Marie-Thérèse Talensby

Profile

I am motivated by accessibility and keenly interested in exploring different and meaningful ways of connection and relationship. As part of this journey, I am a writer, a practicing counsellor/psychotherapist, and a doctoral researcher with the Extinction Studies DTP.

Coming to education as a mature student, I bring a wealth of life experience, with a personal history of grassroots activism and advocacy, and professional skills from HE, criminal justice, and the third sector. I am a member of the Climate Psychology Alliance (UK), am registered with the British Association for Counselling & Psychotherapy (BACP) and am actively engaged in both the climate and death studies research communities.

I try to bring creative practice to my personal, professional, and academic worlds and am intrigued by the spaces that open, when we allow for the careful blurring of these boundaries.

Research interests

My doctoral research explores how UK-based climate change activists navigate experiences of eco-anxiety and eco-grief, whether they differ when occurring within faith-based climate collectives, and how cultural and societal systems for grief and loss might interact with these experiences. This is an interdisciplinary project, hosted as part of the Leverhulme-funded Extinction Studies DTP, and working across the Schools of Philosophy, Religion & History of Science, and the School of Sociology & Social Policy. Alongside religion and sociology, this project draws on politics, psychotherapy, eschatology, and thanatology, to reintegrate and re-complicate the different layers to experiences of eco-anxiety and eco-grief.

Qualifications

• MSc Equality & Human Rights (University of Glasgow)
• BA (hons) Religious Studies (The Open University)
• COSCA (Dip) Counselling & Psychotherapy
• COSCA Certificate in Counselling Skills