you some sense of the sheer amount of life I’ve lived. And I’ve been incredibly lucky. I’ve lived-, done the things that if I’d ever imagined doing as a 15-year-old, I wouldn’t have believed it, which is rather nice. There are things like being a good mother and being a good wife and being things like that. But I think I am an academic, and that’s quite an unusual thing. And it’s quite a difficult thing to actually mention to other people to say, Oh, I’m a professor, can come across as, Oh, well, I’m a lot better than you. And of course, it means that you’ve got expertise in a particular area. It doesn’t mean to say you’re better or posher or any of those sorts of things.
But I thought it would be interesting to have in your talks something from academic life because most people get contact with it, I would say , you know, through their kids, are they going to go to university? Are they not going to university? What are they studying? How is it going? And all those sorts of things. And then suddenly all these things like doctorates and Masters and stuff like that. It’s a fascinating world, and that world has completely transformed in my lifetime, mostly in ways I don’t like.
Okay.
So we could talk a bit about that.
Yeah, tell us a little bit more. Can you give us an example?
I think it’s worth starting off from the fact that there were two things about my family, I think, that had an enormous impact upon me and my two sisters. We were three girls, but my father was half Swedish, my grandmother was Swedish. And Swedish values, we’re going back to the 1940s, ’50s now, were very different. And so the gender issues in my family were very different from almost all my friends. So when it got to the point of getting, you know, 17, 18, my mother was utterly determined I would go to university. And my father thought that was wonderful and so on. So there were two things there. One was I was treated by my father and by my mother as a girl could do anything.
Which is quite unusual, I imagine.
Very unusual. If you wanted to do so and so, you could do it. Though I will admit there was one point at which my mother said to me when I started to do a PhD, “You’ve got a nice job as a teacher. Why do you want any more?” And I said, “Because it would be interesting.” And it wasn’t quite what she expected me to do. But in those days, mostly what mothers wanted was their daughters to marry reasonably well. My father said he was very pleased I was going to university because I’d get a better class of husband that way. It was outrageous. But what I’m saying is the idea of going away from home to a university for a girl was seen as not a good idea because your daughter would then not bring you grandchildren, or if she produced grandchildren, she produced them so far away, you couldn’t enjoy them properly. So it was a very different way of living.
Yes.
My mother herself hated school. She-, there was a period when I was right at the beginning of my career, when I was a school teacher, and my mother used to visit me at school, but she wouldn’t come into the school because she’d had her mouth washed out with carbolic soap for swearing. She never forgot it, but she wouldn’t go in the building because it would make her sick.
Oh, my gosh.
But she was utterly determined. And my sister Sally is a professor, too. And my sister Pam eventually became a lecturer at Salford University. So all of us went to university. My sister, later than the youngest one, the baby sister, who is now 70. Not much of a baby at 70ish. But, no, it’s a different kind of world.
Yeah, and I imagine this, growing up in a family with such strong values around gender equality and education has influenced your entire life, and I imagine it’s still an influence now.
Absolutely. I would say that my mother, unfortunately, died at 48, which was very young. Both of my parents were in the army. Both of them were supplied with cigarettes in the army to keep them awake at night, and both of them died ridiculously young. My mother was 48, and she had a heart attack, and my father was 62. And these are-, you know, we look back on these days, and you know, I remember getting to the age of 70 and thinking, “Oh, I’ve done so much better than my parents.” But it is one aspect of, I said to you, I’m not happy.
Mmm, yeah.
That trend in Britain has changed. Life expectancy went up and up and up. And as a professor who knows this stuff, I can tell you that it stopped, particularly for women. What’s happening in our country because our health system is in a dreadful state, whereas in most of Europe, it’s still the case that people are living longer and longer. In this country, they’re living less. And it’s, as I say, what is fascinating, it’s particularly to do with women, and it’s particularly to do with poor women, and particularly to do with women who are single parents and things like that. And we have to do something about it.
Yeah, so this is the thing, it’s-, yes, we can see the development over a period of time, but that doesn’t mean we’ve achieved what we would hope. And actually, I wasn’t aware that what you just said there about life expectancy was happening in that way so clearly.
It’s a side of academia, epidemiology, looking at data like that, which is very useful. The other one that’s making me furious is that children are getting smaller, particularly boys. Boys at the age of five, we’re talking averages here. This is rich boys and poor boys. The trouble is that we’ve got vastly more poor boys than we used to have. And I think it’s something like an inch or two shorter. And if you think about it, in my life, most older people were quite small because they were not fully fed in childhood and stuff like that. And one of the changes the NHS made was to do with having proper diets and proper things like that for children. I was born two years before the NHS was brought in. And so my father’s demob, that’s when you left the army, his demob payment paid for me to be born, but my parents had to pay for my birth.
