About us
Kesi Mahendran
Kesi Mahendran is a Chartered Psychologist, Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a founding member and former Chair of the British Psychological Society Political Psychology Section. She leads the OppAttune Consortium which is tracking, attuning and limiting extreme political narratives. She is a member of the Standing Committee for Reflexivities in Migration Studies within IMISCOE (International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion in Europe).
Kesi Mahendran is part of the Open Psychology Research Centre, within the School of Psychology and Counselling within the Open University. Her research programme supports the move from public opinion to public dialogue. In particular dialogue between citizens and their governments on vexed political questions such as migration, sovereignty, European and Global citizenship.
She is the co-editor of the book Discursive Governance in Politics, Policy and the Public Sphere (2015, Palgrave Macmillan). She is published in a variety of journals including Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, Journal of Social and Political Psychology and Political Psychology. She leads the Public Dialogue Psychology Collaboratory which she established in 2020 and is currently writing a book entitled The Migrating Self (Routledge)
Sue Nieland
Sue Nieland is a PhD researcher and Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology and Counselling at The Open University. Her academic interests in the past have included science and technology education and political philosophy, focusing on the Arab Spring.
Her current academic field is political psychology, and she is researching the political decision-making of the Silent Generation, older citizens born between 1927 and 1946. She is interested in how the dialogical older citizen makes political decisions over their lifetimes and how these decisions are influenced, with a particular focus on the UK’s relationship with Europe.
Tetiana Shyriaeva
Tania is a PhD candidate in Social and Political Psychology at the Open University, UK. As a researcher, she is interested in how citizens make their decisions about everyday extremism and how movements across linguistic and geographical borders mobilise national belonging during the time of war. Tania received her first PhD in 2009 while being an Associate Professor at the National University of Ostroh Academy (Ukraine). The shift to social and political psychology resulted from the idea that her personal perspective of being Ukrainian who experienced war can become a lens for scholarly inquiry.
Evangelia Vergouli
Evangelia is a PhD candidate in Social and Political Psychology at the Open University, UK. Her research explores how citizens engage with political actors’ mobilisation strategies and how extreme political narratives emerge in discourse and get enacted in everyday life, influencing political decision-making and behaviour.
Anthony English
Dr. Anthony English is a political psychologist who completed his PhD in 2022 after joining the Open University as the recipient of the Rachael Webb Political Psychology Studentship. The focus of his thesis was on dialogically exploring how polarised political actors could sustain dialogue. The polarised political issue in this instance being the UK’s global relations in a post-Brexit context. A latecomer to higher education, Anthony began studying for a BSc in Applied Psychology at Durham University in 2011. Since that time, he has also completed a PGCE in adult learning, and a MSc in Clinical & Forensic Psychology at Newcastle University. Upon completion of his thesis, he lectured at Lancaster University, convening on both the individual differences and research method modules (and is still affiliated with Lancaster University as a visiting research fellow). Anthony’s current role is back with the Open University as a postdoctoral researcher for the Horizon-EU/ Innovate-UK funded OppAttune project which seeks to track, attune, and limit the spread of everyday political extremism.
Nicola Magnusson
Dr Nicola Magnusson is a social and dialogical psychologist in the School of Psychology and Counselling at the Open University. She is also part of the level 1 presentation team for the Exploring Psychological worlds: Thinking, Feeling, doing as well as the level 3 team for Advancing Social Psychology.
Her main area of inquiry is the psychological injury associated with human rights issues, with a particular interest in refugee and asylum migration, focusing on the psychological and dialogical processes associated with navigating the legal and rights systems pertaining to forced migration, from the perspective of those with lived experience of refugee migration. Theoretically and analytically her work is situated within Positioning processes, Social Representations and Dialogical self.
Nicola has an international background, having lived and worked in Sweden, Germany and the UK as both a practitioner and researcher – with past affiliations with Stockholm University, London School of Economics and The Open University. Her applied work has been working with young people and families, child protection and mental health. She continues to work with combining research with practice.
Alex Pękalski
Alex has been supporting the work of the Public Dialogue Psychology Collaboratory since 2024, drawing on 20 years of experience in senior research management positions in research communications, funding development, and international project management.
She is passionate about bridging the gap between academic research and decision making, and believes oppositional dialogue is essential for a healthy democracy. At the PDPC, she supports the development of communications strategies for the OppAttune project.
© 2025 by Kesi Mahendran, Sue Nieland, Anthony English, Tetiana Shyriaieva, Evangelia Vergouli & Nicola Magnusson.