Rosa Walling-Wefelmeyer

Rosa is committed to conceptual and methodological innovation in order to achieve justice and deliver real-world impact.

This commitment to justice through creativity has moulded her biography, including a strong background in arts, community teaching and crisis support. It has also shaped Rosa’s numerous research partnerships to date. For example, in 2021 she was commissioned by Save the Children UK to analyse and interpret over four hundred children’s creative visions of a more equal future for The Future of Childhood report. Another example here is Rosa’s work with Changing Relations and the Bowes Museum in County Durham, producing a soundscape combining the testimonies of survivors of domestic abuse with digital and orchestral sound.

Rosa was awarded her PhD from Durham University in 2022. This ESRC-funded PhD research devised a unique ‘scrapbooking’ methodology to understand how Rape Crisis centres and survivors of sexual violence make sense of sex, violence and intimacy in everyday life. The project drew on hundreds of mixed media materials to identify everyday activities that reproduce sexual violence and rape culture. Rosa’s publications from this work include the pilot research published in Sociological Research Online (2021) and nominated for the SAGE 2022 Innovation and Excellence award. She has a book and exhibition on this subject forthcoming.

Towards the end of Rosa’s PhD she worked on the first UK project to assess restorative justice and empathy interventions for human harms to non-human life led by Professor Tanya Wyatt. They engaged with stake-holders across the world and have since published the Scottish Government’s official review, alongside recommendations for restorative justice practitioners. Rosa continues to work in this interdisciplinary area, co-designing justice to address environmental and climate issues and include non-human life.

Most recently, Rosa was Postdoctoral Research Associate on pillar three of Operation Soteria Bluestone, a high-profile project investigating and improving police investigations of sexual violence. Under the lead of Dr Kelly Johnson and Dr Olivia Smith, Rosa’s duties over the two years included conducting ethnographies of police forces and devising educational tools for the Police’s National Learning Network in order to improve their practice with minoritised and marginalised groups. She has also led on policy briefings on procedural justice and trauma that will underpin the first National Operating Model for sexual offences investigations, as well as co-authoring forthcoming academic publications expanding the fields of procedural justice and ethnographic methods for researching violence and power-saturated contexts.

Rosa is available for:

• Consultation
• Media enquiries
• Master’s and PhD student supervision
• Conferences as a panellist or speaker

In addition to being an academic and, independently of the university, Rosa is also a celebrant (e.g., for weddings) and creative. For example, she was recently commissioned by Pride Action North to lead participatory art-making workshops and produce a zine (DIY publication) capturing what it means to be LGBTQIA+ in the region.