Right, okay.
So the world has changed a lot. I think this is leading us on to-, my identity is, as an academic, as an intellectual, and you’re not supposed to say that these days. Well, I don’t know, in France, you can get away with being an intellectual and not being seen as a total pillock, but I’m also a troublemaker.
Yes, this is-,
And I spend much of my life making trouble one way and another.
I will never forget the first time you told me that and you said you were a troublemaker. And so, I think it’s led us beautifully on to a bit more information. You’ve said, “We’ve got to do something about that,” and you are doing many things about many issues through your work, and I think it comes across as it’s who you are a bit as well, Wendy. So, tell us more, what does a troublemaker mean in your life?
In my life, it’s about-, okay, it’ll lead us into a totally different line of thought. What is happening in psychology, which is my-, I’m a health-, I’m a professor of health psychology, but I do all sorts of other psychology as well. And within psychology, there has been dramatic change in 2023. There are two bodies that control what is taught in universities. One is the QAA, which is the Quality, something, whatever AA is. And it is the state controller, and a bit like the national curriculum, but it applies to university. And the other one is the British Psychological Society, which is the body of psychologist professions and so on.
Both of them have come out with a statement that social psychology, which is what I’m currently writing a book about, essentially what they’re saying is that social psychology was basically invented by and theorised by and created by a load of middle class, white, men who were very privileged in the life that they lived. And what it’s created is a psychology that is not very good at understanding diversity, at accepting the need for equality and inclusion and the EDI programme. Some people will recognise that and some not, but it’s one of the dominant forces that is coming into education, and particularly at university level, we hope.
So a lot of my battle axing is around other psychologists who’ve made a good living and made a good life out of being the experts and challenging how expert they are. And I do that by giving inflammatory lectures at times. About four or five years ago, I obviously belong to groups of critical psychologists who actually take a very much more open-minded view. And for example, I’ve spent a lot of periods in New Zealand, which is a fabulous place to go and teach psychology because it’s a bicultural country. And being surrounded by a proportion of Maori scholars who they don’t translate. It’s a bilingual country. And if you don’t understand what whānau or one of those words means, you bloody well need to get yourself learning them and so on. So it’s quite nice to be in that situation.
The other keyword that’s knocking around now is decolonising. And it is the idea that Britain was the big coloniser. The first one was apparently Portugal. Portugal was the first sort of takeover. I think it was Madeira that they moved in and started buying up slaves and selling them and things like that. But if you’ve got that kind of background, then there is a particular mindset that goes with it.
And that mindset, it’s very difficult to escape from if you’ve grown up with it. I always remember being in a discussion when I worked at the Open University, when I was writing something, and one of my colleagues on the course team turned to me and said, “What’s this ‘we’ you’re talking about?” And I said, “Well, I mean everybody. I want it to be inclusive.” He said, “You don’t actually mean everybody. You mean people like you.”
Wow.
He said, “We enjoy so and so. We do this. But what you’re assuming is everybody is like you.” And we live in a world where lots and lots of people-, in fact, there’s a nice piece of terminology. It was a guy from Sudan, I think, who came up with this term. He talks about the minority world, which is Western and rich and so on. I’ll come onto that. So there’s the minority world, which is the people that have the power and the influence and the privilege. And then there’s the majority world, which is most of the world’s population, which, you know, is either coping with past exploitation because somebody’s come and looted all their stuff or other reasons why that they’re not going to have the benefits that you get if you are WEIRD I love WEIRD, I discovered it several years ago. WEIRD is an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic. So you talk about a WEIRD world.
And I rather-, that’s a nice way of making trouble. Because you get into a conversation or something and they’re saying, “Blah, blah, blah, we this.” And I’m saying, “Oh, you mean people in the WEIRD world?” And they said, “What’s weird about it?” This is what’s weird about it and so on. I think the other side of being a bit of a troublemaker is you have to enjoy it. There’s no point-, there’s a very interesting woman who is an incredibly good feminist theorist. Her name is Sara Ahmed, and she’s got a whole website and books and so on about being a feminist killjoy.
Oh, nice.
