Dr Rosa Walling-Wefelmeyer

Rosa is committed to conceptual and methodological creativity in order to achieve justice. This commitment has moulded her biography which includes a strong background in arts, community teaching and crisis support. It has also shaped her 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 moreequal future for The Future of Childhood report. Another example is Rosa’s work with Changing Relations and the Bowes Museum, where she produced a soundscape combining the testimonies of survivors of domestic abuse with digital and orchestral sound.

Rosa was awarded her PhD 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. An exhibition from this project can be viewed online and she has a book on this subject forthcoming.

Rosa has also 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 report ‘Non-custodial Interventions for Animal Welfare and Wildlife Offences: An Evidence Review’, alongside recommendations for restorative justice practitioners. Rosa continues to work in the area of non-human and environmental harm, and is currently supporting a local community-led approach to waste mismanagement through a British Science Association grant.

Before coming to Reading, Rosa was part of pillar three of Operation Soteria Bluestone, a high-profile project examining 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 academic publications expanding the fields of procedural justice, and ethnographic methods for researching power and change (forthcoming).  

With colleagues across disciplines and universities, Rosa is currently undertaking a critical systematic literature review of the support available for survivors of sexual violence with learning disabilities.

She welcomes queries about any of the above projects and is also available for:

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

In addition to being an academic, and independently of the university, Rosa is a celebrant and creative.