Jonathan Wyatt
Jonathan is Professor of Qualitative Inquiry and Director of the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry at The University of Edinburgh. Originally an English teacher and youth worker, he worked for ten years as a counsellor in a doctors’ surgery alongside being Head of Professional Development at the University of Oxford, before heading north to Scotland in 2013.
Biography
I have taken a circuitous route to being an academic in Edinburgh. I was originally an English teacher and youth worker before moving into counselling, staff development and training. I trained as a counsellor at the Isis Centre, Oxford, and worked for ten years as a counsellor in primary care; and was Head of Professional Development at the University of Oxford alongside my NHS counselling role.I completed my doctorate at Bristol (supervised by the wonderful Jane Speedy) in 2009, with a thesis (co-authored with Ken Gale) about Deleuze and collaborative writing that became a book, 'Between the two: A nomadic inquiry into collaborative writing and subjectivity'.
I am an accredited member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, and a member of the International Association of Qualitative Inquiry, the Arts and Narrative Inquiry Network at Bristol and the Centre for Arts Therapies Research, Roehampton.
Education
-
Doctor of Education, University of Bristol
Areas of Research / Professional Expertise
-
My research examines the entanglement of self and other within and beyond the therapeutic encounter; and it troubles what we mean by ‘self’ and ‘other’. I undertake this research through autoethnography (or, better, 'assemblage/ethnography'), collaborative writing as inquiry, and, latterly, through bringing these together with performance, including stand-up comedy, dance/movement, and film. My work connects the dots between collaborative inquiry in the context of research and collaborative inquiry in the context of therapy, searching for – and doubting – the transformative resources in each.
I grapple with the ethics of what is mine to tell: how to write stories of, for example, the therapist - but also client, son, partner, father, brother, friend, colleague - ‘becoming’ in relationship with the human, material, and more-than-human other. I'm working at an approach to theorizing experiential accounts without depersonalizing them.
My research examines the links between research and therapeutic practice, provides exemplars to write with and against, and makes explicit some methodological possibilities and limitations.
Books
Articles
Two Shits
Published: Dec 21, 2016 by Departures in Critical Qualitative Research
Authors: Jonathan Wyatt
Subjects:
Psychological Science, Research Methods
This brief essay works and plays with “ordinary affect” as it flows amongst, through, and between two apparently different milieus—a university workplace and a comedy club. It became a chapter in the book, 'Therapy, Stand-up, and the Gesture of Writing'.
'Out here a man settles his own problems': Learning from John Wayne
Published: Dec 01, 2015 by International Review of Qualitative Research
Authors: Jonathan Wyatt
Subjects:
Research Methods, Critical & Creative Life Writing
In this brief essay, I meditate on the experience of watching Westerns and other TV and film genres with my father. I focus on the figure of Tom Doniphon, the John Wayne character in the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, as I consider the links between what my father and I watched together and how I learned, or didn’t learn, to find my way through my adolescent troubles. A much more developed version of this paper became a chapter in 'Therapy, Stand-up, and the Gesture of Writing'.