Dr Hayley J Edwardson

Hayley Edwardson (BSc, PhD) is a feminist scholar whose work makes a distinctive methodological contribution to matricentric studies, while engaging critically with questions of knowledge, governance and lived experience in public health. Working at the intersection of feminist epistemology, cultural history and qualitative inquiry, she examines how maternal subjectivities are constructed, mediated and regulated within cultural and institutional systems.

Her doctoral thesis, The Mothers’ Stories: Representations of Authenticity, Authority, Agency and Autonomy, interrogated the production and legitimation of maternal narratives. Her current research advances matricentric feminist genealogical approaches to archival practice, engaging international collections and foregrounding the politics of care within institutional records. She is concerned with methodological questions of absence, silencing and institutional mediation, and with developing feminist archival autoethnography as a critical research methodology.

Her teaching and research are united by a commitment to inclusive, reflexive and socially engaged approaches to health, care and institutional practice.