And being a feminist killjoy is required, but there are ways round it. In other words, you know, when I was in my working life and I was frequently working with men who were paid more than me and had more power than I had, you know, I’d sort of point out that possibly what they were doing was not very fair. And I remember having one big row with a guy who said, “No, no, we’ll do it this way.” And I said, “If you do it that way, my faculty will get no funding at all because we haven’t got any at the moment. And if you do what you want to do, it will never get any money.” And he just laughed it off.
But to give the man his due, he came to the next meeting and he said, “I’m going to start by apologising to Wendy because she’s right. I looked at what she said, and we do have to do it differently,” because my faculty was a light arrival in the Open University. It was the Faculty of Health and Social Welfare, which was basically doing OU courses, degrees and so on in nursing and social work and a few other various things. They had courses like death and dying courses for people who are working in the area of terminal care and so on.
But what I’m saying is being a killjoy actually is necessary. But I eventually took over this committee. It was the research funding subcommittee, and there’s very little more power than having the power to make the decisions over who gets the money for their research. And so I remember going into it, into the meeting for the first time as the chair, and I went in with a sort of Red Riding Hood basket in which I got a kettle, mugs, you know, tea and coffee. And on the top, on the way driving to work, I’d gone to a little baker, and I got those nice buns that have got icing on the top.
And I said, “Right, I’m taking over as chair. Let’s do it in a nice way. The number of times I’ve gone to meetings and been expected to pour the tea, I’m not doing that anymore. So I’ve brought you all the makings. And my suggestion is we take it in turns to be tea and coffee monitor.” And I think that speech-, sorry, I’m a bit arrogant about it.
No, it’s great.
I think that speech achieved more than almost anything I did to get that committee working.
Wow.
And that’s how I did it. I think feminism and troublemaking has to be done in a way that does not humiliate people.
Yes. So they can hear you.
And it created a situation where they were giggling a bit. Most of them were men, right? I would say it was me and two other women and so on. And you know, what happened is I managed to persuade them that what we were doing was taking the best applications for funding. So the excellent ones were getting funded, and the ones that were not so good were not getting funded. And I said, “This is a waste of money. If we do it like this, then technology and science are going to have a carve up between them because they know how to write excellent bids for money. And all your arts people and your humanities people and so on are going get left behind.”
And I can always remember the day they did change. They accepted if we did it based on need, somebody coming back from maternity leave, somebody coming, working in a field where they can’t get government funding and stuff like that. So they did change. But I always remember there was the guy who looked at me and he said, “You actually think we should give funding for somebody to go to a carnival, a pride march in San Francisco, and so on, because she’s studying the interface between performance art and politics.”
And I said, “Yes.” And she got funded. She was relatively young. She was actually able to use her young person’s rail card for some of the journey. But it-, when I say I’m a troublemaker, I enjoy it enormously because if you get a bit sneaky, you can actually make changes to the way things are done.
Some quite significant changes there, just in those examples.
It all fell apart when I left. It went back vastly more to be-, it went back to being a carve-up between science and technology. But you know, it never quite got back entirely. There was always the seeds of an argument against. And by then, what I’d done is I’d set up training programmes in arts and in the places and got them to evaluate what a good bid needs to look like. And so you seed that and so on. But there’s a certain big headness to this because I want to change the world.
Wow, I think that’s great.
There’s an utter joy to reach your retirement and be an old lady, a little old lady. The little is because I have a crush fracture in my spine and I lost four inches, and I think that’s mean and horrible. It also does dreadful things to your BMI. Losing height.
Oh, yeah, I bet.
Yes, whatever. But anyway.
So with your work, so you’ve worked with such a diverse range of people through the Open University and your whole career. And I thought we could finish with sort of maybe some key learnings or things that you’ve seen that really make a long-term positive difference in our communities. And obviously, your work is really rooted in being a human being, isn’t it, and what that means? Yeah, I wondered, what could we take away from that as some learnings from it?
I think we need to make the academic world a lot more human. It needs to be kinder. It needs to be more open-minded. It needs to be more willing to recognise the enormous skills and the enormous resources that exist in communities. I mean, as a health psychologist, we’ve talked at another time, but briefly talk about the pandemic. You know, there was psychologists involved in that. One particular was Steve Reicher, who was on television a lot, and he was in the newspapers a lot. And basically what he was saying is this government needs to take people with them. And it’s not warm and fluffy bunny.
No.
