Dr Alison Torn is Associate Professor (Teaching and Learning) at Leeds Trinity University, where she leads on digital pedagogy across the university, as well as teaching on the psychology programmes and supervising postgraduate research.  She has published articles relating to nursing, mental health and narrative psychology, is co-editor of the book Psychology for Nursing (2016, Polity), co-author of Madness: History, Concepts and Controversies (2019, Routledge), and is associate editor for The Psychologist magazine. Alison convened the 2016 Joint Annual Conference of the BPS History and Philosophy of Psychology section and the UK Critical Psychiatry Network.  She convened the 2017 Stories of Psychology event for the History of Psychology Centre and was the 2017 keynote speaker for the BPS Psychology4students conference.  

Alison is passionate about her teaching and students’ university experiences. This is reflected in her pedagogical research interests around the development of communities of learning, the co-construction of the student experience, and barriers/facilitators to student engagement.

TEACHING

Level 4  : Social psychology 

Level 5  : Social Psychology

Level 5: Qualitative research methods

Undergratuate and postgraduate project supervisor

MRes and PhD supervisor

I have been actively involved in both collaborative and my own research for the past 18 years.  My doctoral research was located in the fields of social psychology and mental health, which brings together my psychology background and my clinical experience in the mental health field as a fully qualified psychiatric nurse.  My thesis centred around the relationship between narrative, understanding, identity and recovery in first hand narratives of madness, focusing in particular on how the theoretical ideas of Foucault and Bakhtin can be brought together in narrative research.  My interests in alternative methods of understanding distress continue in my support of local mental health charities, who are committed to non-medicalised approaches to unusual experiences.  This has resulted in a collboaration with DIgial and Screen Media colleagues in the production of a film on the impact of a schizophrenia diagnosis on one person's life story.

My current research is focussed on co-creation of student experience and student engagement. I have worked with colleagues and students on designing, collating and analysing a variety of qualitative datasets from participants across the UK to answer the question 'what does it mean to be a UK undergraduate student in the present time?'. This research has been co-authored with students for conference presentations in the UK and Italy, as well as being being written for publication.