Fluffy bunny is the term I use for daft and so on, or too feminine. But what I’m saying is if governments are prepared to work more with people and rather than pushing their ideologies, then we can live in a world that is more human. And I want to make psychology more human. In fact, the book I’m writing at the moment started off as-, the title was The Psychology of Human Being Being Human, because I think psychology needs to stop treating people as if they’re animals, and all that matters is their hormones, and start realising that the kind of stuff your group does, which is using dance as a way for people to express themselves, understand that it is a profoundly psychological thing that you’re doing, which is what turned me on. It is all about giving people confidence. And bodies matter so much. I will admit, at a very late stage, I’ve now got much more into exercising. If you get to 78, if you’re not exercising, you’re going to fall over.
Right, yeah.
And I think we should be doing more about old ladies falling over because I’ve got osteoporosis. If I fall over, I may well never get up again. So I do exercises. And the joy and the pleasure and the bodily-, joy is the only word I know.
Yeah, it’s a full experience through your whole body, psyche, soul, spirit. Like, everything, really, isn’t it? And separating our minds.
Have we got time for a final little bit?
Yeah, definitely.
One of the other things I was involved in changing is to do with NICE. I don’t mean the biscuits, and I don’t mean the sort of whatever. NICE is the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence. And I was invited, I think in 2005 or 06, to get involved in setting the criteria for how the interventions, it was the first public health fund, into behaviour change. And I was there partly because of having the right friends and contacts, but also because I’d written a book in which I’d been extremely rude about the way psychologists theorised about this. And what I think we did was to say, if you’re going to intervene by trying to get somebody to change what they do, you can only do that if you understand the culture from which they come, the community from which they come, from the structural aspects of housing and poverty and so on. And it did make, I think, a difference. I believe that what we have to have is a health service that actually supports the work that you do. And so, if you can make trouble, but trouble that produces good effects.
Yeah, that makes a difference.
I think it’s not a bad identity at all.
No, I agree. I think we need some more troublemaking going on. It’s really nice to hear that you-, obviously, it’s very kind of you as well to mention our work at Curious Motion. But that’s the whole reason we do it, because as humans, just by living as humans, we’ve realised that these creative forms of expression, getting to know your body, all of this stuff brings an essential element of well-being to your life. It’s not separate.
I mean, there are loads of people we don’t need to teach this.
Yes, of course, yeah.
In the sense that you go around the world. And I once went to Venezuela entirely to go and watch the tango and so on and stuff like that. And I do think that we’ve created a world at the moment where life is so busy and life is so demanding. You know, now people have got phones that remind them to be positive.
Yes.
And things like that. And fitting in some joy and pleasure.
Yeah. It’s becoming a kind of-, could become a scheduled thing if we’re not careful.
Yes, we must have had that.
Which maybe that’s a way to be able to still access, but there is that natural need to experience these things as a human, isn’t there, that’s just innately in us.
I have trouble with innately.
Okay.
What I would say is that communities that flourish are communities that are less inequal. There is a direct statistical relationship. The more unequal a country is, the more difficult it is to live there, the earlier people die, the more they get ill. And if we cannot sort that out, then I think we’re going to-, inequality has massively grown, and we’ve got to do something about it. Michael Marmot is the name. And I went to his lecture in Hebden Bridge, and he writes very self-confidently, shall I put it like that, about inequality in health. But if that’s something that interests you, that’s the name. He’s not a marmot. He’s a human being. But whatever.
Yeah, inequality is, yeah, you’re right. We’ve all got to do what we can and be a bit of a troublemaker, I think, really, is the way forwards.
I think so. I have to tell you, I have daughters who are troublemakers.
Excellent. I would expect nothing less, really, Wendy. Thank you so much for chatting and sharing that with us. There is a lot more that we could talk about, and I hope we maybe get another time to go in into some of your other stories and things that I’ve had the pleasure of hearing already. But for now, thank you so much. It’s been wonderful.
You’re very welcome.
It’s time to wrap up another episode of Calder Navigation. And as we do, we want to express our gratitude for joining us on this journey through Calderdale’s stories. We hope these conversations have moved you and reminded you of the power of human connection.
Calder Navigation is part of the Welland Activator Project, aimed at combating loneliness in Elland and Calderdale. A massive thank you to our funders, Calderdale Council, Culturedale, and Reaching Communities from the National Lottery Community Fund, empowering us to continue our mission of fostering connection and combating loneliness through projects like the Welland Activator. A big thank you to Untold Creative for production support, too. Remember to subscribe to Calder Navigation on your podcast app, share it with please leave us a review. Keep exploring and connecting. Until next time.
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